In 1983, Donald Alan Schön published “The Reflective Practitioner”. Donald was a philosopher and professor in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

According to Peter Buwert, his book “highlights the importance of self-reflection to a successful design process. His work greatly influenced not only design but the field of organisational learning”.

Let’s look at a little extract from Donald’s book: “The reflective 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 behavior. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomenon and a change in the situation.”

We see here that Donald fights the technical rationality of the designing profession and wants, as Horst Rittel and Melvin M. Webber did before him, to bring phenomenology into the design field.

This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.