Treating Decision-Making Itself as the Object of Study
Slide Idea
The image depicts a photographic contact sheet—a grid of thumbnail images from a film roll—with selection marks and annotations overlaid in red, demonstrating how decision-making processes can be made visible and studied retrospectively. By preserving multiple alternatives alongside marks indicating which options were selected, rejected, or designated for further consideration, the contact sheet transforms the typically invisible process of editorial judgment into an observable artifact that can be examined, analyzed, and learned from.
Key Concepts & Definitions
Contact Sheet
A contact sheet is a photographic tool created by placing developed film negatives directly onto photographic paper and exposing them to light, producing a page of small positive images representing every frame on a roll of film. Before digital photography, contact sheets served as essential selection tools: photographers could review all captured images at once, compare alternatives, and mark selections for enlargement without the time and expense of printing full-sized versions of every frame. Contact sheets document the photographer's entire exploration of a subject—successful images alongside unsuccessful ones, compositional experiments, exposure variations, and progressive refinement of visual ideas. The marks photographers make on contact sheets—circles indicating "print this," X's indicating "reject," crop marks, exposure adjustment notes—make visible the evaluation criteria and decision-making process that produced final selections from initial captures.
Source: Magnum Photos. (2025). Contact sheets: The images behind the image.
Selection as Decision-Making
Selection is the deliberate act of choosing certain elements from a larger set of possibilities based on explicit or implicit evaluation criteria. In creative work, selection represents a fundamental form of authorship and judgment: what gets kept, what gets discarded, what gets emphasized, and what gets subordinated. Selection requires comparative evaluation—assessing alternatives against standards or goals and determining which best serve intended purposes. Unlike generation (creating new material), selection exercises judgment about existing material, applying aesthetic criteria, technical standards, functional requirements, or strategic considerations. Documentation of selection processes—preserving both selected and rejected alternatives with notation about decision rationale—makes otherwise invisible judgment visible and available for examination.
Source: Dorst, K. (2011). Frame innovation: Create new thinking by design. MIT Press.
Reflective Practice
Reflective practice is the systematic examination of one's own professional actions, decisions, and thinking processes to support learning and improvement. Donald Schön distinguished between reflection-in-action (thinking about practice while engaged in it, making real-time adjustments) and reflection-on-action (retrospective analysis after events conclude). Reflective practice transforms experience into learning by making implicit knowledge explicit, examining assumptions underlying decisions, analyzing relationships between actions and outcomes, and considering alternative approaches. For reflection-on-action to occur, practitioners require access to records of what actually happened—preserved artifacts documenting actions, decisions, and processes rather than relying solely on potentially inaccurate memory. Contact sheets exemplify artifacts that support reflective practice by creating objective records of what was captured and what was selected.
Source: Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.
Metacognition
Metacognition refers to thinking about thinking—the awareness and regulation of one's own cognitive processes including planning, monitoring, and evaluating one's thinking and learning. In educational contexts, metacognitive awareness enables learners to recognize their own thinking patterns, identify effective and ineffective strategies, monitor comprehension or progress, and adjust approaches when initial strategies prove inadequate. Treating decision-making itself as an object of study—examining not just what was decided but how decisions were made, what criteria were applied, what alternatives were considered—develops metacognitive capacity by externalizing thinking processes for explicit examination. The annotated contact sheet functions as a metacognitive tool: the photographer can study their own selection patterns, evaluation criteria, and decision-making tendencies visible in the marks and annotations.
Source: Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906-911.
Design Iteration and Co-Evolution
Design iteration is the cyclical process of generating, evaluating, and refining solutions through repeated cycles of creation and assessment. In design research, Nigel Cross and Kees Dorst identified a "co-evolution" model where problem understanding and solution development evolve together: initial solution attempts reveal previously unrecognized aspects of the problem, which in turn suggest new solution directions, creating reciprocal refinement of both problem framing and solution approach. Contact sheets document this iterative process visually: successive frames may show the photographer working a scene, trying different angles, compositions, or moments in response to what previous frames revealed. The rejected images are not merely failures—they are part of the exploratory process through which the photographer developed understanding of what the image should be. Preserving the full sequence makes the co-evolution of understanding and solution visible.
