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).  
  

Functional Design I

I couple the use of design layers with an approach to design process that I call functional design (Gibbons, DESRIST 2009, see http://prezi.com/58265/edit/ ). Functional design is based on the principle that a designer can make design decisions in any number of orders. It supplies the designer with a guideline for determining the order that follows the best strategic sequence for the particular project.

Most designers recognize that design problems come to the designer with diminished degrees of freedom—with constraints imposed by goals, resources, client desires, and time. It is generally recognized that fixed-process models are not sensitive to this fact of life and that there are generally no guidelines for adapting the generic process to a specific project. Further complicating things is the fact that different projects place different value on full-featured models due to time, staff, or client interest restrictions.   

To deal with this, functional design removes order constraints from decision-making during design. Design decisions can be made in any order. However, functional design also incorporates the principle that each decision, firm or tentative, imposes constraints on future decisions—creating some new decisions while cutting off others. This leads designers to hold decisions tentative where possible until correlation has been made across all areas of the design to ensure coherence and unity in the whole design.

Learning versus Instructional theory

It is a general but, I believe, mistaken idea that learning theories can be applied directly into instructional designs. I think there are translations necessary to convert a learning theory into an instructional theory that can be applied directly. By looking more closely at theories, you can see that the ones that tended to be most easy to apply to designs are those that considered themselves "instructional" theories rather than "learning" theories. I think the key difference is that a learning theory posits from what is exists or is thought to exist. Instructional theory posits from what can be made to be there. It supplies terms for elements that can be created.

Two kinds of theory?

To make sense of these ruminations on layered decomposition of instructional design problems one has to accept a distinction between two kinds of theory: instructional design theory and instructional theory. To put this in general terms, it means for designers accepting the existence of two kinds of design-related theory--one kind pertaining to how things are designed, and one pertaining to what kinds of structures those designs might contain. The first of these can be called a design theory; the second can be called a domain theory. 

Donald Schon (umlat over the "o") describes domain theories in some detail in "Educating the Reflective Practitioner" (Jossey-Bass, 1989). He gives an account of a tutor helping a student solve an architectural problem. In the process, Schon reveals his view that different parts of the problem become most critical at particular times and that each sub-problem constitutes a "domain" which has its own terminology, principles, and practitioners.

At the same time as we acknowledge domain theory as a kind of theory required by designers, we can also see that designers draw on another type of theory--design theory--which is theory about how something is or can be designed.The subject of Herbert Simon's "Sciences of the Artificial" was this kind of theory.

The two types of theory relevant to a designer may puzzle the scientifically-oriented person, who is used to there being only one kind of theory--and that an explanatory , not a synthetic, kind. What answers this puzzlement is the realization that designers use theory, but that the theory is not scientific theory: it is design-related theory. Moreover, the identification of two kinds of design related-theory (with the expectation of even more being identified) means that design-related theory is a different species of theory with different properties and different uses: technological theory.

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.

Approaching design problems differently

Instructional designers have become accustomed to decomposing their design problems in terms of general phases or steps of problem solving. This approach, however, is but one of many possible avenues to simplifying problems for solving. Design fields other than instructional design have employed approaches that break the design problem down in terms of the characteristic functions of the artifact. I suggest we think in terms of a layer theory of design architecture that leads to a method of decomposing design problems by the generic functions of the class of artifacts being designed—functional design.

What's in a design problem?

Instructional design problems aren’t really single, monolithic problems, and instructional designers don’t solve design problems all at once. Design problems consist of many different sub-problems which are identified by decomposing the large problem into smaller, more solvable problems. The manner in which designers do this decomposition makes all the difference.

What the Heck is an Operational Principle?

An abstract idea called operational principle is described by Polanyi (Personal Knowledge, The Tacit Dimension) as the principles by which something functions. An operational principle describes the transfer of energy and information that allows the something to function. Jane Darke (British architect, in Design Studies) described these abstractions from a designer's viewpoint as primary generators. Whatever you call them, these abstractions form the effective core of a design, and designers can use the concept of "operational principle" to better comprehend what they are really designing and how to design.

I gave a talk on the operational principle at the Annual Technology in Teaching Idea Exchange (TTIX) Conference that is held each year at Utah Valley University in Provo, Utah (good conference, free). I tried to make the concept of an operational principle clear, concrete, and relevant.  I divided the video of the talk into short podcasts and put them on YouTube:

Part 1 – Operational principle defined (3:36)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL9ambSGr4s

 

Part 2 – Operational principle across fields (3:36)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKi_puMPbL0

 

Part 3 – Operational principle of a yo-yo (3:42)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4ejZtRuNrg

 

Part 4 – Yo-yo operational principle in more detail (6:01)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29hTv0SRqYM

 

Part 5 – Operational principle and instructional designs (8:20)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiKPAZe5lSg

 

Part 6 – The operational principle of model-centered instruction (4:08)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1xJ-aSTWGI

 

Part 7 – Model-centered instruction in more detail (5:32)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoDG4R_q_2E

 

Part 8 – Results and review (3:11)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmagH69oiRc

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.

