Redoing by Repair: The Search for Tacit Knowledge Transfer in Furniture Design Education

Michael Polanyi indicates “We know more than we can tell”. He points a hidden and greater dimension - the tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is also the personal knowledge which is hard to transfer and in reality people use it more effectively than the other explicit dimension. Cognitivistic, rationalist and utilitarian approaches made the reality be understood as explicit and knowledge has been reduced. Except a reduction, better ways of knowledge transfer are being researched. The transfer of tacit knowledge is an important point, especially between design and production. And furniture design is no exception. In a design approach which is isolated from production the tacit knowledge from production phase will be missing. From this perspective, an applied class for furniture design has been setup on the theme “repair”. In this paper, tacit knowledge and its transfer methods, repair as a constructive element for dialogue and observations will be discussed.