This paper contributes to discussion on the forms of adaptive learning by exploring how chemistry professionals interact with and in different physical settings—laboratory, pilot plant, and industrial production plant—while developing new chemical technology. More particularly, the study examines how chemistry professionals analyse information in these three physical settings and how they transform this information from one physical setting necessary in a chemical scale-up process to another. The presented empirical evidence suggests that expert pattern recognition mediates learning between different physical settings. The study identifies different kinds of seeing as a particular form of this expert pattern recognition. Processing contextual knowledge through seeing helps chemistry professionals extract clues about the underlying issues and problems in specific physical settings, thus enhancing learning in and across those settings. Furthermore, this study examines formation of such expert pattern recognition.
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