Modelling the Invisible: the pedagogy of craft apprenticeship

Critical Analysis

Visualization—a broad term that includes sketching, form-giving, model-making, and so-on—is a fundamental part of tacit knowledge. It is “like a ‘glue’ that makes all the segments [of craft knowledge] hang together” (197). Gamble describes this glue as a grammar, one that regulates and organizes knowledge. The act of visualization activates verticalized knowledge—“subsidiary knowledge becomes ‘instrumentalized’ in the body (196)—and any individual segment becomes embodied in a larger creative whole or creative action. Visualization is an ordering principle, and following the language metaphor, it acts as the grammar across individual characters or words to create coherent meaning. An individual character or word may be a design move and the connectivity between those moves may be tacit, but a sketch or visualization can serve as a form of “speaking” or showing the organizational structure. It “stands in the place of a non-articulable ordering principle and compensates for the lack of a clear syntax or grammar to regulate coherence” (197).

In an apprenticeship, knowledge transmission requires showing or modeling the individual segments of knowledge. Learning to use a hand tool or to make a certain type of rote decision can be demonstrated and easily articulated. But tacit knowledge production occurs as students learn to develop the grammatical glue and instrumentalization abilities. They need to develop skills in activating ordering scaffolds. Gamble argues that this occurs when students observe a master modeling their judgement while working; “the apprentice, while working at a bench and performing any of a number of technical steps, continually observes the master’s judgement of original and subsequent efforts—a process which apprentices describe as ‘stealing with the eyes’” (198).

There is also a craft in the design of strategy, but this craft is not readily observable. The argument of visualization as a sort of connective substrate for knowledge implies that design that results in non-tangible output requires some form of abstraction equal to a sketch. If the abstraction is too obscure, it likely can’t serve its role as a grammar around design moves in action. This presents a struggle in describing (and therefore modeling and teaching) how to design strategies and systems. A diagram acts as a stand-in, but introduces an added level of abstraction—the diagram itself then needs to be designed, presenting as a sort of nested design problem within a design problem. Words also become effective representations of the connective grammar, but do not activate a creative problem space in the same way as a sketch—they lose the three-dimensionality. This may question the need for a sketch at all in the design of strategy, but raises a related question as to the materiality of strategy: what is craft, in the context of designing a strategy, and what is being shaped?