Source: Dorst, K., & Cross, N. (2001). Creativity in the design process: Co-evolution of problem-solution. Design Studies, 22(5), 425-437.
Treating Process as Object of Study
This concept involves shifting analytical attention from products or outcomes to the processes that generated them, examining processes as phenomena worthy of study in their own right. In science and technology studies, Bruno Latour argued that understanding science requires studying "science in action"—observing how knowledge gets constructed through laboratory practices, negotiations, and iterations rather than examining only finished, published claims that conceal their origins. Applied to creative and technical work, treating process as object of study means preserving and examining intermediate materials, decision traces, rejected alternatives, and iterative refinements that typically disappear once projects complete. The pedagogical value lies in making visible how expertise operates: not just what skilled practitioners produce but how they think, evaluate, decide, and refine.
Source: Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press.
Why This Matters for Students' Work
The concept of treating decision-making itself as an object of study addresses a fundamental challenge in learning creative and technical skills: expertise operates largely invisibly, making it difficult for novices to understand how skilled practitioners think and decide.
When students view finished creative work—published photographs, completed films, polished designs, shipped software—they observe the outcomes of countless decisions but have no access to the decision-making processes themselves. They do not see what alternatives were considered and rejected, what criteria informed selections, what problems were encountered, or how understanding evolved through iteration. This invisibility creates learning difficulties: students must infer process from products, reverse-engineer decision-making from outcomes, and guess at evaluation criteria that remain undocumented.
The contact sheet provides a concrete model for making decision-making visible. By preserving all frames alongside editorial marks indicating selections, rejections, and modifications, the contact sheet creates an observable record of judgment in action. Students studying contact sheets can see not just what the photographer chose but what they chose from—the full range of alternatives explored. The marks and annotations make evaluation criteria partially visible: what got circled? What got marked with X? What do crop marks suggest? This visibility enables analysis: What patterns characterize selected images? What common features characterize rejected ones? What criteria seem to have guided choices?
For students' own work, creating contact-sheet-like documentation of their decision-making processes supports multiple learning functions. First, it develops metacognitive awareness by requiring students to make their evaluation criteria explicit—to mark selections with brief rationale rather than simply choosing intuitively. The act of annotating decisions creates opportunities for reflection: Why is this alternative better than that one? What criteria are actually being applied? Is there consistency in how those criteria are applied?
Second, documented decisions create external memory that can be consulted during iteration and revision. When students encounter difficulties later in projects, they can review earlier decisions to diagnose whether problems stem from poor initial choices or from unanticipated consequences of reasonable choices. Without documentation, students often cannot remember what they tried, what they rejected, or why they made particular decisions—their process exists only in potentially inaccurate memory.
Third, treating decision-making as an object of study enables pattern recognition across multiple projects. A student who preserves and annotates selection decisions over time can retrospectively analyze their own decision-making patterns: Do they consistently favor certain types of solutions? Do they reject alternatives prematurely? Do they apply evaluation criteria inconsistently? This longitudinal self-analysis supports development of more sophisticated judgment by making implicit criteria and tendencies explicit and examinable.
The concept of design iteration and co-evolution emphasizes that creative and technical work does not follow linear paths from clear problems to obvious solutions. Instead, understanding of both problem and solution evolves through iterative engagement. Students who treat their decision-making as worthy of study can observe this co-evolution in their own work: how initial attempts revealed aspects of the problem they had not anticipated, how those revelations suggested new approaches, how successive iterations refined both understanding and execution. This visibility helps students develop realistic expectations about creative processes and recognize iteration as normal and valuable rather than as evidence of inadequacy.
