Amishi Vadgama
Khyati School of Design, Ahmedabad, Gujarat (Associate Professor) | National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Gujarat (PhD Scholar)
Epistemology of the unspoken
Knowledge transfer has been evidently witnessed for generations. Through the evolution of the human race, from learning to create fire with sticks and flint to the innovation of designing human-like robots that have emotions through technology, humans have come a long way in terms of innovation that continuously defines our future today. This paper investigates the importance of knowledge generation and its transfer to enable systemic solutions to design. It refers to the role of tacit knowledge in craft and its non-explicit form of pedagogical framework. Furthermore, it looks into the systemic design practices and their framework and aims to compare how the former knowledge transfer is also an essential influence on the latter for better design solution building.
The research draws on examples of the world of traditionally skilled craftspeople and their knowledge generation and pedagogical influence on the various design practices. This is further exemplified through case studies of certain craft practises and the importance of the same in order to form a bridge and understand the various parallels between tacit knowledge and systemic design, as well as the probable learnings they can have from each other. Methodologically, the multiple case studies investigate various skilled crafts, collect empirical data and confirm the influence of tacit knowing to be an important influence in the systems field. The research findings reveal that tacit knowledge has a nature to innate some process that we formally express to be used in design practices and pedagogy. It further looks at how systemic design practices are influenced by this form of knowledge.
Keywords: knowledge creation, systemic design, tacit knowledge, craft and design
