Visibility of Decisions
Slide Idea
This slide addresses the epistemic challenge that finished creative work displays outcomes but obscures the decision-making processes that generated those outcomes. When viewing a completed film, audiences encounter visible artifacts—framing, lighting, performance, and editing—that represent the culmination of invisible judgment, while the conversations, revisions, and rejections that shaped these choices remain inaccessible to observation.
Key Concepts & Definitions
Tacit Knowledge
Tacit knowledge refers to knowledge that is difficult or impossible to articulate explicitly through language or symbolic representation, yet becomes evident through skilled performance and action. Philosopher Michael Polanyi characterized this as "we can know more than we can tell"—the capacity to perform complex tasks without being able to fully explain the principles or reasoning underlying that performance. In professional creative practice, tacit knowledge encompasses intuitive judgments about composition, timing, emphasis, and appropriateness that practitioners develop through accumulated experience but cannot readily translate into codified rules or procedures. This knowledge is transmitted through modeling, observation, and situated practice rather than through explicit instruction.
Source: Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. University of Chicago Press.
Knowing-in-Action
Knowing-in-action describes the type of knowledge revealed through the execution of skilled performance rather than through verbal explanation or propositional statement. Donald Schön introduced this concept to characterize how professionals make spontaneous decisions in complex situations by drawing on internalized expertise that operates below the level of conscious deliberation. This differs from theoretical knowledge (knowing-that) or procedural description (knowing-how-to-explain); it manifests only in the act of doing. In creative work, knowing-in-action encompasses the thousands of micro-decisions practitioners make instinctively during production—adjustments to timing, emphasis, scale, and relationship that feel appropriate without requiring explicit justification at the moment of action.
Source: Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.
Reflection-in-Action vs. Reflection-on-Action
Schön distinguished between two temporal modes of reflective practice. Reflection-in-action occurs during performance—the real-time adjustment of approach as new information emerges or as initial strategies prove inadequate. This involves thinking on one's feet, noticing unexpected outcomes, and modifying actions within the flow of work. Reflection-on-action occurs retrospectively, after the event, when practitioners review what transpired, analyze their responses, and consider alternative approaches for future situations. Both forms support professional learning, but reflection-in-action remains largely invisible to external observers who see only the adjustments, not the noticing and reasoning that prompted them.
Source: Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.
Design Rationale
Design rationale constitutes the explicit documentation of decisions made during a design process, including not only what was chosen but why it was chosen, what alternatives were considered, what trade-offs were evaluated, and what criteria informed the selection. This documentation practice makes visible the argumentation and reasoning that typically remain implicit in finished artifacts. Design rationale serves multiple functions: it supports traceability from requirements to implementation, facilitates maintenance and revision by preserving the logic behind choices, enables knowledge transfer across team members and projects, and externalizes decision-making criteria that can be examined and refined. Without such documentation, the reasoning that shaped design choices remains accessible only to those who participated in the original process—and even their recall may prove incomplete or inaccurate over time.
Source: Lee, J. (1997). Design rationale systems: Understanding the issues. IEEE Expert, 12(3), 78-85.
Cognitive Apprenticeship
Cognitive apprenticeship adapts traditional craft apprenticeship methods to domains where the practice consists primarily of cognitive rather than physical processes. While traditional apprenticeship makes expert practice visible through demonstration of tangible skills, cognitive apprenticeship addresses the challenge that thinking processes—problem-solving strategies, comprehension monitoring, planning, and evaluation—remain invisible to learners. The model emphasizes making expert thinking visible through techniques including modeling (demonstrating while articulating reasoning), coaching (observing learners and providing strategic feedback), scaffolding (structuring tasks to support developing capability), and fading (gradually removing supports as competence increases). The visibility challenge this addresses parallels the one described in the slide: learners need access not just to finished products but to the processes that generated them.
Source: Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Holum, A. (1991). Cognitive apprenticeship: Making thinking visible. American Educator, 15(3), 6-11, 38-46.