For collaborative work, documented decision-making creates shared understanding among team members. When multiple people contribute to projects, each makes decisions that others may not witness or understand. Preserving decision traces—what was tried, what was selected, why—enables team members to understand the logic underlying the current state of work and make informed decisions about revisions. Without such documentation, collaborative projects accumulate undocumented choices whose rationales exist only in individual memories.
How This Shows Up in Practice (Non-Tool-Specific)
Photography and Visual Media
Professional photographers working on documentary projects, photo essays, or commercial assignments routinely shoot many more frames than they ultimately use—sometimes hundreds of images to select a final set of ten or twenty. The contact sheet (or its digital equivalent—thumbnail grids with selection marks) documents this selection process. A photographer covering an event might capture the same scene from multiple angles, with different focal lengths, at successive moments. Final selections represent judgments about which angles best convey the story, which moments are most compelling, which compositions are strongest.
Photographers who maintain annotated contact sheets create learning resources for themselves and others. Reviewing contact sheets from successful projects reveals selection patterns: perhaps selected images consistently show clear visual hierarchies, or perhaps they capture decisive moments rather than transitional ones. Reviewing contact sheets from less successful projects might reveal that available alternatives were all problematic—the issue was not poor selection but inadequate capture, suggesting different shooting approaches for similar future situations.
Photo editors working with photographers' contact sheets exercise curatorial judgment distinct from the photographer's judgment. An editor might select different images than the photographer would choose, reflecting different evaluation criteria—editorial narratives versus photographic aesthetics, perhaps. Documented editorial selections alongside photographer selections make these different judgment frameworks visible and discussable.
Design
Designers generate numerous variations during iterative design processes. Interface designers exploring navigation patterns might sketch or prototype ten different organizational schemes before converging on one. Product designers might create dozens of form studies exploring different aesthetic approaches. The rejected variations are not wasted effort—they are part of the exploration through which understanding developed.
Design studios that maintain "iteration logs"—documented sequences of design variations with brief annotations about why each variation was modified or what problems it addressed—create visible records of design reasoning. These logs reveal how problems and solutions co-evolved: an early variation attempted to solve problem X, but implementing it revealed previously unrecognized problem Y, which prompted a different variation addressing both problems. Without documentation, this co-evolution remains invisible; with documentation, it becomes a learnable pattern.
Design critiques function as collective decision-making sessions where multiple people evaluate design alternatives and deliberate about selections. Recording these critiques—what alternatives were presented, what evaluations occurred, what criteria were debated, what selections were justified—documents the social dimension of design decision-making and preserves institutional knowledge about evaluation standards.
Writing and Editing
Writers produce multiple drafts; editors select, modify, and refine. Manuscript mark-ups—whether physical redline annotations or digital tracked changes—document editorial decision-making. These marks show not just what changed but the editorial process: deletions indicate judgment that material was unnecessary, additions indicate gaps requiring elaboration, restructuring indicates organizational inadequacy, marginal comments articulate reasoning.
Professional writers and editors who maintain draft sequences with editorial commentary create visible records of how texts evolved through judgment and revision. These records reveal writing patterns: perhaps early drafts consistently over-explain and require cutting, or perhaps they under-explain and require development. Recognizing these patterns enables writers to adjust their initial drafting processes.
Collaborative writing involving multiple authors and editors creates complex decision-making chains: who wrote what, who revised it, who accepted or rejected revisions. Version control systems with detailed commit messages document these chains, making visible the distributed authorship and collective judgment that produced final texts.
Computing and Engineering
Software developers create branches for experimental features, alternative implementations, or architectural explorations. Version control systems preserve these branches alongside commit messages documenting reasoning. Code review processes generate documented technical discussions where reviewers evaluate implementations, suggest alternatives, and deliberate about trade-offs. These preserved discussions document engineering decision-making: what approaches were tried, why certain approaches were selected, what trade-offs were accepted.
Development teams that maintain decision logs or architecture decision records (ADRs) treat their decision-making as worthy of documentation. An ADR might document: "Considered three approaches to caching: client-side, server-side, distributed. Selected server-side because client constraints make client-side infeasible and distributed adds operational complexity unjustified by current scale. Will revisit if scale increases 10x." This documentation preserves the reasoning—the alternatives, criteria, trade-offs—that produced current architecture.
