User Design

Alison A. Carr-Chellman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781136744389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

User Design offers a fresh perspective on how front-line learners (users) can participate in the design of learning environments. The author challenges the universal assumption that front-line users must be relegated to the role of offering input, and that the actual design activity of learning systems must still be conducted only by experts. The b

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User-Design: The Basics

INTRODUCTION

This book is about user-design; about the idea that we as instructional design (ID) professionals in schools, universities, and organizations of all sorts can sincerely engage users in the creation of their own systems of learning—human learning. User-design is founded on systems theory and thinking and can be concisely defined as an authentic empowerment of a particular set of stakeholders, the users of any innovation, such that they are creating their own systems of human learning. Systems theory and thinking are fundamental for the effective application of human performance and instructional design technologies to organizational and educational change efforts. One of the cornerstones of systemic change is the involvement of all stakeholders in what is termed participatory design or user-design. User-design seeks to produce new systems of human learning and organizational functions to support those systems. It assumes that the users are responsible for design and that those who have traditional design expertise are tasked with facilitating users in the processes of design.

While the value of including the users in the creation of large systems of education and human performance (such as training, computer systems, and curriculum) is apparent, the reality of such inclusive efforts has a history of failure. Meeting the challenge of shifting power dynamics, empowering stakeholders and educating for design must, at some level, fall to the leaders of any dynamic organization. This means that there is clearly a political nature to the actual practice of user-design. This chapter defines user-design and begins to embed it in a systemic change context. By using clear examples and nonexamples of user-design, this chapter brings into sharp focus the meaning and basic ideas associated with user-design. It also starts to link the user-design constructs to instructional design practice.

USER-DESIGN AND THE ROOTS OF ID

Definitions of instructional design practice and Performance Technology (PT) have varied widely through the last decade. From our roots in B. F. Skinner’s (XXyearXX) behaviorist prescriptions for instruction and Gilbert’s Performance Engineering (1978) concepts, we have progressed far to reach the introduction of constructivism (Jonassen, 1991), Performance Technology (Stolovitch & Keeps, 1992), feminist pedagogy (Maher & Tetreault, 1994), situated cognition (Brown & Duguid, 1994) and the learning sciences (Carr-Chellman & Hoadley, 2004). ID can be contrasted with PT, though both share a history and similar approaches. ID focuses on the creation of effective instructional moments where PT may include noninstructional interventions such as incentive systems, organizational development, motivation systems, and strategic alignment. This book is primarily concerned with ID; while PT is dealt with as a separate entity with its own chapter (chapter 8) devoted to examining user-design within PT. Therefore, we concentrate on user-design for ID here.

Examples of the broadening of the field of ID are many. The seminal Handbook of Human Performance Technology (Lineberry & Carleton, 1992) points out that diverse, noninstructional interventions should be considered when trying to improve overall human performance in any organization. The recent edition of Dick and Carey’s (1996) and Systematic Design of Instruction (2005) includes consideration of issues such as contextual analysis—a critical concept in systemic change. Over the past decade, there has been a shift from a more narrow focus on training and instruction to a broader consideration of various interventions and cultural contexts (e.g., Land & Hannafin, 1996; Henderson, 1996; Gayeski, 1995; Rowland, 1994; Dick & Johnson, 1993). A particularly strong contribution in this widening of the field of design has been Laurillard’s text on university teaching (2002) which addresses constructivism as on teaching strategy, but also illustrates the importance of contextual analysis and organizational infrastructure within the design methodology. Most recently, links between instructional design and learning sciences (Carr-Chellman & Hoadley, 2004) have broadened the field of practice.

Despite this expansion, much of the literature in the field continues to focus on efficiency of human learning, instruction, and performance. Our traditional models of ID maintain a sense of linearity and closed boundaries. While efficiency seemed an appropriate value in the industrial era, it is becoming increasingly obsolete in the information age where dynamic change in organizations continually forces the integration of new and innovative technologies and processes into the workplace. Because of this dynamism, innovation adoption rates cannot be hampered by less-than-enthusiastic users. Moving through stages of adoption such as those suggested by Rogers (1995) or Bhola (1977) in models of innovation is time consuming to the point that a new process or innovation often comes just on the heels of the adoption of the previously “new” process or innovation. This creates frustration on the part of the user and confusion about his or her place in the broader system. The frequency with which these changes are occurring is exacerbating an already less-than-perfect adoption process, causing anxiety and frustration—which can lead to sabotage of the innovation or a loss of human potential because of high turnover rates. In a way, user-design can be compared to rapid prototyping in that we are trying to move the process more quickly directly into the hands of the users; however, as we shall see, the process of user-design is itself time consuming, ill understood, and creates its own resistance. The best instructional designs are useless without faithful adoption and implementation of the design specifications. This is particularly true of innovations within the design itself. So, we are left with a conundrum—that is, we have great design models that leave us with excellent designs which are only partially and often unfaithfully adopted and implemented via inadequate diffusion models. All of this is, in a sense, a problem of power. We need this book because it helps us to see the ways in which we can overcome this conundrum and create designs that are more likely to engender faithful adoption.

