Schön’s world is a living studio: real students, instructors, and master practitioners whose conversations become the book’s case studies. Across critiques, master classes, and seminars, they reveal how professional “artistry” is learned in action—through coaching, reframing, and trying things out. The cast maps the spectrum from empowering mentorship to adversarial stalemate inside a Reflective Practicum.
Main Characters
Petra
Petra is an architecture student whose design review with Quist anchors the book’s central inquiry into how novices get “unstuck.” Initially trapped by an unhelpful problem frame—trying to “butt the shape of the building into the contours of the land”—she learns to treat drawing as a site of experimentation rather than mere presentation. Through Quist’s demonstration, she enters a “reflective conversation with the situation,” discovering how imposed discipline can open creative options and how local design moves ripple through the whole. Her turnaround, detailed in the Chapter 3-4 Summary, hinges on trust in her coach and a willingness to reframe.
Judith
Judith embodies the student caught in a “learning bind,” resisting the stance of exploratory play the practicum demands. Holding to a rigid ideological view of architecture, she treats critiques as threats, misreads “thinking architecturally,” and uses drawings as presentations rather than tools for inquiry. Her exchanges with Northover devolve into a win/lose game of attack and defense, blocking the feedback loops needed for learning. The result, traced in the Chapter 5-6 Summary, is a failure cycle: she tries to “give my critics what they want” without grasping underlying meanings.
Michal
Michal is a first-year student whose breakthrough illustrates the power of “joint experimentation.” Mistaking expectations, she initially suppresses her own aims to produce a safe “school solution,” but once Dani invites her to articulate what she truly wants—nature’s dominance, social experience, and sensory development—her work accelerates. By legitimizing her vision and sketching possibilities, Dani helps her translate intention into form with speed and focus. Her rapid transformation, recounted in the Chapter 5-6 Summary, shows how validation plus experimentation unlock creative agency.
Quist
Quist is the studio master who models the “Follow me!” approach to teaching artistry: he draws, talks, reframes, and lets the student learn by watching and trying. His signature move is reframing—beginning with a clarifying discipline, then cycling between part and whole to keep the design conversation coherent. With Petra, he makes thinking visible, revealing how Reflection-in-Action guides each experimental stroke. As shown in the Chapter 3-4 Summary, he is a steady exemplar rather than a changer; his process is the lesson.
Northover
Northover appears as the counterexample coach: probing and prescriptive without surfacing the reasons that would make critique teachable. With Judith, he defaults to unilateral control—trying to win the argument rather than inquire into her meanings—which amplifies defensiveness and mutual misunderstanding. His static “Model I” patterns, explored in the Chapter 5-6 Summary, show how even expertise can fail if it doesn’t create a behavioral world where learning can occur.
Dani
Dani exemplifies a collaborative, student-centered coaching style. By asking what Michal likes and feels, he recenters the work on her purposes, then co-experiments—sketching multiple avenues so she can choose how to realize her goals. The stance shifts authority from the master’s solution to the learner’s intention, enabling autonomy without abdicating guidance. His effectiveness, highlighted in the Chapter 5-6 Summary, contrasts both Quist’s directive mastery and Northover’s counterproductive control.
Supporting Characters
Pablo Casals
Pablo Casals appears as a master teacher from music whose lesson dramatizes the paradox of disciplined imitation leading to freedom. He first demands that Bernard Greenhouse copy every nuance, then performs the piece anew to reveal improvisation as the higher lesson—another form of “Follow me!” applied artfully. His master class, discussed in the Chapter 7-8 Summary, becomes a model of Learning by Doing and Coaching.
Chris Argyris
Chris Argyris is Schön’s collaborator in the seminar on counseling and consulting skills, bringing the theory-of-action lens (espoused theory vs. theory-in-use; Model I vs. Model II) to interpersonal learning. Direct and analytically rigorous, he confronts the gaps between what students say and do, then treats the seminar itself as a practicum for co-experimentation. In the Chapter 9-10 Summary, his iterative redesigns of pedagogy show reflective practice applied to teaching itself.
Minor Characters
Johanna
Johanna is the ideal learner in Quist’s studio, practicing “detached commitment” and a willing suspension of disbelief—trusting the process because she can always revise later.
Leftwich
Leftwich is a studio master whose frustrations expose how tacit “covert things” of architectural thinking can remain inaccessible if not made visible in coaching.
Lauda
Lauda is Leftwich’s intelligent but “unvisual” student, bewildered by standards that feel alien—an emblem of mutual incomprehension when the coach’s world doesn’t translate.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
At the heart of the book are coach–student pairings that range from enabling to paralyzing. Quist and Petra illustrate directive mastery that works: his reframing and visible experimentation invite her into a disciplined, cyclical conversation between part and whole. Dani and Michal, by contrast, model joint experimentation: by legitimizing her aims and sketching multiple routes, he distributes authorship without diluting rigor, producing a rapid surge in insight and output.
Northover and Judith reveal the breakdowns of Model I control. Each treats the interaction as an argument to be won, so critique becomes threat, inquiry evaporates, and the learning system locks into a defensive loop. A similar disconnect appears with Leftwich and Lauda, where tacit standards stay tacit; without shared language or visible reasoning, instruction becomes mysterious rather than illuminating.
Across fields, Casals and Bernard Greenhouse echo the effective master/apprentice template: precise mimicry as a scaffold to later freedom. In the seminar, Schön and Argyris extend the practicum model to interpersonal competence, forming a coaching alliance with students to examine—and change—their own theories-in-use. Taken together, these relationships map a spectrum: from directive demonstration that opens possibilities, to collaborative co-experimentation that empowers voice, to adversarial standoffs that foreclose learning.