Invisible Editing
In film and video editing, invisible editing refers to cutting techniques designed to maintain continuity and narrative flow such that audiences remain unaware of the editorial choices shaping their experience. Techniques include matching on action (cutting during movement so the motion masks the transition), maintaining consistent screen direction and eyeline matches, using J-cuts and L-cuts to overlap audio and visual transitions, and employing rhythm and pacing that feels natural to viewers. The paradox of invisible editing is that its success depends on extensive, deliberate craft—the editor makes countless decisions about timing, emphasis, juxtaposition, and rhythm—yet these decisions succeed precisely when audiences do not consciously register them. The finished film reveals the outcome (seamless continuity) but conceals the judgment that produced it.
Source: Rabiger, M., & Hurbis-Cherrier, M. (2013). Directing: Film techniques and aesthetics (5th ed.). Focal Press.
Why This Matters for Students' Work
The invisibility of decision-making processes presents a fundamental pedagogical challenge: students encounter finished work that demonstrates competence but provides limited access to the thinking that produced that competence. This has direct implications for how students approach learning creative and technical skills.
When students view professional films, read published writing, or examine completed designs, they observe products of expertise but not the processes through which that expertise operates. This can create misleading impressions about how such work gets made. Students may assume that experienced practitioners produce excellent work more fluently, with fewer false starts and revisions, than actually occurs. The invisibility of struggle, iteration, dead ends, and rejected alternatives can lead students to interpret their own difficulties as evidence of inadequacy rather than as intrinsic to the creative process. Understanding that finished work represents hundreds of invisible decisions—many involving trial, evaluation, and revision—provides more realistic expectations about what learning and creating entail.
The challenge extends beyond observing others' work to documenting one's own process. Students working on projects make countless decisions, but many remain implicit—choices made quickly based on intuition, preference, or convenience without deliberate articulation of reasoning. When work produces unsatisfactory results, students often struggle to diagnose what went wrong because they lack a record of what they tried and why. The decisions themselves were made, but their invisibility prevents systematic analysis. Developing practices that make decision-making visible—through documentation, annotation, version control, or reflective writing—enables students to examine their own reasoning, identify patterns in their choices, and learn from the relationship between decisions and outcomes.
For collaborative work, the invisibility problem compounds. When multiple people contribute to a project, each brings tacit knowledge and makes intuitive judgments that may not be explicitly communicated. Finished work integrates these contributions, but the reasoning behind them remains distributed and largely unshared. This creates difficulties during revision: team members may disagree about changes without being able to articulate why particular choices were made originally. Projects accumulate decisions whose rationales exist only in memory—memory that fades, becomes selective, or departs when team members leave. Making decisions visible through documentation creates shared understanding and enables teams to maintain coherence across time and personnel changes.
The visibility problem also shapes how students evaluate their own progress and capability. Because tacit knowledge operates below conscious awareness, students may possess more understanding than they can articulate. They might make appropriate choices instinctively but struggle to explain why those choices work. This can create tension in academic contexts that value explicit reasoning and justification. Students benefit from recognizing that some legitimate knowledge exists as knowing-in-action—demonstrable through performance even when not fully articulable. Simultaneously, developing capacity to externalize tacit knowledge through reflection-on-action supports both learning (making implicit criteria explicit enables examination and refinement) and professional practice (explicit reasoning facilitates communication, teaching, and documentation).
For students working with generative AI systems, the visibility challenge takes a particular form: the system's decision-making process is entirely opaque. When a system produces output, students see the result but have no access to how that result was generated—what alternatives were considered, what criteria were applied, what trade-offs were evaluated. This makes the already-challenging task of learning from observation even more difficult. Students must develop strategies for making their own decision-making visible (through documentation, specification, and rationale) precisely because the system provides no such visibility.
How This Shows Up in Practice (Non-Tool-Specific)
Filmmaking and Media Production
A finished film presents the viewer with a seamless sequence of shots, but each transition represents editorial decisions about timing, emphasis, and juxtaposition that remain invisible when executed successfully. An editor may have tried multiple cutting points for a single transition—cutting earlier to emphasize anticipation, cutting later to emphasize reaction, or cutting on action to maintain movement continuity. The chosen cut appears in the final film; the rejected alternatives exist only in the editor's working files and memory. Similarly, the decision to use a particular take of a performance reflects invisible judgment: the director and editor evaluated multiple performances, weighing technical quality, emotional authenticity, timing, and continuity considerations. The audience sees the selected take without access to the comparative evaluation that led to its selection.
