Donald Schon
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Donald Schon. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Donald Schon's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The mistake I kept making was the same one every builder makes. I thought the hard part was building the thing. Getting the code right, shipping the feature, hitting the deadline. The hard part was always something else — something I couldn't name until I found Schon's vocabulary for it.
The hard part was figuring out what I was actually building.
Not the specification. Not the feature list. The problem underneath the problem. The thing the client couldn't articulate, the user need that no survey would surface, the architectural decision that felt wrong in my gut before I could explain why. That unnamed territory — the swamp where the real work lives — is what Donald Schon spent his career mapping.
Schon drew a line