STAKEHOLDER INVOLVEMENT

One way to ameliorate some of the frustration of conducting ID within dynamically changing organizations and bureaucracies is to engage stakeholders in the design of their own systems. Stakeholder engagement is essential to the success of design, adoption, and implementation of broad innovations such as new educational systems (Banathy, 1991; Reigeluth, 1993; Jenlink, 1995) or more narrow curricular innovations such as effective uses of video scaffolding technologies: they will all benefit from increased stakeholder engagement.

There are many ways of engaging groups of stakeholders as we design new systems of human learning. The first step in stakeholder engagement is identifying who we should consider stakeholders. The Handbook of Human Performance Technology (1992) generally says very little about stakeholders, but Lineberry and Carleton (1992, in the Handbook) define stakeholders as “the individuals and groups significantly affected by the organization’s performance and results” (p. 238). They identify the major categories of organizational stakeholders as including customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers, distributors, and the general public. Using this same definition of stakeholders, we can say that students, teachers, school board members, administration, and community members are the major categories of stakeholders in public school. In general, the literature on stakeholder participation tends toward empowerment, particularly of specific populations (Bauch & Goldring, 1998; Cochran & Dean, 1991; Comer & Haynes, 1991; Delgado-Gaitan, 1991; Midgley & Wood, 1993; Pena, 2000; Romanish, 1993). However, these examples, while they attempt to take stakeholder involvement to the empowerment level, continue to rely on approval and negotiation among leaders and expert designers.

Traditional instructional design has concerned itself primarily with the engagement of stakeholders only as they impact a needs assessment. Generally speaking, in a needs assessment, learners are considered if they happen to be involved in the interview or fact finding process and possibly again only if they happen to be members of a pilot group for formative evaluation. Otherwise, the traditional instructional design paradigm does not include users as designers, but rather as sources of information for the design of new instructional solutions.

When stakeholders are considered in performance technology, instructional design, or traditional educational reform, methods for identifying them range from leadership alone generating a list of groups and their representatives (the most common) to observing the context and identifying users, stakeholders, and opinion leaders as good sources of information. An additional method is the organization of a group of people concerned with the design project, but not able to participate in the actual design work. This group can then identify candidates for user-design activities and recruit, contact, and confirm their participation (Jenlink, Reigeluth, Carr, & Nelson, 1998). Each of these methods has a variety of tradeoffs; a complete discussion of stakeholder groups and methods for garnering stakeholder participation is offered in Carr (1995b).

But, stakeholder participation is NOT the same as user-design. I introduce it here primarily as a way to link the conversation in userdesign with the most familiar touchstones in traditional ID. While stakeholder participation is an important method for gathering support and information for any innovation, including new instructional programs, it is not equivalent to user-design. The critical features which distinguish user-design from other forms of user-input such as stakeholder participation and user-centered design are power, design, and context related. So what, then precisely is user-design?

USER-DESIGN DEFINED

User-design extends stakeholder involvement beyond mere input to create empowered users who have design and decision-making powers. This is perhaps its most critical feature in terms of differentiating UD from other forms of user input—that is, the power dynamics change much more substantially in user-design than in any other form of user engagement.

User-design also honors the front line users as the most powerful designers in the system, rather than considering all stakeholders at approximately equivalent levels of influence. In past stakeholder-based approaches, all stakeholders were considered equal and were usually asked to work together through some particular issue in the hopes of reaching consensus or compromise. It is naïve to assume that merely putting all stakeholders into a room together will somehow eliminate or equalize the power dynamics that are already at play in our culture. Thus, the school board member holds more power than the teacher, and the teacher more power than the parent and so forth within a public school arena. And to even complicate matters even more, we cannot simply understand power as attached to simple titles or positions within a system. Indeed, opinion leaders may hold significant power in ways that initially elude the casual observer. We may be surprised to discover a wealth of power residing in the support staff, janitor or lunch lady when we expect to find it in the manager’s office. Thus, we need something more, something that actually addresses the underlying natural power dynamics present in all groups of designers and stakeholders and proactively tackles some form of power redistribution. The approach in which stakeholders are more than just “involved” in change and design is often referred to as userdesign by systemic change theorists (Banathy, 1991; Reigeluth, 1993; Jenlink, 1995; Carr-Chellman, 1997).

