The boffins from The Obligatory What Do We Call It Dept have sent in today’s question: What is design?
We’ll have a reading for you that’s specific to instructional design, but this morning, consider the idea of designing in general. Is it an art? A science? A craft? Maybe something else?
Administrators would really like it to be a science, I think. If you could have a process that you follow and it always yields predictable and replicable results within some envelope of variability, then planning becomes much easier. If you know three people can reliably design a good course in twenty hours using a particular process then you have a recipe for success.
But even recipes have flaws–variations in ingredients, errors in measurement, and even mechanical breakdown in the equipment. Your bread won’t bake very well if your oven is broken. In theory, a recipe would be a good thing, but the problem is generalization. It’s all well and good to make a recipe for bread. You have the general wheat flour recipe, modify it for specific conditions, and you can get relatively reliable results. Notice I didn’t say “quality results” but rather “reliable” ones.
I think many educators believe design is a craft. The process combines technology, experience, knowledge, and inspiration to create a useful entity. It doesn’t matter if you’re creating a vegetable peeler or a geometry class. In this idea of craft, we find the cook. A cook takes the things he or she knows and is able to combine them using familiar techniques and tools to create meals that are pleasing to the palate and nutritious. Certainly there is a workman’s ethic in this ideal of design–even as we apply it to instructional contexts.
Personally, I see design as art. Art is an expression of the human. In the best design we go beyond the mundane craft and explore inspiration. No longer are we talking about a cook, but rather the chef–that individual who, through science and craft, creates an inspiration. In the world of instructional design, many people are willing to settle for craft, but those who understand it best know that an educational experience needs to be–by definition–transformational. The students who experience the design need to leave the experience fundamentally changed from where they began it and for that, I maintain, one must go beyond the predictability and replicability of science, beyond the product of craft, and seek the inspiration of art.
August 25th, 2010 at 9:35 pm
I believe design is originally creative, but also by necessity has elements of science, craft and art. Since design is by definition, ‘creative’ I think this does put art at the head of the list.
Would you say that design is the abstract form of an instructional plan? (Occurring mostly in the mind at first) Craft is the implementation of that plan in a concrete way and art is the presentation of it?
Why is it, using your metaphor, that some people can follow a recipe to the ‘t’ but the food does not arrive tasting like the four star chef’s creation who originated it? Assuming that the person put the elements together in the same fashion, why is there a difference? I think it must be because there is another invisible element at work other than just the coming together of the required elements. Maybe that is art? Passion? Inspiration? Experience?
August 25th, 2010 at 10:11 pm
I believe the answer to your last question lies in the question itself and has to do with the difference between novice and expert.
The best cooks seldom measure carefully. They slop a bit of this, enough of that. Sprinkle in a hand full of nuts and before you know it, it’s Thanksgiving Dinner. They know their art, and have sufficient experience with their science to make the things they dream.
The neophyte measures carefully and creates exactly, but lacking that spark of inspiration is left with Betty Crocker instead of Haute Cuisine.
August 27th, 2010 at 1:39 am
I agree that instructional design is an art. Two teachers could be given the exact same resources and told to plan a lesson. However, if working separately, chances are that the lesson, while covering the same content, wold be designed differently. Seeing instructional design as an art also helps explain why we have some exceptional teachers and others that are merely mediocre; our exceptional teachers are the artists who are experts at instructional design because of intuition while our mediocre teachers are those that approach instructional design as a science or craft following a recipe.
August 29th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
But, if instructional design is to be something replicated for proven results, how does the sloppy, non-measuring artist-cook-teacher (who turns out year after year brilliant results with kids who are inspired AND prepared for the future) doesn’t really know how she did it or what went into the recipe in the first place, how much “design” is there? It’s most likely internal, spontaneous, flexible, rigorous in goal, but versatile in delivery and it most likely changes by fourth period when a new group of students troop in and slouch in their seats. Is design intuitive? Then does it count as “design,” which seems by definition, planned?
I agree that good teaching is mostly art. Maybe design happens as a byproduct of something unquantifiable, something that cannot be charted in a standards manual or something regimented that would satisfy an adminstrator bent on replicating those results in the rest of her school system.
August 29th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Ahh, the crux.
Is design replicable? Should it be?
Is education a mass production? Are you suggesting that instructional design should be creating uniform outputs? Is it the machinery for stamping ingots of knowledge?
Or is design a setting? A stage upon which learning in its variety can play out?
The non-measuring chef knows exactly what went into the recipe. She knows exactly how she did it and what went into it. She can re-create the outcome at will, albeit shifted slightly, accounting for vagarities in conditions and materials. In the end, an artisanal loaf is still recognizably bread, still an instantiation of the design, but it is her design, her art.
The question for the class is how do we each achieve that level of skill in instructional design. What are the tools? What are the techniques that we each need to master in our own ways? What are the results that are meaningful? How will we know if we’ve succeeded? And how will we count success?
Welcome to the class.
August 29th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
Course design is an art. One must take all the content available (the recipe) and sculpture a desired learning outcome (the bread).
Comparing a design to a good recipe brings great thought into the instructional design process. You could give a specific recipe to a group of individuals and the outcome would still be different. The recipe only contains the ingredients and instructions. The techniques are individualized. For example, when kneading bread one may handle it too much or maybe not enough. A great example is breakfast gravy. It takes an art to master the perfect breakfast gravy. Sometimes it may be too thin, too think or just plain ole lumpy.
I always look at my course designs as work in progress. There is always room for improvement or additional knowledge that one obtains from professional readings and research. Each semester I would address my course development as if I were the cook striving to be a chef.