Gunnar wrote:
> In the same talk/essay he said that when client would say "I know what I want to say; I just can't put it into words" he'd say "What do you have it in now?"
Great question Gunnar,
Sorry I've lost the source for this but a Swedish shipbuilder,
recognising that their workers had a great fund of tacit knowledge about
building ships and wanting ways to harness that experience, formed a
policy that went like this:
The team that work on building a section of the ship can propose any
practical measure that they feel will improve the work. They are not
obliged to prove that it will be effective, just assert that in their
experience this feels like the right thing to do.
The professional engineers and managers that they work with can only
overturn these proposals if they can explain, clearly and with evidence,
that the proposal will not work in practice. A great example of
validating and asserting that which we know but cannot tell.
Of course you have to be confident that the client, or the shipyard
workers, have valid experience and good judgement. I struggled with this
when I first started teaching design, a student who had produced a
really ugly and incoherent design proposal challenged my criticism by
asking why my ideas were any better than his and I didn't have a good
answer. Now I would say that I have spent many thousands of hours
examining design proposals, my own and others, and their consequences,
good and bad, and I have come to internalise a reliable sense of what is
likely to work. My judgement is not perfect but he cannot claim either
my experience or come up with a reasoned argument why he is right.
Now I must go and see who has won the X-Factor (if you don't know about
this sorry for bringing it up, if you are in the USA it's the precursor
of American Idol) Whoever wins is having a very compressed version of
the 10,000 hour craft apprenticeship that Richard Sennett (2008) has reminded
us about.
best wishes from Sheffield
Chris
Sennett, R. (2008) The Craftsman, London, Allen Lane
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