ISD

ISD (Instructional Systems Design/Development) is just an idea. It embodies a set of reified processes, each with its particular goal. It expresses an order of design and a dependency between design processes. In this way it guides the designer in prioritizing and sequencing decsion-making during instructional design. Embedded in the fabric of ISD  are many implicit categories that shape and condition the designer's thought, usually without the designer's awareness.

The invention of ISD was a major leap forward in its time. In a period of rapidly increasing size and complexity in electronic systems, including among other things computers and radar, ISD brought sanity into an otherwise chaotic instructional  design world. The order ISD brought to instructional design was highly desirable when compared with the lack of systematic design thinking that existed before it. Many benefits have accrued to instructional designers. It has become a standard design process--the water that design-fish no longer even have think about.

And that is the danger associated with it. Taking ISD for granted and applying it too literally has been overwhelmingly the rule. This led at one point to voluminous and highly detailed descriptions of the ISD process. It also led to the belief that ISD could be used by non-trained designers as a substitute for informed, skilled, and insightful instructional design. Untrained designers pressed into service in unfamiliar design tasks turn the ISD crank for comfort and assurance, turning ISD into an substitute for thought rather than a problem-solving tool and guide. The long-term disappointing results produced by these trends has led to a general questioning of ISD and a search for something else.

It is likely that we have been like the cook that forgot why it was important to cut the end off the ham before cooking it. We have lost the question ISD was trying to answer, and we need to find it again.

The Order of Design

A design cannot be produced all at once. Designing requires: (1) knowledge of the decisions to be made, and (2) a way of prioritizing those decisions in an order appropriate to the specific design problem. A designer designs by breaking a large design problem that cannot be solved intuitively and all at once into smaller individual problems that can be. Once made, individual decisions are tested, fitted, and aligned with the rest of the design in a way that produces a coherent design, yet one whose individual members have not lost their identity and can be modified. 

A designer’s most important tasks therefore are: (1) breaking the original design problem into solvable sub-problems, (2) imaging the broadest range of suitable solutions to each sub-problem, (3) finding the possible solutions to each sub-problem that are feasible, and (4) picking the solution for each sub-problem that best aligns with prior elements of the design and best meets the criteria of the design problem.

Design and decision-making

Designing is a process of making decisions for execution. Decisions can be made at any time: long before the decisions are actually implemented, or at the instant of implementation. A product may be designed and then developed into a package which is used in a different time and place, or an intelligent agent can be made to make some or all of the decisions about instruction and implement them on the spot. The great power of both live instruction and (potentially) computer-based instruction comes from the making some or all of the design decisions at the moment of instruction.

Feedback: Forgotten art

From the earliest days of our infancy we use feedback from the world around us for learning. No one tells us how to do this: it is a natural phenomenon—the key to our development. We act, the world around us responds, and we learn. If feedback stops, learning stops. Feedback is our friend and the most powerful of instructional forces. If the right pattern is followed, at the moment of receiving feedback a person is the most teachable.

As infants we receive constant feedback from an attentive world around us. We receive natural feedback from a material world and agentive feedback from fellow humans. Natural feedback is without mercy and implacable: the laws of nature are unforgiving. Feedback from humans may be judgmental, inadvertent, or nurturing, depending on the intentions and awareness of the giver, and it may be helpful or corrosive, depending on how it is received and interpreted by the learner. But how it is received is learned from how it has been given in the past. Feedback is not just cognitive: it is bathed in emotion as well.

Feedback has different names: “knowledge of results”, “outcome”, “correction”, even “discipline”. As humans we learn to use feedback deliberately as a means of controlling each others’ behavior. The primary purpose of feedback changes by this use from learning to manipulation. We learn to use feedback as a means of judging, correcting, and sorting: “you are better than…”, “you are worse than…”. The use of feedback becomes institutionalized and thoughtless in formal education, and the learning and growth value of feedback is often destroyed, except for those who excel or those who are strong.

The constructive uses of feedback are often ignored, and the art of giving nourishing feedback—which should be one of our most coveted skills—becomes routinized into an impersonal exchange of mostly negative, often terse messages and a potential source of contention and hardness—at the very least a source of negative self-judgments and an absence of rekindled hope and anticipation. The inspiring stories we hear about “the teacher who cared” is really an unspoken story about the tens of teachers who didn’t care—or who were perhaps thoughtless or overtaxed by their duties.

