Externalisation and Design

Summary

The paper examines externalisation in design as the active shaping of external artefacts and representations as intellectual resources. It connects externalisation to embodiment, distributed cognition, situated action, tacit and explicit knowing, and Schon's reflective practice. The authors argue that external representations mediate between unreflective embodied action and analytic reflection, enabling designers to communicate, form, transform, and reflect on ideas. They classify design externalisations by what they represent, their modality, and their persistence, and discuss tools and methods that use resistance, breakdown, reduction, tracing, and reflection to improve design and creativity.

Important Keywords

Externalisation: making thoughts, ideas, categories, or possibilities visible through external artifacts and representations.
External representation: a sketch, model, diagram, list, prototype, or other artifact that supports design thinking.
Design: a reflective activity of shaping external artifacts and representations to explore possibilities.
Embodiment: the role of bodily action and material engagement in thought and design.
Reflective practice: design activity involving reflection while acting and after acting.
Tacit knowledge: knowledge that is embodied or implicit and not easily stated directly.
Explicit knowledge: knowledge that has been articulated in words, diagrams, or other external forms.
Distributed cognition: cognition spread across people, artifacts, actions, and environment.
Situated action: action shaped by the immediate situation rather than only by prior plans.
Breakdown: a disruption that makes hidden assumptions or categories available for reflection.
Reflection in action: reflecting and adjusting during the act of designing.
Reflection on action: reflecting after an activity to understand or improve it.
Design space: the range of possible design alternatives and directions.
Problem space: the way the design problem is represented, structured, and reframed.
Boundary objects: external artifacts that allow people with different perspectives to coordinate.
Persistence: the extent to which an external representation remains available over time.
Tacit knowledge: embodied or practice-based knowledge that is hard to verbalize.
Explicit knowledge: knowledge that can be consciously explained.
Informational externalisation: communicates an already formed idea.
Formational externalisation: helps vague ideas become clearer.
Transformational externalisation: changes the idea through material engagement.
Transcendental externalisation: turns ideas into objects of thought.

Important Concepts

Externalisation is defined as shaping the world as an intellectual resource by embodying, representing, and exploring thoughts, feelings, and interior life.
Tacit and explicit knowing are treated as interacting modes rather than a simple dualism: tacit action is embodied and associative, while explicit thinking is conscious, symbolic, and available for discussion.
Breakdown is not only a failure of smooth action; in design it can make tacit assumptions visible and support reflection.
Externalisations in design can represent the product, the problem space, the design space, or the design process.
External artefacts vary by representational form, modality, and persistence, from physical models and sketches to speech, diagrams, notation, bodily action, and digital traces.
Externalisation supports interaction with the world, with other people, and with oneself over time.
The paper identifies four functions of externalisation: informational communication, formational clarification of vague ideas, transformational thinking through materials or representations, and transcendental reflection on thoughts as objects of thought.
Design tools and creativity methods can work by tapping tacit knowledge, creating resistance and breakdown, reducing and relating materials, separating engagement from reflection, and recording ephemeral activity for later analysis.
Externalisation means making internal thoughts, tacit knowledge, ideas, feelings, and design possibilities visible or tangible through sketches, personas, scenarios, models, prototypes, and writing.
It helps designers think with materials, not only communicate finished ideas.
Four functions are informational, formational, transformational, and transcendental.
Schon distinguishes knowing-in-action, reflection-in-action, and reflection-on-action; externalisations make these reflective processes easier.
Academic writing can also function as externalisation: writing helps clarify arguments, structure reasoning, and reveal gaps.

Examples

Product and design representations include blue-foam models, architectural plans, UML diagrams, paper prototypes, storyboards, mood boards, personae, scenarios, sketches, scale drawings, drafts for weaving, and CAD or virtual walkthroughs.
In an Internet-enabled Swiss army knife concept, acting out use of the knife revealed that fingers holding it would obscure the display.
Petra's scale drawing of a school in Schon's example helped reveal that six staggered classrooms were too small in scale, leading to three L-shaped configurations.
Xara's documentation and example outputs for simulation code let her compare program versions and begin to "feel" the code.
Yorick's written and spoken explanation of a paper allowed Betty to reflect back an implicit argument that he had not previously articulated.
Zoe's spreadsheet reduction of grounded-theory categories revealed cross-cutting concepts such as the physical properties of books.