The realm of Knowledge in Creative Practice Research Sophia and Phronesis

Arnaud Hendrickx explains the mechanisms of knowledge-building in the field of design as follows:

“A designer should constantly be looking for means to address this gap [between mind and matter]. A possible perspective is that designing entails displacing memories of earlier encounters into a nearby or distant future by equilibrating our conceptual frameworks to imagined novel situations. We construct our con- ceptual frameworks by internalising our knowledge of our environment and how we personally relate to it in cognitive structure that originate from action in this environment” 1_.

Leon van Schaik identifies, therefore, two kinds of knowledge which are created within the field of Creative Practice Research the creative research:

“one concerns the ways in which designers marshal their intelligence, especially their spatial intelligence, to construct the mental space within which they prac- tice design. The other reveals how public behaviours are invented and used to support design practice. This new knowledge combined is the contribution that this research makes to the field of design practice research”

In this regard, Ranulph Glanville introduces a distinction between ‘knowledge of’ and ‘knowledge for’ in design disciplines, from an operative and transformative per- spective:

1 Hendrickx, A. (forthcoming), Practice of Spatial Thinking. In: van Schaik, L., Researching Venturous Practice: towards understanding how practitioners innovate, Spurbuchverlag AADR - Art Architecture Design Research Publisher.

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“Knowledge of is what scientists and engineers are after, but knowledge for is what designers need - for it enables us to change the world. The way that engi- neers work is associated with problematization. Designer’s work is associated with solutions. We might and should question the assumption that we must understand the world in order to be able to act on, for or in it.”2

Hefurther introduces a distinction and yet a complementary relation between in- tellectual knowledge, sophia and skill-based knowledge, phronesis.

“There is more than one way of knowing. Aristotle tells us of tacit, skill-based knowledge, phronesis - knowledge that guides what we do with our hands (for instance) without needing formalised instructions - but also of intellectual knowledge, sophia.

(...) This creates a circle: we get our intellectual knowledge from doing and we test it by returning to doing. To my mind, that makes it very difficult to talk about sophia as superior: it places phronesis and sophia on the same level. The doing, the making, is as significant as the thinking. Theory is not superior to practice, and it does not make sense to impose theory on practice” 3 _.

Consistently and in relation to the role of poetic potential of “making” (intended not a passive step subsequent to the moment of creation but belonging to, conflict- ing with and generating it4_{) Jo Van Den Berghe talks about the process of recon-} struction of the spatiality of his grandmother house in his own practice through the means of drawing:

“This sketching and drawing is a non linear (re)discovery and understanding of spatial sequences in ‘My Grandmother’s House’, experienced in the childhood of the author.

“(…) it is firstly a journey into memory, trying to build a reconstruction. Very soon, this becomes a design process in its own right, for this reconstruction will fail if it remains limited to a journey into memory only, if the researcher forgets his journey to move into imagination in order to come up with a vivid recon- struction based on empathy.”5

2 Glanville, R. (2014). Building a Community of Practice. Public Lecture at EAA, April 23, 2014 (unpublished).

3 Ibidem.

4 Van Den Berghe, J. (2012). Theatre of Operations, or: Construction Site as Architectural Design PhD Dissertation, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

5 Van Den Berghe, J. (2010). The Imaginative Process of Thinking, paper presented at the First International Conference on Design Creativity, ICDC 2010 29 November - 1 December 2010, Kobe, Japan, Retrieved from: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/481563/1/The+I maginative+Process+of+Thinking.pdf

On a similar note, Deborah Saunt explains the role of non-linear ‘drawing’ in her process of consciousness during the PhD:

“My resultant findings have been created mainly through drawings, and focus on the dynamics of operating simultaneously on multiple levels, as if informed by orbits and trajectories which offer non-linear, spatial ways of navigating key issues (...).”6

Knowledge in creative practice draws on the “spatial history” of a practice related to poetic and technical aspects, revealing a kind of tacit knowledge, built in and through the construction of the practice itself.

The binomial Explicit and Implicit Knowledge

With ‘knowledge’ we generally refer to a familiarity, awareness or understanding of someone or something. The understanding of a topic that can be gained as facts, information, descriptions, or skills, can be usually acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering, or learning. Knowledge can refer to a the- oretical or practical understanding of a subject and it is usually described either as explicit, as with the theoretical understanding of a subject, or implicit or tacit, which will be discussed more in depth in the following paragraphs.

It is important to remind how tacit and explicit knowledge are deeply connected and how they are at the base of a circular and never-ending interplay between thinking and making and are therefore not considerable as separate or polarised realm of knowledge, but rather as useful categories to introduce and clarify how knowledge is conceived at large.

For this reason it is interesting to see how these two facets of the knowledge are usually described by a couple of juxtaposed nouns highlighting the interrelation between different aspects that complete and compensate each other. Here a list of some of those ‘couples’ of meanings and aspects of the knowledge: formal/in- formal, systematic/rhizomatic, theoretical/practical, reflective observation /active experimentation, comprehension/apprehension, abstract experience/concrete ex- perience, slow/fast, codified/embedded, notion/skill, a priori/a posteriori [Fig. 1].

6 Saunt, D. (2014), Orbits and Trajectories: Why Architecture must never stand still. ADAPT-r Summative Work Package (internal document).

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