The learner who has received nourishing feedback is in a position to learn and to change. The moment of giving and receiving feedback is one of the most important in all of learning, but it is often the one where the teacher is most distracted, most overtaxed, and most unable to respond with the adaptive nurturing that could turn an inadequate performance by the learner into a triumph.

If our goal is improvement of learning—and even more important, improvement of the learner’s ability to self-teach and become a learner for life, then we must raise the importance of feedback in our calculations, cultivate the skills of feedback-giving, and organize our teaching procedures to place feedback in its position of central importance. When this occurs, teaching gives way to mentoring, and we become companions in learning rather than learning-masters. When we do this, self-direction in learners improves, and there is a positive anticipation associated with feedback occasions.

We can change the occasion of feedback from being punishing to being inspiring, or at least hope-building, even in an institutional setting.

1. We can make feedback the stimulus for a better effort rather than a summary judgment. This requires that we allow students to test themselves against the criterion more than once—even repeatedly. There should be an opportunity for learners to make the determination within themselves to improve. There should be room for agency to act toward self-directed change.

2. We can make the feedback we provide disciplined, fulsome, and encouraging. A few cryptic notes on a paper is not sufficient. Feedback can be principled and disciplined by an ontology-based feedback message structure. We know from experience that feedback messages are not unique. There are patterns—kinds of things that we say over and over. We should become aware of the patterns and master the construction of complete feedback. There are only a few basic elements to feedback, regardless of the specific content.

Contents of feedback might include: re-assertion of the expectation, identification of the location(s) and type(s) of error, hearing of the learner’s reasoning about the error, provision of models of adequacy and excellence at the learner’s level of understanding, solicitation of alternatives from the learner, commitment to a plan for subsequent action, affirmation of the learner’s determination, affirmation of the teacher’s confidence, etc.

3. We can make our standards and expectations more clear. We can provide models. We can be patient in giving re-explanations.

4. We can change our image of the learner and eliminate the automatic assumption of the learner’s guilt or improvidence. We can see learners as if they were infants with respect to the principles and theories we are teaching, because that is what they are. We can treat them with the same tender care we would give an infant, reserve negative judgment, and still hold high expectations of them.

5. We can construct grading systems in which there is room for choice and self-determination. Re-try should be possible.

6. We can take the threat and pressure out of receiving feedback. We can reduce the stresses and uncertainties that normally surround feedback encounters. We can exhibit respect toward the learner and use patient, personal attention to reaffirm our regard for the individual. 

7. We can give learners the ability to track their own progress toward improvement as they are attempting improvement.

In short, we can become more Christ-like. By doing these things, we reclaim feedback as an instructional rather than a sorting technique and allow learners to use the feedback we provide in a self-directed and self-determined (and satisfying) learning process. We teach learners to be agents.

I Wonder About Technology

Right off the bat, I'm going to violate my own rule and give a citation. Rawlins (Slaves of the Machine, MIT Press) describes the operational principle of the computer by comparing it to an irrigation project:

"An electrical current is really a river of electrons, and each one of the millions of tiny decision-making boxes inside a computer chip is like a sluice gate controlling whether electrons will flow through it. So a computer chip is a giant electron irrigation project laid out on a nearly flat plane, with microscopic hydraulic plants, wells, water tanks, and pumps, and millions of canals and sluice gates--enormous complexity working at enormous speeds and tucked into an enormously small space" (p.28)

Hillis (The Pattern on the Stone, 1998) uses a similar metaphor:

"The picture I have in my mind when I design a logic circuit is of hydraulic valves. A hydraulic valve is like a switch that controls and is controlled by the flow of water. Each valve has three connections: the input, the output, and the control. Pressure on the control connection pushes the piston that turns off the water flow from input to output". (p. 13)

An irrigation project works because natural forces of gravity press the water through the gates and ditches. Technology in this case consists of pre-arranging the paths by which the water flows. The same is true in a computer.

I take this as a pattern for all of technology. When human intention is exercised in any way to influence the flow of natural forces, I call that the application of technology. 

This notion has immense implications that are lost on many technologists. And since design is the way we decide how to make those impositions of our will on natural forces, I believe that designers should make this understanding the beginning point of their cogitations on design.   

I Wonder Where This Will Go

When you place something online you become an iceberg. You hang there in the water with only a tip exposed and wonder whether there will ever be interest in the rest. A blog exposes what's below the water line a little at a time and hopes for a discerning and generous reader. Worst case, it becomes a kind of journal that records impressions for your own later use.

I'm a designer by nature and by profession. I will probably write about that. I'm an academic too, but I find that in my field of study the academics haven't gotten to the most interesting and important questions. Maybe I'll write about them here and enjoy freedom from the multitude of citations that are normally used to give authority to what you say.  Saying it then will be its own authority.