Hiatus

Time warp forward six years. Wow. My shirt is still smokin'. Is my hair frizzled?

I had completely forgotten that I even had a blog. Tell me, are blogs still in vogue these days? Probably not. There are so many. But like they were out of a time capsule, here are my words in 2015. I read them, and they still make sense to me. Since I put these words on line I have added a good others to them and published them in a book. 2014.

This is 2015. So what's new? I think I have some speculative things I want to say. Since no one reads this anyway, what harm can it do? I would like to do some speculating: kind of an intellectual diary.

The first thing I would say is that I think instructional designers have it all wrong. Yes, that's right...wrong. I've been doing it myself for decades. We have intellectualized something that isn't intellectual. It's fundamentally emotional.

There are a lot of indications for this, and it may take me a while to get my thoughts into words. I think that the first things we teach new designers to pay attention to are not the first things a designer ought to pay attention to.

Learning is based first in emotion and tacit processes, but we teach instruction as if it were completely rational. I am convinced that what we refer to as knowledge is really more like a belief. I feel that instructing should be approached as if it was an appeal to the mind and the heart. I do not feel that we can rely on the design principles and processes of the past to lead us to the promised land of learning.

These are things I would like to talk about, and since I am in kind of an echo chamber here, I can write without fear of being discovered.

Why All the Noise About Functional Design?

OK. So why all the noise about functional design?

Because:

• It's closer to what designers really do anyway
• It makes it possible to link theory in a more direct way to a design
• It allows the designer to tailor the process to the needs of the project
• It supplies an alternative to the traditional approach
• It corrects some of the shortcomings of the traditional approach

Functional design actually fills in a blank spot in the ADDIE/ISD approach. If you look closely at the many versions of ADDIE/ISD, you will notice that the models abandon you just at the point when you need the most insight and guidance. In this respect, the ADDIE/ISD models remind me of the "...And then a miracle happens" cartoon from the New Yorker. Most of the ADDIE/ISD processes get you to the point where you are ready to make the most substantive and detailed decisions but do not tell you how this can be done. Functional design takes up at that point, focusing the attention of the designer on the details of the artifact and challenging you to think inside of each functional area of the artifact to produce a design that is detailed, yet coherent.

Functional design also deals with an inconsistency found in virtually every ADDIE/ISD description: the mixing of instructional theory with design theory. Stop and think about it: when the design model tells you to perform task analysis, it is committing your design to a particular bias toward task-type instruction. Sometimes this is not  appropriate to the type of subject-matter you need to instruct, and this apparent mismatch between what you sense you should do and what the model tells you you should do leads to confusion and frustration. 

There is another example I could cite of where the current ADDIE/ISD models create this kind of subtle bias: in the recommendation to use taxonomized instructional objectives. I know that I am saying heresy at this point, because one of the principles that brought instructional design out of the dark ages was the one-objective-one-strategy concept promoted by Gagne, Merrill, Bloom, and others--an idea so thoroughly ingrained in instructional design today that many designers would not know what to do without it.

But the creation of classes of objectives (and I don't argue that they are not comfortable and useful--I've used them many times myself) tends to gravitate the thinking of the designer in the direction of the fragmentation they lead to, with no countervailing force to bring the designer's thinking back toward integration of the fragmented learning into fluent and competent wholistic performance. 

What remedy do I suggest? The remedy of acknowledging that there is a body of design theory that can guide a designer in the making of designs and that there is also a body of instructional theory that supplies the content of those designs. This implies that I can talk about how to design without making assumptions of what the design will look like. Clint Rogers and I make this point in the new Green Book III chapter we titled "The Architecture of Instructional Design".

This is a new idea for instructional designers. Things have not been taught this way up until now. One of the fall-outs of that has been the neglect by instructional designers of a large body of research into design across the disciplines. 

So anyway, that is the reason for all of the noise about functional design. It is a design theory, not an instructional theory, but it shows how instructional theory can be more directly incorporated into instructional designs.

Functional Design and ADDIE/ISD

Functional design and ADDIE/ISD inform each other and are capable of working in a complementary way. Probably the two themes most important in describing the relationship are sequentiality and granularity.

