The practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomenon before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behaviour. He carries out an experiment which generates a new understanding and a change in the situation. And reflection-in-action need not be an intellectual or verbalised activity.
An example of reflection-in-action is good conversation which must be neither wholly predictable nor fully unpredictable. If it�s fully predictable, it�s boring and not good, and if it�s wholly unpredictable, it�s crazy. Good conversation, which all of us have some gift for, involves a moving between those extremes in a kind of on-line observation and action which is so natural and spontaneous to us that we don�t even think about the capacity we have to do it.
Another example is jazz, because people playing jazz understand the beat and rhythm and melody, one person plays and another person responds, and responds on the spot to the way he hears the tune, making it different to correspond to the difference he hears, improvisation in that sense is a form of reflection-in-action.
During these activities we need not think about what we are doing in explicit, verbal or symbolic terms, but sometimes we must. For example, when we get stuck. Or, for example, when we want to teach somebody else to do what we know how to do.
Through experimentation and testing a practitioner develops a repertoire. The notion of repertoire is a key aspect in Schon�s approach. Practitioners build up a collection of images, ideas, examples and actions that they can draw upon. Therefore when a practitioner makes sense of a situation, he sees it as something already present in his repertoire. To see this and that is not to categorise the first as a rule. It is, rather, to see the unfamiliar, unique situation as both similar to and different from the familiar one, without at first being able to say similar or different with respect to what. The familiar situation functions as a metaphor for the unfamiliar one.
Reflective practices in a design faces the phenomena of confusion and mystery and anger at the beginning. And everybody feels confused. And people keep on asking, �What are we really doing?��What is designing, really?� �What are we supposed to be doing?� What does it mean to be thinking creatively?� Becoming a reflective practitioner is when you cannot in principle know what it is you�re supposed to be learning, and yet you must learn it. This is a paradox, a universal question that have been argued for many centuries: how will you look for something when you don�t in the least know what it is? How will you know that what you have found is the thing you didn�t know?
You would feel vulnerable; you would feel you don�t know what you�re doing; you would feel out of control; you feel incompetent; you feel that you�ve lost confidence. To overcome this a designer must start doing, drawing back to the previous experiences he/she had, and try to educate him/herself before they know what it is they�re trying to learn. �After six months or a year, they were understanding perfectly well what was being said. If you experimented and did it yourself, you know the experience. The knowledge becomes native, tacit and completely internalised, which means that you could start working more intuitively, professionally because you understood what you were talking about, you achieved a kind of convergence of meaning.
If you are riding a bicycle, and you begin to fall to the left, then in order not to fall you must turn your wheel to the ___?
If you turn the wheel to the right you�ll likely fall off; if you turn the wheel to the left you�ll likely NOT fall off because you�ll be turning into the fall. It has to do with where your centre of gravity is. You�re going to bring the bicycle underneath it.
If you said, �You turn to the right,� I would presume frequently fall off the bicycle. No, you don�t? So the question is how it is that you could give the wrong answer and do the right thing. This capacity to do the right thing, knowing more than we can say, exhibiting the more that we know in what we do by the way in which we do it, is what I understood by knowing-in-action.
What is involved in the reflective process? In his discussions it is clear that the reflective process needs saficient amount of time. But, when time is extremely short, decisions have to be rapid and the scope for reflection is extremely limited. As well as when we think and act, questions arise that cannot be answered in the present. The time and place that could afford recording, experimentation, testing, supervision and conversation with our peers allows practitioners to approach this method. Reflection requires space in the present and a possibility of such space in the future.
There have also been no psychological elaborations of reflection in action, It does not specify the topic of commitments. If you have to do something just out of obligation, or the work that does not interest you and is a big hassle, this attitude, lack of commitment and motivation will not trigger the reflective processing its full strength.
Another thing is that we do not find in Schon is a reflection by him on his own practice in giving some kind of account of that he does of reflection-in-action and the reflective practices