Our breakthrough was the result of “night science”: a stumbling, wandering exploration of the natural world that relies on intuition as much as it does on the cold, orderly logic of “day science.”
F. Jacob, The Statue Within: An Autobiography (Unwin Hyman, London, 1988)
François Jacob (1920–2013) was an eminent French biologist who won the Nobel Prize for his scientific breakthroughs. Here is a snippet from his obituary:
Jacob wrote and talked about “day science” and “night science.” He described day science as how we present our discoveries in seminars and papers, as a linear progression of observations and scientific design to a “voilá” conclusion. Night science is how the discovery process really happens, in its messy, intuitive, questioning progression, where we construct and then demolish hopeful hypotheses, “fighting a lot with yourself.” Most important to this process is how one formulates questions that then drive the design of the experiment.
It was through a recent paper on the messiness of emergence as a characteristic of the design research process that I was introduced to this powerful metaphor. Gaver et al., (2022) wrote:
“…Jacob argues … that emergence is integral to the experimental sciences, writing in a dramatic essay [39], about “day and night science”:
Day science employs reasoning that snaps together like gears, and achieves results with the force of certainty… Conscious of its progress, proud of its past, sure of its future, day science advances in light and glory.
Night science, in contrast:…is a sort of workshop of the possible where the future building materials of science are made…Where thought proceeds along sinuous paths, winding streets, most often blind alleys…. What guides the mind, then, is not logic. It is instinct, intuition.
In this characterization, before hypotheses can be formulated and experimental tests devised, there is a more or less lengthy phase of emergent understanding as “innumerable suppositions, connections, combinations, associations that constantly flash through the mind”. This is what produces the hypotheses and tests that make up the rigorous and logical investigations –day science –that follow.”
Night science, according to all, must be “formalized” (Jacobs, 1966) into the coherent linear predictive structure and work flows for peer review and publication, the day science in Jacob’s own words:
In Jacob’s view, night science is as integral to scientific research as day science.But night science doesn’t appear in scientific reports. This is because to “convince his colleagues of the importance of his work”, the scientist must “purify the research of all affective or irrational dross.” The result is that “to write an account of research is… to transform the very nature of the research; to formalise it. To substitute an orderly train of concepts and experiments for a jumble of disordered efforts.” (Jacob’s words (1966) from Gaver et al., 2022)
This “purification” of research and the suppression of the intuitive leaps of logic can often be the most difficult part of the practice-based researcher’s struggle – “early dawn” science. We have experience in finding the real story to tell in hte midst of all the gathered data from observations, interviews, and desk research. Suppressing most of it imagines a world that is shorn of all complexity and sends the message that discovery is far more logical and linearly progressive than it is.
To change this, at least for disciplines where emergence and surprise are part of the research process (such as design and product development), means stepping outside of the box of the ‘western knowledge system’ and its scientific ways of knowing which have claims for objectivity.