Engineers reviewing these decision artifacts later can understand why systems are structured as they are, whether original assumptions still hold, and how to evaluate proposed changes. Without such documentation, future engineers must reverse-engineer reasoning from code alone, often incorrectly inferring why choices were made.
Common Misunderstandings
"Documenting decision-making is about justifying choices to external evaluators"
This misconception treats decision documentation as a defensive measure—creating records to demonstrate accountability or defend against criticism rather than as a cognitive tool supporting learning and improvement. While documented decisions may serve accountability functions, their primary value for practitioners lies in supporting their own reflection and learning. The contact sheet serves the photographer—enabling them to study their own selection patterns, refine their judgment, and learn from comparisons between what they captured and what they selected. When documentation is framed primarily as an external compliance requirement, it often becomes superficial: providing just enough information to satisfy requirements without capturing meaningful reasoning. Effective documentation serves practitioners directly by externalizing thinking that supports their metacognitive examination of their own processes.
"Only successful decisions are worth studying"
This view assumes that learning occurs primarily through examining what worked rather than what did not work. In reality, both successful and unsuccessful decisions provide learning opportunities, and studying failures often yields more actionable insights than studying successes. The contact sheet preserves rejected images alongside selected ones specifically because the rejections reveal evaluation criteria. Students examining why certain images were rejected develop clearer understanding of quality standards than they would from studying only successful images. The confusion may arise from assessment contexts that emphasize demonstrating competence through finished work—naturally leading students to hide unsuccessful attempts. However, learning contexts benefit from the opposite approach: making failures visible enables diagnosis and improvement. Professional photographers study contact sheets not to admire their good decisions but to understand their entire decision-making process, including recognizing when they failed to capture adequate alternatives.
"Documenting all decisions provides complete understanding of decision-making"
This overestimates what documentation can capture. Much decision-making operates through tacit pattern recognition and intuitive judgment that resists complete articulation. A photographer reviewing a contact sheet and circling one image exercises judgment that may be partly explainable ("this composition is stronger") and partly intuitive ("this one just works better"). Documentation makes some aspects of decision-making visible—the alternatives considered, the selections made, explicit reasoning when provided—but does not capture complete mental processes. The goal is not exhaustive documentation of every thought but strategic documentation that makes enough visible to support learning. The contact sheet achieves this: it shows what was captured and what was selected, enabling inference about criteria even when those criteria are not explicitly articulated. Perfect transparency is neither achievable nor necessary for learning.
"Treating decision-making as object of study means over-analyzing every choice"
This concern imagines that metacognitive attention to decision-making interferes with fluent practice—that constantly monitoring and documenting choices disrupts the flow of creative work. This conflates two different temporal modes: decision-making during work (which should flow naturally without excessive self-monitoring) and reflection on decision-making after work (which involves retrospective examination of documented traces). The contact sheet model illustrates this temporal separation: the photographer shoots fluidly during capture, then later examines the contact sheet to study their selections. The examination does not interfere with the shooting because it occurs afterward. Similarly, students can work fluidly while preserving process artifacts (alternatives explored, iterations produced, versions generated), then periodically examine those artifacts retrospectively to study their decision-making patterns. The concern legitimately identifies that excessive real-time self-monitoring can disrupt performance; the solution is temporal separation, not abandoning examination entirely.
Scholarly Foundations
Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press.
Foundational work arguing that understanding science requires studying scientific practice as it unfolds—observing laboratory work, examining draft papers, following negotiations—rather than studying only finished published knowledge claims. Introduces methodology of treating process as object of study, relevant here for understanding why contact sheets (process artifacts) reveal aspects of photographic practice that finished prints conceal. Demonstrates that finished products systematically hide the contingencies, alternatives, and iterations that produced them.
Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.
