The unlearning framework

§ Summary

Unlearning, here, is a design practice for questioning a default’s priority. I call that priority sequence authority. One case follows what an interface puts first, the work needed to bring in another route, and whether the change lasts beyond the encounter.

§ Where this began

Before the word, a hand. I am left handed. At the table in Dhaka, I was corrected to eat with the right. I have done so since childhood. It feels normal now. Still, I reach for everything with the left. My first default.

Years later I heard three words: learn, unlearn, relearn. I took the sequence as wisdom. To make something new, I thought, I must empty the space holding legacy norms, habits, and traditions.

That time, I was working in film production and teaching, struggling with unwritten conventions on how films should be made and taught. Unlearning became my word for that friction.

Companies and campaigns attached the “unlearn” word to any preferred behavior and made the change sound obvious. I wanted to question inherited practice, but the term had lost precision.

So I looked for something I could use. Where does a learned order act? What keeps it in place? What can change? What comes back under pressure?

That search moved me toward interfaces. Three questions followed me. What does the interface put first? What must the person repair? What disappears when the result looks like success?

§ The meaning I use

I began with a clean story. You hold old knowledge. You remove it. You put new knowledge in its place. Learn, unlearn, relearn.

Howells and Scholderer challenge that account. In the psychological sources and organizational studies they reviewed, they found no support for a distinct process that deletes knowledge before new learning. They argue that changes in belief or practice explain the cited cases more adequately.^[1]

That critique does not settle every use of the word. Management, decolonial and pedagogical work ask different questions about inherited knowledge and practice.^[2] I do not treat them as one theory.

My use is narrower. I ask whether a route loses its automatic priority in an encounter I can document. I am naming a design practice, not proposing a mechanism that erases memory.

This practice does not require the old route to disappear. Nor does it require keeping a route that is unsafe. The question is whether its priority remains justified.

§ Sequence authority

A default is the route an arrangement puts first unless someone intervenes. Repetition, convenience, authority or the cost of asking can keep it there. It need not feel natural to the person required to follow it.

An interface is the point through which a person encounters that arrangement: a billing search, a form, a protocol, a permission or a report.

I call the priority carried through it sequence authority. I distinguish three forms:

These are working distinctions, not three kinds of power that this case proves exhaustive.

Priority can serve care and safety. The audit begins when relevant knowledge cannot enter without extra work, or when a successful result hides the work needed to produce it.

A delay alone is not evidence of sequence authority. I need to identify the preferred route, the alternative and what made that alternative harder to introduce.

§ One case

The sleep test follows a hospital encounter on 3 and 4 January 2026 and the route that followed it.

At the billing counter, the service became available in the search once I supplied the word polysomnography. During the night, the recording requirement initially excluded the sound I normally use to settle. I asked for an exception. The technologist consulted the doctor and allowed quiet audio.

The report diagnosed moderate obstructive sleep apnea. PAP substantially reduced the recorded breathing events during titration. Its recommendation named treatment and a review after three months, but left questions about settings, continuing leg movements and obtaining a device.^[3]

The case connects the three forms of sequence authority: a term secured recognition, the protocol took precedence, and the report carried a treatment route into later decisions.

The audio permission changed the encounter. The later failure to buy PAP was an access problem, not further proof of unlearning.

From 6 February to 19 July, Garmin recorded 145 main sleeps and 90 naps. Several related measures moved in favourable directions, but they could not establish whether OSA improved. Their shared inputs also limit how much independent confirmation their agreement provides.

My analysis places those measurements together. It does not establish that I saw them together at the time or allowed them to overrule my experience.

The case therefore documents a local change, an unresolved treatment route and a further question about measurement. It does not yet demonstrate institutional change.

§ Local and institutional unlearning

A negotiated exception is evidence that a route changed for one encounter. It is not automatically evidence of a lasting change in priority.

I reserve local unlearning for a weakening of priority that someone practices, rather than merely endorses. One encounter can show an initial instance. Later encounters test whether it holds.

Institutional unlearning requires more:

A revised document is evidence of a formal change, not proof that practice changed. A later encounter must test that too.

If the next person still has to repeat the negotiation, the local repair has not yet become a dependable institutional route. If I have no evidence from the next person, the outcome remains unknown.

§ Try it in three steps

Choose one small encounter where an alternative can be explored safely.

I keep these traces in a friction journal: the date, the interface, what happened, the available evidence and what remains uncertain.

A refused request, an ineffective change or a default worth keeping also belongs in the journal. The practice needs evidence against my preferred reading, not only examples that fit it.

§ Position and limits

I write from Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. I am a multilingual Bangladeshi man from the middle class. I describe myself as neurodivergent, with the limits of that self assessment stated below.^[4] I have taught film, designed curricula and contributed to care. This position helps me notice some pressures and can make others easier for me to navigate.

I call the method interface autoethnography: examining my own encounters to understand how an arrangement works beyond my individual intention. Experience raises the question. Notes and artifacts constrain the explanation, but neither is a complete record.

This case helped me develop the framework and is now being read through it. It is not an independent validation. The clinical protocol also produced useful evidence, so the case does contain a default that helped. What is missing is comparison with other cases and evidence that the proposed changes persist. A framework with one witness is a framework on probation.

Evidence safety sets the other limit. A prompt log holds another person’s words. A medical record can expose a body. The public account shrinks when safe evidence runs out.

Neurodivergence is part of my position, not an explanation for every difficulty in the case. Nor does my ability to negotiate show that everyone could obtain the same response.

This essay is made inside the contradictions it names. I write in standard English. I revised this text with AI.^[4] I call this a design practice and no longer a critical one.^[5]

§ Closing

A repair can travel through a revised field, a protocol or a public account. Each form preserves some conditions and drops others. This essay does that too. Versioning makes those choices available for another reading.

The question I want to carry forward is simple: did another route become easier to use, or did one person become better at working around the same arrangement?

§ References

Grisold, T., Kaiser, A., and Hafner, J. (2017). Unlearning before creating new knowledge: A cognitive process. Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 4614-4623.

Hislop, D., Bosley, S., Coombs, C. R., and Holland, J. (2014). The process of individual unlearning: A neglected topic in an under-researched field. Management Learning, 45(5), 540-560.

Howells, J., and Scholderer, J. (2016). Forget unlearning? How an empirically unwarranted concept from psychology was imported to flourish in management and organisation studies. Management Learning, 47(4), 443-463. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507615624079

Jackson, S. J. (2014). Rethinking repair. In T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski, and K. A. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (pp. 221-239). MIT Press.

Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7-8), 159-181.

Star, S. L., and Strauss, A. (1999). Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 8, 9-30.

Tsang, E. W. K., and Zahra, S. A. (2008). Organizational unlearning. Human Relations, 61(10), 1435-1462.

Tufte, T. (2024). Unlearning communication for social change: A pedagogical proposition. Social Sciences, 13(7), 335.

§ Endnotes

The endnotes hold the position, the doubts, and the detail that would slow the main route.