Lighting design in a dramatic scene involves hundreds of decisions about direction, intensity, color temperature, and shadow placement, yet the finished image presents these as integrated reality rather than as constructed choices. The cinematographer made decisions about key light placement, fill ratio, practical source motivation, and atmospheric effects based on narrative function, visual hierarchy, mood, and technical constraints. The visible lighting appears appropriate to viewers; the invisible process involved testing alternatives, balancing competing priorities, and problem-solving technical limitations.
Design
Interface designers make continuous decisions about layout, hierarchy, spacing, color, typography, and interaction patterns. A finished interface presents these as integrated whole, but each element emerged through iterative decision-making involving tradeoffs between competing values: accessibility versus aesthetic minimalism, feature discoverability versus visual simplicity, consistency with platform conventions versus product distinctiveness. Designers may generate dozens of layout variations, evaluate them against criteria including usability, brand alignment, technical feasibility, and stakeholder preferences, and select approaches that integrate these considerations. Users encounter the final interface without seeing the alternatives considered and rejected, the criteria applied, or the compromises negotiated.
Product designers working on physical artifacts make decisions about form, material, manufacturability, cost, durability, and user interaction. A finished product appears as singular solution, yet its development involved exploration of alternative forms, material testing, prototyping, user feedback integration, and engineering constraint negotiation. The smooth handle of a tool represents decisions about grip diameter, surface texture, material selection, and ergonomic testing. The visible outcome conceals the experimentation, evaluation, and iteration that produced it.
Writing
A published essay presents arguments in linear sequence with apparent coherence, but the writing process typically involves non-linear exploration, recursive revision, organizational restructuring, and extensive editing. Writers make decisions about what to include and exclude, what to emphasize, what order to present ideas, what evidence to cite, how to frame claims, and how to guide reader attention. Early drafts may explore tangential ideas, follow organizational structures later abandoned, or make arguments subsequently refined. The published version displays the writer's final choices; it does not reveal the explorations, revisions, and rejections that preceded them.
Writers revise at multiple scales: word choice, sentence structure, paragraph organization, section sequencing, overall argument framing. Each revision represents a decision that something in the previous version was inadequate and that a specific change would improve it. Yet published work provides no record of these revisions—readers see only the final state, not the progression through which it emerged. This invisibility can make accomplished writing seem more fluent and less labored than it actually was.
Computing and Engineering
Software developers make continuous decisions about architecture, data structures, algorithms, interfaces, error handling, and implementation approaches. Finished code represents the accumulation of these decisions, but the code itself typically does not document why particular approaches were chosen over alternatives. A developer might have considered multiple ways to implement a feature, evaluated them for performance, maintainability, extensibility, and development time, and selected an approach based on weighted priorities. The implemented code shows what was built; without documentation, the reasoning behind architectural choices remains invisible.
Systems engineers working on complex technical projects make decisions about component selection, integration approaches, performance optimization, and failure mitigation. Finished systems operate as integrated wholes, but their architecture emerged through deliberate choice-making involving technical analysis, constraint satisfaction, risk assessment, and trade-off evaluation. Documentation practices vary widely: some projects maintain detailed design rationale capturing decisions and their justifications; others preserve only the final specifications, leaving future maintainers to reconstruct reasoning from artifacts alone.
Common Misunderstandings
"Invisible decisions indicate fluent expertise that doesn't require deliberation"
This interpretation mistakes the invisibility of decisions to observers for the absence of decision-making by practitioners. Expert practice does develop automaticity for certain routine choices, allowing practitioners to execute common patterns without conscious deliberation. However, skilled work also involves continuous judgment, evaluation, and adjustment—decisions that occur rapidly based on internalized criteria but remain decisions nonetheless. The cinematographer adjusting lighting makes dozens of subtle modifications based on how the image appears; these adjustments represent decision-making even when executed fluidly. The confusion arises from conflating "invisible to audiences" with "requiring no thought." Experts make many decisions quickly and intuitively, but that does not mean decision-making is absent—it means their tacit knowledge enables rapid, informed choices.
