Reflective Practice

Reflective practice is a collection of interrelated methods, which were first formalised by Donald Schön in his seminal work The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action ¹. While Schön did not invent the concept of formalised reflection, he did create a framework that has been widely adopted amongst creative practitioners, which of course, includes designers and is widely regarded as solid foundation to build reflective practice upon. Schön detailed the methods of reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action, which are the two aspects of reflective practice we’ll focus on in this guide.

As design practitioners, we tend to get into a state of ‘flow’ when working on a project, often making hundreds of subtle decisions without even realising it. These decisions are always informed by a kind of subjective criteria that we impose on task at hand. While you may not have clearly articulated these criteria, they do exist and the reflection-in-action method can help you to become more aware of these criteria, and perhaps interrogate or question them. Reflection-in-action doesn’t involve any formalised process, and it more so an attitude or way of thinking. When beginning to work through a design project, clearly articulate your goals and as you make decisions, take a moment to pause and critically think about what you’re doing. It often helps to ask, “why am I doing this?”, as well as “why am I doing this, in this particular way?”. Over time you will begin to enact this kind of critical interrogation and reflective way of thinking implicitly, which can lead to richer, more critically informed design decisions.

While reflection-in-action focuses on in-the-moment decision making, refection-on-action is retrospective, taking place after the action has occurred. It is through pairing these two kinds of reflection that practitioners can come to a much deeper understanding about their cognitive processes and clearly articulate their ‘practitioner frameworks’ – the subjective decision-making criteria we were talking about above. We suggest a rigorous approach to reflection-on-action, such as keeping a design journal, where you can record reflections on your current projects. Get into the habit of reflecting at regular intervals, which should be flexible to accommodate changes in projects. For example, if you’re working on a variety of projects you might make reflective notes before moving between projects, whereas you might reflect at the end of the day if focussing on a single project.

Activity

Before you start

Before you begin reflecting you need to make a decision about the format in which you’ll record your reflections – are you going to work analogue or digitally? Both of these mediums have a wide array of advantages and disadvantages. While a traditional journal is accessible and a seemingly obvious place to start, it can become difficult to organise and manage your reflections as you start to produce a large number of them. Digital alternatives, such as keeping a blog for reflections, note taking software and digital journals can make organisation, searching and sharing reflections very efficient. The limitations of these digital formats vary but a common issue is that digital mediums don’t facilitate the same kind of expressive, spontaneous and ‘messy’ reflections that are possible with a physical journal. In our experience, we find keeping a physical journal for everyday reflections, where notes and sketches on general practice, research and projects are detailed and reflected upon as well as a personal blog is a happy medium. When we’re working on projects, we find it much easier to take quick notes in a physical journal and build reflections from there, while we find a blog is a great place to upload any images of prototypes, relevant research and write accompanying reflections.

Experiment with different formats for your reflections – remember you’re aiming to develop a reflective practice – which takes practice! For reflection to become valuable and useful to you, it must become habitual, so we suggest starting small and developing a simple, sustainable reflective routine. Thinking of reflecting on your practice as a burden or additional task will likely make you disinterested and disengaged, so again, experiment and try a variety of different ways of reflecting until you determine what works best for you.

The following activity is a quick and easy approach to recording reflections when you’re finished working on a project for the day and provides a few prompts to get you thinking critically about your practice.

Activity steps

1. In your journal, begin your entry with the date and title of the project or task you worked for the day. If you worked on various projects, we recommend organising your reflections by project as this will allow you to critically reflect on each of them as well as draw comparisons between them.
2. Depending on your available time and level of engagement, you might choose to reflect in short paragraphs, in a series of notes or using dot-points. There are no rules for reflection and it’s common that you might vary your format between and even within reflections. We do recommend that you make a summary of key points at the end of your reflection as this will aid in revision as well as enhance your capacity to remember your ‘findings’.
   
   Consider using this list of questions to structure and guide your reflections:
   • What did you do? A brief description of the task here is sufficient.
   • How did you do it? What was the process applied to the task?
   • What skills and/or experiences did you draw upon?
   • What is the goal or aim of the broader project?
   • How did your activities contribute towards realising this goal or aim?
   • What was successful? What could be improved? This might apply to practical tasks or activities as well as the processes or methods used to undertake them.
   • Is the project heading in the right direction? If so, what can be done to keep it moving forward? If not, what can be done to course-correct?
   • Summarise the key points using dot-points. Underline or highlight them if you’ve used dot-points to format your reflections.
     
     This is by no means an exhaustive list, rather, it’s a list of prompts to provoke a reflective and critical mindset. We highly encourage you to build, adapt, expand and/or reorder the list to suit your own style of reflection.
3. Don’t be afraid to doodle, sketch and style your reflections. Relevant imagery such as sketches of concepts, project details, images of prototypes and diagrams can all aid in communicating your thinking while also prompting recall – use whatever tools suit you!
4. Keep track of your reflections – consider setting yourself a time limit if you tend to over-explain, or conversely, allocating a specific amount of daily reflection time.
5. Practice, practice, practice! Reflective practice is not only a practice in and of itself, but it takes practice – there is no time wasted reflecting on your work as a designer so keep practising your reflective practice!

Notes

If you haven’t already read about sketchnoting it’s both worthwhile taking a look at and considering as a format for your reflections.

You might be familiar with ‘reflective writing’ as a style of writing, much like descriptive, analytical and academic are all styles of writing. In essence, reflective writing shares much of the same underlying aims we’ve described here about reflective practice – developing an ability to critique your work through reflection on it.

The subtle difference in ‘reflective writing’ for an assessment item and the kind of writing you undertake when reflecting on your practice is one of conventions. When writing reflectively for an assessment item you will need to adhere to whatever format and structure is outlined for the assessment, whereas your own reflective practice is very much that – your own, meaning you have complete freedom to write in whatever format suits you best.

Keeping this in mind can help you to apply your critical, reflective thinking to more conventional writing structures. If an assessment item requires a reflective writing style or if you’re simply interested in learning more about the style, check out the reflective writing resources available via the QUT CiteWrite website.

References

1. Schön, Donald A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books. QUT Library Permalink.