In user-design, as in stakeholder participation, control percolates from the bottom up. Kevin Kelly (1994) describes the problem of control over distributed systems (such as most social systems). He uses the example of bees in a hive to define distributed systems, but generalizes the point to various social systems including organizations, the internet, and learning systems:

When everything is connected to everything in a distributed network, everything happens at once. When everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command. A mob can steer itself, and in the territory of rapid, massive, and heterogeneous change, only a mob can steer. To get something from nothing, control must rest at the bottom within simplicity. (p. 469)

Stemming from Scandinavian approaches to software interface design, user-design is an approach that has been applied to the design of computer systems in which “the people destined to use the system play a critical role in designing it” (Schuler & Namioka, 1993, p. xi). So, we now have a working definition for user-design; however, knowing the definition of user-design is only really useful if we understand how to use it and what it is within the context of systemic change. We will address the how question further in chapter three and the contextual question in more detail in chapter two. However, a brief discussion of the systemic change context is important in a clear and complete definition of user-design, so it is included here. A more in-depth discussion of systemic change context is in Chapter 7.

THE IMPACT OF USER-DESIGN ON ID/PT

One of the cornerstone values of systemic change and UD is the fundamental assumption that users must negotiate change with leaders on an equal basis. Because of this, the systems designer role shifts rather dramatically. First, the systems designer in either the ID or PT context must address issues of power and resistance, working with leaders to help them see the hazards of leaving the users out. In addition, the instructional designer or performance technologist must work with users to create ideal systems of human learning. Thus, there is little or no space in user-design for expertism (Carr-Chellman, in press); instead, users are empowered to create their own visions apart from the agenda of the designer. An aboriginal woman, Lila Watson, once said, “If you’ve come to help, you’re wasting your time; but if you’ve come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let’s work together.” This is a common saying among systemic change advocates and it is one of the fundamental values which can be difficult to live by because it calls into question the validity of our presence in a system as an expert, thereby calling into question our training, our pay scales, even our very purpose. This shift from expert system designer to design facilitator exemplifies the desire of the systemic change movement to realign power distributions and alter the dominant paradigms of top-down change. I discuss this change for instructional designers in more depth in Chapter 3.

User-design represents a dramatic shift in power dynamics from traditional approaches. In traditional diffusion of innovations, the reformer analyzes, creates, and negotiates; the leaders initiate, approve, and decide. Unfortunately, the users are left to accept or reject the innovation, and much literature has focused on better and better ways to encourage adoption or compliance from the end users. This approach, however, does not give weight to indigenous knowledge and does not recognize that smart stakeholders usually realize that they are being, in large part, controlled or manipulated by the negotiated agenda of the designer and the leader. Typically, those products or processes which are truly designed by users tend to build ownership among users and create a significantly different adoption process than is typical of more manipulative models of innovation adoption. Perhaps the most well-known diffusion theorist is Evrett Rogers, author of Diffusion of Innovations (1995). Rogers’s approach, or the “colonial” approach to design and diffusion has been critiqued because of the disempowerment of users and the lack of respect afforded indigenous knowledge (Carmen, 1990; Yapa, 1996a, 1996b). This traditional approach is deficient in terms of the robustness necessary given the variability of many current contexts (Larsen & McGuire, 1998). Thus, in user-design, actions such as initiation, approval, rejection, design, and decision making are negotiated among the users, designers, and leaders.

Certainly, the recent passing of Ev Rogers saddens us all. And his work is significant and not to be minimized by this critique of colonial models of diffusion. In fact, he gave us a language to use that helps us to really understand diffusion of innovations when we had nothing. However, the approach is very much top-down. It was interesting to me that even his obituary, written, presumably by one of his students, Kim McCormick of the University of North Florida, shows this “light bringer” attitude:

Please join me in honoring Everett Rogers by pursuing his dreams and goals; to teach and care about students by doing, to conduct research that matters to people, and to do everything we can to make the communities in which we live mirror the wealth of knowledge we possess.

It’s a lovely eulogy, and I agree that we should care about students and do research that m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. User-Design: The Basics
• 2. History and Research1
• 3. Tools for User Design
• 4. Facilitating User-Design
• 5. Conflict
• 6. Leadership
• 7. User Design and Systemic Change
• 8. User-Design and Performance Technology
• 9. Linking User Design to Traditional Instructional Systems Design Models
• Reference
• Author Index
• Subject Index