"Making decisions visible eliminates tacit knowledge or intuitive judgment"
Some practitioners resist documentation or explicit articulation of reasoning on grounds that it interferes with intuitive creative processes. This frames visibility and tacit knowledge as opposed when they are actually complementary. Documenting decisions does not prevent practitioners from continuing to operate intuitively—it creates a record for later examination. Reflection-on-action does not replace knowing-in-action; it supplements it by enabling practitioners to examine patterns in their intuitive choices and refine their judgment over time. The concern may stem from experiences where excessive documentation requirements become bureaucratic burdens disconnected from actual decision-making. Effective documentation captures meaningful reasoning without requiring that every micro-decision be consciously articulated during performance.
"The goal is to make all decisions fully explicit and articulable"
This misunderstands both the nature of expertise and the purpose of making decisions visible. Some knowledge legitimately remains tacit—intuitive judgments about appropriateness, timing, or emphasis that practitioners can demonstrate but not fully explain. Attempting to force complete articulation of all tacit knowledge is neither feasible nor desirable; it would overwhelm practitioners with self-monitoring and potentially disrupt skilled performance. The purpose of making decisions visible is strategic: documenting significant choices, capturing reasoning about non-obvious trade-offs, and externalizing criteria that inform evaluation. This provides sufficient transparency for learning, collaboration, and revision without requiring exhaustive articulation of every intuitive judgment.
"Visibility is primarily about compliance or accountability rather than learning"
In some organizational contexts, documentation requirements function mainly as bureaucratic accountability measures—evidence that processes were followed rather than as tools for thinking or learning. This can create associations between "making decisions visible" and administrative burden. However, the pedagogical function of visibility differs fundamentally: the goal is supporting learning through examination of one's own reasoning, enabling teams to maintain shared understanding, and creating historical records that facilitate iteration. When visibility practices become burdensome without supporting learning or decision quality, the implementation may be problematic rather than the underlying principle. Effective visibility practices serve practitioners directly by clarifying their own thinking, not solely external evaluators.
Scholarly Foundations
Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.
Foundational work examining how professionals make decisions in situations of uncertainty and complexity, introducing concepts of knowing-in-action, reflection-in-action, and reflection-on-action. Central to understanding how expert judgment operates largely invisibly yet can be made visible through reflective practices. Critiques technical rationality model that assumes professional practice involves straightforward application of explicit knowledge, arguing instead that much professional competence exists as tacit, context-dependent judgment.
Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. University of Chicago Press.
Introduces the concept of tacit knowledge—"we can know more than we can tell"—and explores how implicit, intuitive knowledge functions in skilled performance and discovery. Essential for understanding why decision-making processes often remain invisible: much of what practitioners know operates below the level of conscious articulation. Distinguishes between focal and subsidiary awareness, explaining how attention operates in skilled performance.
Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Holum, A. (1991). Cognitive apprenticeship: Making thinking visible. American Educator, 15(3), 6-11, 38-46.**
Develops framework for teaching cognitive skills by making expert thinking processes visible through modeling, scaffolding, and articulation. Directly addresses the pedagogical challenge presented in the slide: students need access not just to finished products but to the processes that generated them. Provides practical methods including thinking-aloud protocols, worked examples with commentary, and structured reflection that externalize invisible cognitive processes.
Lee, J. (1997). Design rationale systems: Understanding the issues. IEEE Expert, 12(3), 78-85.**
Examines design rationale documentation systems, analyzing what information must be captured to make design decision-making visible and useful. Discusses various representation frameworks including IBIS, QOC, and DRL. Addresses practical challenges of rationale capture: how to minimize documentation burden, when to capture rationale, how to structure information for retrieval and use. Relevant for understanding systematic approaches to making design decisions visible.
Burge, J., & Brown, D. C. (2000). Reasoning with design rationale. AI in Design, 461-484.
Explores how documented design rationale can be used not just as historical record but as active resource for reasoning about designs, detecting inconsistencies, and assessing impacts of proposed changes. Demonstrates that making decisions visible enables not just retrospective understanding but prospective evaluation and systematic revision. Provides concrete examples of how captured rationale supports maintenance, evaluation, and learning.
Rabiger, M., & Hurbis-Cherrier, M. (2013). Directing: Film techniques and aesthetics (5th ed.). Focal Press.