Examines how professionals make decisions in situations of uncertainty and complexity, introducing concepts of reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action as modes of professional learning. Essential for understanding why treating decision-making as object of study supports expertise development: retrospective examination of decisions (reflection-on-action) enables practitioners to refine their judgment. Emphasizes that professional competence involves more than technical knowledge—it requires pattern recognition, contextual judgment, and continuous learning from experience.
Dorst, K., & Cross, N. (2001). Creativity in the design process: Co-evolution of problem-solution. Design Studies, 22(5), 425-437.
Empirical study of design processes demonstrating that problem understanding and solution development evolve together rather than sequentially—designers do not fully understand problems before attempting solutions; rather, solution attempts reveal aspects of problems previously unrecognized. Relevant for understanding what contact sheets reveal: successive frames do not just show failed attempts before success; they document evolving understanding of what image is possible or appropriate. The full sequence reveals the co-evolution process that final selection alone conceals.
Dorst, K. (2011). Frame innovation: Create new thinking by design. MIT Press.
Explores how designers create innovative solutions by reframing problems—shifting how problems are understood or what aspects are emphasized. Discusses role of judgment and selection in creative work: design involves generating possibilities, evaluating them against criteria (often implicit), selecting promising directions, and iteratively refining. Contact sheets exemplify this process in photography: frames represent alternative framings (literal and conceptual) of subject matter; selections represent judgment about which framings effectively capture intended meaning.
Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906-911.
Foundational paper introducing metacognition as research domain, defining it as knowledge about cognitive processes and regulation of those processes. Establishes that metacognitive awareness—knowing about one's own thinking—supports learning and performance across domains. Relevant for understanding pedagogical value of treating decision-making as object of study: externalizing decisions for examination develops metacognitive capacity by making implicit cognitive processes explicit and available for monitoring and regulation.
Magnum Photos. (2025). Contact sheets: The images behind the image.
Archival collection and analysis of contact sheets from renowned photographers, demonstrating how contact sheets reveal working processes, decision-making patterns, and iterative refinement invisible in finished photographs. Provides concrete examples from professional practice showing how photographers use contact sheets both as selection tools and as reflective artifacts for studying their own practice. Contextualizes contact sheets as both practical tools and pedagogical resources within professional photography traditions.
Ritchhart, R., Church, M., & Morrison, K. (2011). Making thinking visible: How to promote engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners. Jossey-Bass.
Educational framework emphasizing strategies that externalize student thinking to make it accessible for examination, discussion, and refinement. Introduces "thinking routines"—structured protocols that prompt students to document and share their reasoning. Relevant for understanding pedagogical rationale for treating decision-making as object of study: when thinking is made visible through documentation, both teachers and learners can examine it, identify patterns, and support improvement. Contact sheet functions as thinking routine in photography: the ritual of reviewing all frames and marking selections externalizes judgment.
Cross, N. (2011). Design thinking: Understanding how designers think and work. Berg Publishers.
Examines cognitive processes of expert designers through protocol analysis and empirical studies. Demonstrates that designers work iteratively, generating and evaluating options, and that expert designers develop sophisticated pattern recognition enabling rapid evaluation of alternatives. Discusses how designers' thinking can be made visible for study through documentation of design processes. Relevant for understanding what treating decision-making as object of study reveals: not just final choices but the exploration patterns, evaluation heuristics, and iterative refinement characterizing skilled practice.
Benfield, A., & Krueger, R. B. (2021). Making decision-making visible—Teaching the process of evaluating interventions. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(7), 3635.
Educational research demonstrates that explicitly teaching students to examine their own decision-making processes—making the process visible through structured documentation—improves quality of decisions and develops transferable analytical skills. Provides empirical evidence that treating decision-making as an object of study supports learning. Uses concept mapping as a tool for externalizing clinical reasoning, analogous to how contact sheets externalize photographic judgment.
Boundaries of the Claim
The image and accompanying note identify the contact sheet as exemplifying how decision-making can be treated as an object of study. This does not claim that contact sheets are the only method for documenting decisions or that all decision-making should be documented exhaustively. Contact sheets represent one specific approach—appropriate for photographic work and potentially adaptable to other domains through analogous documentation practices.
