Craft knowledge - craft learning

The skills involved in craft practice involve a large degree of tacit knowledge; the principles governing a skilled craft practitioner’s actions are often only known through undertaking those actions. This internalised nature of craft knowledge makes it difficult for expert practitioners to communicate their knowledge to others, presenting a barrier both to transmission and to knowledge elicitation.

Traditionally such skills were learned through some form of apprenticeship, where novices gradually subsumed craft practice over a period of time by working alongside more expert practitioners. However, many craft practitioners nowadays work alone and have insufficient work and / or money to take on apprentices. With little or no experience of training others, practitioners tend to be defensive about their skills. The reasons behind this are not fully known, but in part they seem concerned their explanations will over-simplify the complexity of their skill, and additionally they simply seem uncomfortable with not knowing how to explain what they do.

Elicitation and the role of the Expert Learner:
As the previous stages of this research developed it was seen that the presence of learners in the elicitation process often had a valuable effect in helping practitioners articulate their knowledge, especially where the learner had developed some self-confidence in their relationship with the craft master. The most recent research has employed an "expert learner" as an intermediary between the craft master and the designer. This demonstrated that such a learner had the ability to learn new skills with minimal instruction then, as the knowledge was recently acquired and the expert learner was consciously engaged with the elicitation process, she was able to rapidly adapt her understanding of it to improve transmission to the learners.

A key part of this process is the expert learner’s interaction with the designer and the developing learning resource. Through a process of video recording and summarising events using drawings and flow charts, the designer/researcher can assist with articulation of the knowledge and develop interpretation suitable for transmitting the knowledge.

Further reading:
Wood N & Horne G (2008). The new journeyman; the role of an expert learner in eliciting and transmitting skilled knowledge. Proceedings of the Design Research Society Conference, Sheffield. PDF
See also sections on craft knowledge and learning from Nicola Wood's PhD thesis. PDF