Comprehensive text on film directing and production that extensively addresses editorial decision-making, continuity principles, and the craft of invisible editing. Relevant for understanding how hundreds of decisions in film production—camera placement, shot selection, editing rhythm, performance choices—remain invisible to audiences when successfully executed. Provides concrete examples of decision-making processes in media production contexts.
Cross, N. (2011). Design thinking: Understanding how designers think and work. Berg Publishers.
Examines cognitive processes of expert designers, including how much design thinking involves tacit knowledge and pattern recognition that operates largely unconsciously. Addresses the challenge of making implicit design reasoning explicit for purposes of teaching, documentation, and reflection. Discusses protocols for capturing design thinking in action, including think-aloud studies and retrospective analysis.
Ericsson, K. A., & Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Synthesizes research on expertise development, emphasizing that expert performance results from deliberate practice involving immediate feedback, focused attention on technique, and continuous adjustment. Relevant for understanding how expertise develops through thousands of decisions and refinements that become increasingly automatic and invisible. Discusses role of feedback and reflection in making performance decisions visible for analysis and improvement.
Boundaries of the Claim
This slide asserts that finished creative work displays outcomes while concealing decision-making processes; it does not claim that all decisions should be made visible or that complete transparency is achievable or desirable. Some tacit knowledge legitimately resists full articulation, and attempting exhaustive documentation of every micro-decision would be neither feasible nor valuable.
The slide addresses the invisibility of decisions to external observers (audiences, students, future team members). It does not claim that decisions are invisible to the practitioners making them at the moment of action, though practitioners' access to their own tacit reasoning may be incomplete and their retrospective recall may prove inaccurate.
The examples cited—framing, lighting, performance, editing—illustrate the broader principle but do not constitute an exhaustive list of invisible decisions in creative work. Virtually every aspect of production involves decision-making that remains largely invisible in finished artifacts, from sound design to production scheduling to budget allocation.
The slide does not specify what level of visibility is optimal, what documentation practices are most effective, or how to balance the costs of making decisions visible against the benefits of doing so. These are implementation questions requiring context-specific judgment about project needs, team size, timeline pressures, and learning goals.
The framework does not address the political or ethical dimensions of visibility: who has access to documented decisions, how decision records might be used in evaluation or conflict, or what power dynamics shape which decisions get documented and which remain invisible. These are consequential considerations beyond the scope of the slide's epistemological claim.
Reflection / Reasoning Check
1. Identify a piece of creative or technical work—a film scene, a designed object, a piece of writing, a software application, or an engineered system. What are three significant decisions that must have been made during its creation that cannot be directly observed in the finished work? For each decision, what information about the alternatives considered or the reasoning applied would be necessary to fully understand why the final choice was made?
This question tests whether students can mentally reverse-engineer finished work to identify invisible decision points and recognize what information remains inaccessible. An effective response would identify specific, non-obvious decisions (not merely "they chose this color" but rather "they chose between emphasizing contrast for readability versus minimizing visual weight for elegance"), articulate what is unknowable from observation alone (rejected alternatives, evaluation criteria, constraining factors), and demonstrate understanding that finished work represents selected outcomes from larger possibility spaces. The question assesses whether students grasp that every aspect of finished work emerged through choice rather than inevitability.
2. Consider a recent project where revisions were made—changes to approach, modifications to work, or adjustments to plans. If documenting the rationale for one of those revisions (what changed, why it changed, what alternatives were considered, what criteria informed the decision) were required, what would be difficult to reconstruct or articulate? What does this difficulty reveal about how decision-making processes operate?
This question prompts metacognitive examination of invisible decisions. It assesses whether students recognize that reasoning often operates implicitly, that retrospective reconstruction may be incomplete, and that documentation practices serve functions beyond record-keeping—they externalize thinking that would otherwise remain inaccessible even to oneself. An effective response would identify specific challenges in articulation (difficulty recalling alternatives considered, uncertainty about actual decision criteria versus post-hoc rationalization, recognition that some choices felt appropriate intuitively without explicit reasoning), and connect these challenges to broader concepts of tacit knowledge and knowing-in-action. The question tests conceptual understanding while encouraging reflection on personal practice.