The claim that examining marked contact sheets makes decision-making "visible" should be understood as making certain aspects of decision-making observable—specifically, what alternatives existed and which were selected. The marks and annotations do not fully capture all reasoning, tacit knowledge, or contextual factors informing decisions. They provide evidence sufficient to support analysis and learning without claiming complete transparency into mental processes.
The framework does not specify how detailed documentation should be, what annotation practices are optimal, or how frequently decision-making should be examined retrospectively. These are implementation questions requiring judgment about specific contexts, learning goals, and resource constraints. The principle—that decision-making can be treated as an object of study through preserved alternatives with selection marks—applies broadly, but specific practices vary.
The note referencing Dorst's "Frame Innovation" (MIT Press, 2011) and Cross's "Design Thinking" (Berg, 2011) grounds the idea in design research traditions but does not claim these are the only relevant scholarly frameworks. Other disciplines—including cognitive psychology (metacognition), education (reflective practice), and science and technology studies (process analysis)—contribute complementary perspectives on studying decision-making processes.
The image shows a contact sheet from photography; the concept extends by analogy to other domains but manifests differently depending on domain characteristics. Software development has version control and code review; writing has tracked changes and editorial markup; design has iteration logs. The underlying principle—preserving alternatives alongside selections—remains constant while implementation formats vary.
Reflection / Reasoning Check
1. Consider a recent project where work was produced through an iterative process—perhaps a paper revised multiple times, a design refined through several versions, or code refactored after initial implementation. If all intermediate versions had been preserved with brief annotations about what changed and why in each version, what patterns might be discovered about the revision process? What would those patterns reveal about decision-making that currently goes unnoticed because only the final version exists? Consider: Are changes typically large structural modifications or small refinements? Is material typically added or cut? Are revisions comprehensive or incremental in many small steps? How would knowing these patterns help work more effectively on future projects?
This question tests whether students understand that examining their own decision-making processes can reveal patterns invisible during the work itself. An effective response would identify specific types of patterns that documented iterations would reveal (structural versus surface revisions, additive versus subtractive changes, comprehensive versus incremental modification), articulate what those patterns would indicate about decision-making tendencies (perhaps preference for planning versus discovering through doing, or perhaps difficulties with particular types of revision), and connect pattern recognition to potential improvements in future work processes. The question assesses whether students grasp that treating their own decision-making as an object of study—through preserving and examining process artifacts—supports metacognitive development and process improvement.
2. Imagine reviewing someone else's annotated contact sheet (or equivalent decision documentation from another domain—marked-up design iterations, code review with comments, editorial markup on drafts). The documentation shows 20 alternatives with three marked as "selected" and five marked as "rejected," while the remaining twelve have no marks. What does the absence of marks on those twelve alternatives indicate about the decision-making process? What different explanations could account for alternatives being neither explicitly selected nor explicitly rejected? How might the decision-making have been different if there had been a requirement to mark all alternatives with explicit reasoning rather than leaving some unmarked? What does this suggest about the relationship between documentation practices and decision quality?
This question tests understanding that documentation practices shape decision-making processes, not just record them. An effective response would generate multiple plausible explanations for unmarked alternatives (perhaps they were dismissed immediately without deliberation, perhaps they were considered irrelevant, perhaps they were simply overlooked, perhaps they were ambiguous cases that did not merit either selection or rejection), recognize that different explanations have different implications for decision quality (quick dismissal might indicate efficiency or might indicate insufficient consideration; lack of evaluation might reveal gaps), and articulate how documentation requirements can prompt more thorough evaluation by requiring explicit reasoning for all alternatives rather than allowing some to be ignored or dismissed without articulation. The question assesses whether students understand that treating decision-making as object of study is not merely retrospective analysis—the practice of documentation itself can improve decision quality by prompting more systematic and explicit evaluation.