Crystalizing a design

Designs--instructional designs--crystalize. They begin from a starting point disciplined by a seed structure and progress outward toward detail and concreteness. Good designs maintain the discipline of the seed. Bad designs are like mal-formed crystals that incorporate into their structures impurities which disturb the structure. I speculate that every design has impurities, but elegant designs have the fewest.

The seed can be any structural concept: a content structure, a strategic committment, an operational principle of instruction, a conversational pattern, a media commitment, an interaction pattern. Designers need to think through what they use individually and collectively as seeds for designs.