EXD.Preface:1 - The practice and the problem it solves

Use Explanation Design when someone needs to recover a connection: why an outcome occurred, how a calculation follows, how something works, why one recommendation follows from its grounds, or how a selected arrangement answers its working problem. The governed practice includes preparing an explanation and performing an exchange in which the recipient contributes. Its first useful result is an account whose relevant connection and conditions the recipient can use, or a question identifying the subject contribution still needed.

A formally adequate account can remain difficult for a particular recipient to reconstruct. A fluent, engaging account can expose a relation clearly while leaving that relation unsupported. The practical problem is to connect subject adequacy with recipient-relative recoverability without treating either as proof of the other.

Explanation Design brings together the relevant contributions of formal explanation and empirical craft around one explaining practice. It asks both what warrants a connection and what enables this recipient to recover it for this purpose. Questions about available attention, preparation, access, assistance and later learning determine different design and assurance moves.

A recipient who only needs an already understood fact can use it directly. Creating a scientific explanation, selecting a management policy, securing agreement and establishing a human learning effect may supply or receive explanation work, but each retains its own question and evidence. A satisfying exchange alone settles none of them.