Experiential Tutorials: Designing Tutorial Authoring Tools to Facilitate Tacit Knowledge Exchange in Creative Practices

Tutorials serve as a fundamental mechanism for disseminating knowledge within creative practices. Yet, tutorials struggle to convey tacit knowledge, a type of knowledge that practitioners internalize over time and experience. The subconscious nature of tacit knowledge often causes experienced practitioners to inadvertently omit fundamental actions in their instructions, which poses significant challenges for novices attempting to grasp the basics. However, no two novices are alike, making it challenging and burdensome for the tutorial author to align their tutorials with the audiences’ expertise. My doctoral research aims to create a more bespoke learning experience where tutorials are adapted to learners’ experiences without burdening the tutorial author. My contributions towards this goal include a tutorial concept extraction method that identifies the core vocabulary of a practice to inform authors of their audiences’ language, a typology that aids authors to identify key characteristics of tacit knowledge to enable richer instructions, and a framework that enables authors to use the tutorial medium effectively to maximize tacit knowledge transfer. I am currently working towards a tutorial authoring tool that leverages large language models to extract a learner’s unique and relevant experiences to create a personal knowledge inventory. Future work would combine this inventory with previous contributions to augment tutorials to be experiential, or aligned with learners’ experiences.