Sequentiality refers to the issue of design decision order. Designs are large and complex enough—even the simplest ones—that they cannot be created in a single stroke. Designing is decision-making process, and therefore some decisions have to be made before others. ADDIE/ISD models specify a general order of data gathering and decision-making processes. Logically it does not make sense for some of these processes to come before others. At the same time, ADDIE/ISD models have been criticized for their tendency to promote “waterfall” thinking, which tends to be linear and which prevents the designer from anticipating the outlines of designs early-on: frustrating clients and designers alike.

Functional design orders design decisions according to project-specific patterns in response to constraints imposed by the problem’s context.  ADDIE/ISD models represent an idealized case in which it is seldom made clear how prior constraints impact the idealized model’s processes. Functional design assumes the existence of prior constraints for every design problem that force the designer to re-assess the order of decision-making. Design order in functional design is determined by the “next most critical” rule for selecting decisions to be made, assuming that certain decisions have been made or are strongly indicated even before the project is launched, creating the “seed” from which the design expands outward in increasing detail.

Granularity refers to the degree of guidance provided to designers by a design approach. Functional design and ADDIE/ISD probably differ to the greatest degree with respect to granularity. This is because functional design operates within the same context as ADDIE/ISD, overlapping to some extent some of the ADDIE/ISD processes. However, functional design deals with the concerns of design within this context at a much smaller granularity and therefore scaffolds design efforts to a much higher degree during the critical phase where the design itself is being formed.

Functional design also recognizes that design decisions begin during what is normally recognized as a design phase but that they also continue to be made throughout what is normally called the development phase. Functional design therefore considers all decisions, from the highest level down to the lowest, to be design decisions. What are normally considered production tasks are therefore treated as design tasks, and the existence of a development phase is de-emphasized.

Functional Design V

Functional design supports the simultaneous consideration of parallel alternatives—design hypotheses—and reduces the sequentiality of decisions. It encourages the evaluation of clusters of decisions which must work together to create design unity. It enables designers to hold off firm decisions on a cluster until the impact of the decisions on cost, skill, time, and tools has been determined. A functional designer will most likely advance the design within many layers at once through interdependent decisions spread across multiple layers. The method of proposing hypothetical designs and testing them is described by Schön as a design “conversation”. Just as Schön’s domains of an architectural design define the loci of individual design decisions, the layers and sub-layers of an instructional design localize the attention of the instructional designer without obscuring the integrity of the whole.

Functional Design IV

Since it can’t be predicted what constraints will come with the problem, and since different decisions challenge different parts of a process model, functional design does not specify a design order. Instead, it follows next critical decision order. Gibbons (2009) defined several factors that may individually or jointly determine the next critical decision for a given project and moment within the design process:

• The decision most constrained by the latest previous decision.
• The decision most constrained by external factors, such as skill availability, infrastructure, resources, etc.
• The decision that best advances the central discipline of the primary generator.
• The decision that best takes advantage of an opportunity afforded by the latest previous decision.
• The decision that creates the most options for later decisions.
• The decision for which there is the most supporting data from the analyses of the target population and of the instructional context.
• The decision that represents the next highest quality priority.
• The decision that most directly addresses a major client criterion or desired feature.
• The decision that best leads to the satisfaction of an innovation goal.
• The decision that is most necessary to the implementation of a chosen theoretical position.
• The decision that responds to the latest prior decisions in other layers of the design.

Functional Design III

As decisions are made, either in singles, in clusters, or in order to serve an operational principle, each new decision imposes new constraints on future decisions, redefining again the options left in the problem solving space, making certain future decisions imperative, and shifting priorities for the next decision. This cycle of progressive placement of constraints continues until the minutest decision has been made firm. Functional design is a natural companion of design layer theory. Initial constraints on a design problem affect different layers. One project may require a particular medium to be used; another may require a particular social setting. Constraints influence the options available within different layers of the design. Moreover, constraints on one layer ripple effects to other layers, constraining decisions within them. 

Functional Design II

It is called "functional design" because it employs layers, and layers correspond with functions of the artifact being designed. I propose that instructional designs have layers that correspond to:

• the representation function (provide sensory experience for the learner)
  
• the control function (give the learner a way to respond to the sensory experience)
  
• the message function (construct the individual messages of the instructional conversation--the ones that are to be represented)
  
• the strategy function (determine high-level strategic moves that support learning and drive messaging)
  
• the content function (supply content in appropriate form to the strategic, messaging and representation functions)
  
• media-logic (execute all functions)
  
• the data management (record data from the instructional encounter).