Some Big Questions about Design in Educational Technology.
This article asks five questions that lead us to the foundations of design practice. Design processes structure time, space, place, activity, role, goal and resource. For educational technology to advance in its understanding of design practice, it must question whether we have clear conceptions of how abstract conceptions are turned into physical artifacts capable of inspiring the intellect and the emotions to facilitate learning. These five questions hopefully supply topics for design conversations. Dave Jonassen (2000) said that a good starting point for solving wicked design problems was to clarify the problem. That's my purpose today. I want to say some things that may help clarify the problem of design and how we teach it. This isn't a scholarly presentation. It is more of an essay about instructional design, what it is, how we perceive it, and how we pass our perceptions on to the next generation of designers. Steve Yanchar and his colleagues recently completed an article for this year's EMTY about the profession of instructional design (Yanchar et al, in press) Today I won't be talking about design as a profession as much as I will be talking about design activity as a researchable subject. I want to pose a series of questions that I hope will have a positive impact on research into how we do instructional design. Question 1: I would ask: Are designers really taught to understand what they are doing as they design? In any design profession of which there are many design consists of the structuring of time, space, place, activity, goal, and resource. This is true for architects, auto designers, landscape artists, and designers of learning experiences. Instructional designers target the creation of both intellectual and emotional states not just single states, but sequences of them. For instructional designers the goal of state sequencing is a condition in the learner of belief, commitment, and capacity that we sometimes refer to as "knowledge" It's easier to think about how design takes place if we step back from the details of any specific position on design and consider design at a more abstract level. Donald Schon (1987) describes the act of designing at this more abstract level in a book significantly subtitled, Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. He speaks in terms of processes that act upon and interact with structures. For Schon, the process is a reasoning process, and the structure is a fund of structural concepts that exist in the mind of the designer. Research has shown that for a novice designer the vocabulary of structural concepts is relatively small and tends to pertain to surface phenomena. For expert designers, the vocabulary is larger and richer and deals with deeper, less readily apparent forces. Schon describes the reasoning process in the following manner (with comments of my own added) "[The designer] spins out a web of moves [or decisions] subjecting each cluster of moves to multiple evaluations drawn from [a] repertoire of design domains" (p. 64) Schon's "design domains" are where the "conceptual structures" reside. According to Schon, every design draws upon multiple domains, from which it receives structural content. (See Schon, 1987, p. 59, Table 1 for an example of the domains of building design. With a tentative set of decisions in mind, Schon says the designer steps back and conducts an evaluation that examines the fitness of the choices: first, in the local context, and then the context of the whole design. For Schon design is an oscillation between choosing and evaluating, re choosing, and re evaluating. As choices are made firm, the designer finds future decisions constrained by former ones, as the designer moves "from a stance of tentative exploration to one of commitment" (p. 64) And I believe the commitments are to structures that have been arranged through the application of some type of process.