Explicit and semi-tacit knowledge

By Gordon Rugg and Sue Gerrard

This is the second in a series of posts about explicit, semi-tacit and tacit knowledge.

It’s structured around a four way model of whether people do, don’t, can’t or won’t state the knowledge. If they do state it, it is explicit knowledge, and can be accessed via any method. If people don’t, can’t or won’t state the knowledge, then it is some form of semi-tacit or strictly tacit knowledge, which can only be accessed via a limited set of methods such as observation, laddering or think-aloud.

This is summed up in the image below.

The previous article in this series gave an overview. In the present article, we focus on do and don’t knowledge, i.e. explicit and semi-tacit knowledge.

Tacit and semi tacit knowledge: Overview

By Gordon Rugg and Sue Gerrard

Tacit knowledge is knowledge which, for whatever reason, is not explicitly stated. The concept of tacit knowledge is widely used, and has been applied to several very different types of knowledge, leading to potential confusion.

In this article, we describe various forms of knowledge that may be described as tacit in the broadest sense; we then discuss the underlying mechanisms involved, and the implications for handling knowledge. The approach we use derives from Gordon’s work with Neil Maiden on software requirements (Maiden & Rugg, 1996; reference at the end of this article).

In brief, the core issue can be summed up as whether people do, don’t, can’t or won’t state the knowledge. If they do state it, it is explicit knowledge, and can be accessed via any method. If people don’t, can’t or won’t state the knowledge, then it is some form of semi-tacit or strictly tacit knowledge, which can only be accessed via a limited set of methods such as observation, laddering or think-aloud. Because of the neurophysiological issues involved, interviews, questionnaires and focus groups are usually unable to access semi-tacit and tacit knowledge.

The image below shows the key issues in a nutshell; the rest of this article unpacks the issues and their implications. There are links at the end of the article to other articles on the methods mentioned in the table. The image below is copyleft; you’re welcome to use it for any non-commercial purpose, including lectures, as long as you retain the coplyleft statement as part of the image.

What’s so great about live lectures anyway?

By Gordon Rugg

So what’s so great about live lectures anyway, and why do people get so worked up about whether to put lectures online?

Live lectures have some significant advantages over other media; however, these advantages can be difficult to put into words unless you’ve encountered the relevant bodies of research and practice. This can be very frustrating if your employer wants to put everything online for whatever reason, and if they think that anyone who disagrees is simply a lazy Luddite unwilling and unable to change with the times.

There are very real reasons for including face to face lectures, tutorials etc in education and training. However, some important reasons aren’t as widely known as they should be. In this article, I’ll look at these reasons, and then consider the implications for choice of delivery methods in education.

Beauty, novelty and threat

By Gordon Rugg

In an earlier article in this short series, we looked at what happens when you treat two concepts such as liking and disliking as two separate scales, rather than as opposite ends on a single scale. The answer was that often this makes sense of results which would otherwise look contradictory.

In another article, we looked at what happens when you apply this approach to the well established literature on perceptions of attractiveness. The result was that this provided a clear, simple way of explaining an apparent paradox within the literature on perceptions of attractiveness in human faces.

Covering these topics raised a lot of other questions, which we’ll tackle in this article. The questions relate to three main themes:

• Social context
• Cognitive load
• Perceptions of novelty and threat

The apparent attraction of average faces

By Gordon Rugg

In a previous article, we looked at what happens when you take two concepts that are normally viewed as opposites, and instead treat them as two separate concepts. We used the example of what happens when you treat liking and disliking as two separate concepts, and ask people to rate items in relation to both liking and disliking.

The result is that people are willing and able to do so. The image below shows types of response that we’ve seen in real data.

Item A has been rated low both for liking and for disliking; it’s just boring, with little to be said for or against it.

Item B has been rated high both for liking and for disliking; it produces strong but ambivalent feelings. An example that we saw involved university departmental websites, where some were strongly liked because they signalled high quality, but simultaneously strongly disliked because that same signal of high quality was viewed as implying unforgivingly high expectations.

Item C has been rated high like/low dislike by some participants, and low like/high dislike by others. This is informally known in the UK as the Marmite effect, where people either love something or hate it, with few people in between.

This approach of uncoupling apparent opposites is well established in some fields, but isn’t yet widely known outside them. We’ve been using it for a while in software evaluation, where it’s invaluable for improving software mockups before committing to the final design. We’ve also blogged about ways of using it to represent expressive and instrumental behaviour; handedness; and gender roles, going back to the literature where we first encountered it, in Bem’s work on androgyny (Bem, 1974).

The advantages of using this approach are clear when you see examples. In the next section, we’ll look at the background theory on which it works. We’ll then apply it to an apparently paradoxical finding about facial attractiveness, to show how the underlying issues can be swiftly and easily teased apart via this representation.

When liking and disliking aren’t opposites

By Gordon Rugg

Treating liking and disliking as opposite ends of the same scale looks so obvious that few people ever think about it. They’ve been viewed as opposites since at least Classical times, when Catullus wrote about the paradox of loving and hating the same person. However, this approach doesn’t actually work very well when you try applying it systematically in contexts like surveys or evaluation or market research. There are usually pros and cons that you’re asking the respondent to compress down into a single number, and respondents usually don’t look very happy about it.

So what happens if you instead try treating liking and disliking as two separate scales? The answer is that it gives you a lot of powerful new insights, because liking and disliking are often not opposites.

Desire, novelty, and the attractions of safe Necker shifts

By Gordon Rugg

So what do wireframe Necker cubes have to do with enigmatic facial beauty, Rothko paintings, Sudoku, and video games? The answer is: Quite a lot.

In this article I’ll look at the deep structure of some popular passtimes, and consider some of the implications. This is the first in a short series of articles about the deep structures of desire.

Guest article: How to conduct a successful focus group

This is a guest article by Dan O’Neill; I hope you’ll find it interesting and useful.

How to conduct a successful focus group

By Dan O’Neill

While focus group methodology is often discussed in the context of market research, it is also used in a variety of research fields. Focus groups have been used to gather data on a wide range of research topics including: attitudes towards tobacco, meat quality, farming, electronic resources, patient quality, solar technology, health and safety, property management, and many more.

If you’re thinking about conducting a focus group for your own research, below are some fundamental things you’ll need to do to prepare for this type of study.

Mapping smiles and stumbles

By Gordon Rugg

In a previous article, I looked at ways of systematically recording indicators of problems and successes with a design. In that article, I focused on the indicators, with only a brief description of how you could record them.

Today’s article gives a more detailed description of ways of recording those indicators, using the worked example of a building entrance.

The worked example is, ironically, the Humanitarian Building. Here’s the Wikipedia image for its entrance.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MSU_III_Humanitarian_Building_Entrance.jpg

Observation, stumbles and smiles

By Gordon Rugg

If you’re designing something that’s going to be used, as opposed to something decorative, then it’s a really good idea to make it fit for its purpose.

How can you do that? Observing the users is a good start.

“Observing” is a broad term that includes various specialised forms of observation and analysis. In this article, I’ll describe a simple way of doing basic observation of users, which involves watching out for four key alliteratively-named actions:

• stumbles
• scowls
• swearwords
• smiles

It’s simple, but it’s powerful, and it usually catches most of the main problems, and it gives you a good start towards designing something that the users will like.

Not great art, but useful: Four things to watch for in task analysis

Sources of original images are given at the end of this article