Externalization: 4 Ways and Methods to Uncover Your Tacit Knowledge

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Have you ever struggled to explain something which you easily know how to do? Performing the action is so familiar, and yet so hard to put into words. Or perhaps you’ve experienced the opposite phenomenon: you sketch and write to make a design problem clear to yourself… and you end up with a crystal-clear description of a solution which you didn’t think you had the knowledge needed to come up with when you first started.

Much of our own knowledge, and that of our clients and users, is not uncovered. It lies ‘buried’ deep within us, but we can access it. In other words, it’s tacit. We can apply that tacit knowledge, but we struggle to articulate precisely what it is. Sometimes, we may not even be aware that we know it at all.

In this video, you’ll learn powerful methods to externalize your unarticulated knowledge. And you’ll learn how externalization can enable you to tackle practical problems and lift your ability to think and talk about them to new levels.

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There are four ways you can use externalization, and we can convert those four ways right into methods you can use in your ideation sessions. Learn how you can use externalization as an ideation method in our template:

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Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. (2020, June 26). Externalization: 4 Ways and Methods to Uncover Your Tacit Knowledge. Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF.

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