Abstract
This study explores how a designer’s experiential and theoretical types of knowledge are involved in her research, analysis, and synthesis processes, based on observations made from a cafeteria service design workshop. A designer’s experiential and theoretical types knowledge arise from her interaction with the natural world. While experiential knowledge is acquired from her direct experience with intuitive thinking, theoretical knowledge is a product of her direct-indirect experiences reflected with both intuitive thinking and analytical thinking. Experiential knowledge and theoretical knowledge are two sides of her knowledge as a whole. They are dependent to each other in that experiential knowledge is explained with theoretical knowledge, and theoretical knowledge is demonstrated with experiential knowledge. In this study, a designer’s experiential knowledge is argued as part of her seemingly rational problem framing, hypothesis building, and decision-making. It can assist her to be sensitive to particular aspects of design problems, contextualize observed problems and find potential causes, and intuitively see feasible solutions without much analytical thinking. Simultaneously, experiential knowledge may make her thinking biased towards certain aspects of design problems and exaggerate their priority, limit her thinking only to situations she experienced before, or misguide her to consider irrelevant facts/assumptions and render the deduced conclusions faulty. For the reasons, a designer’s intuitive decisions based mostly on experiential knowledge need to be triangulated with multiple sources of information that often come in the form of theoretical knowledge, proven with supporting data and evidences. In the conclusion, a model of design expertise is described, that becomes richer and broader through deepening experiential and theoretical types of knowledge, in these four areas: understanding the problem space, representation of current problem, exploring the solution space, and materialization of the solution ideas.
Keywords
experiential knowledge; theoretical knowledge; design expertise, service design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2013.113
Citation
Hahn, Y.,and Uppa, H.(2013) The Interplay between Experiential and Theoretical Knowledge in Service design, in Nimkulrat, N., Niedderer, K., Evans, M. (eds.), EKSIG 2013: Knowing Inside Out – Experiential Knowledge, Expertise and Connoisseurship, 4–5 July 2013, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2013.113
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
The Interplay between Experiential and Theoretical Knowledge in Service design
This study explores how a designer’s experiential and theoretical types of knowledge are involved in her research, analysis, and synthesis processes, based on observations made from a cafeteria service design workshop. A designer’s experiential and theoretical types knowledge arise from her interaction with the natural world. While experiential knowledge is acquired from her direct experience with intuitive thinking, theoretical knowledge is a product of her direct-indirect experiences reflected with both intuitive thinking and analytical thinking. Experiential knowledge and theoretical knowledge are two sides of her knowledge as a whole. They are dependent to each other in that experiential knowledge is explained with theoretical knowledge, and theoretical knowledge is demonstrated with experiential knowledge. In this study, a designer’s experiential knowledge is argued as part of her seemingly rational problem framing, hypothesis building, and decision-making. It can assist her to be sensitive to particular aspects of design problems, contextualize observed problems and find potential causes, and intuitively see feasible solutions without much analytical thinking. Simultaneously, experiential knowledge may make her thinking biased towards certain aspects of design problems and exaggerate their priority, limit her thinking only to situations she experienced before, or misguide her to consider irrelevant facts/assumptions and render the deduced conclusions faulty. For the reasons, a designer’s intuitive decisions based mostly on experiential knowledge need to be triangulated with multiple sources of information that often come in the form of theoretical knowledge, proven with supporting data and evidences. In the conclusion, a model of design expertise is described, that becomes richer and broader through deepening experiential and theoretical types of knowledge, in these four areas: understanding the problem space, representation of current problem, exploring the solution space, and materialization of the solution ideas.