Seeing more deeply into the heart of design problems

Studies of designers and the process of designing have shown that expert designers perceive the problem in more sophisticated ways than novices, seeing different conceptual categories at a deeper level of organization. As the instructional design field continues to mature, its problem-solving constructs and processes can also be expected to evolve and consider deeper structures. Myself and Clint Rogers have proposed a theory of design layers as a way to describe the architecture of the deep structure of instructional designs (“The Architecture of Instructional Theory”, in Reigeluth & Carr-Chellman, 2009, Instructional-Design Theories and Models, Volume III, Routledge). The theory describes several levels (layers) of structure that can be used to decompose and solve instructional design problems. The appeal to a layered design architecture has been made in other design fields but is new to instructional design.