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.