Layered View of Instructional Designs

I believe instructional designs are layered structures. This became apparent to me as I observed the different priorities and design orderings of other designers. For instance, as I considered model-centered instruction and its basis, I realized that it differed in giving priority to the design structures of a particular layer of design (the model or content layer), while other approaches tended to give priority to structures at other layers (the instructional strategy, the message structure, the channelized representations of the message, media logic structures, etc.). I found it was possible to classify designer styles and even instructional theories on the basis of the structures they emphasize and for which they provide design terms and guidelines. Design layering is most concretely expemplified in Stewart Brand's chapter "Shearing Layers" in the book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (Penguin, 1994). Many sources I have found in the design literature indicate to me that layering in instructional designs is just one manifestation of a general design principle. The changing focus of an individual designer's personal layer priorities can be seen as a long-term trend for most designers. It is described in a paper titled "What and How Designers Design: A Theory of Design Structure" which I presented at the November 2000 meeting of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. The gap between designer's conceptual structures and the structures of time, events, and materials that express the design is where the designer works. I call it "Simon's Gap", referring to Herbert Simon's description in Sciences of the Artificial. The designer's job is to build bridges from the conceptual to the real using a variety of structures and their transformations, mappings, and alignments across several layers to achieve a desired outcome. An instructional design layer is defined by: A specific set of design goals or problems Sets of layer-specific design structures, expressed in the terms of design languages Principles for the selection, arrangement, and mapping of structures within a layer Principles for the relation of structures across layers In addition, a layer often corresponds with a set of specialized design skills with its own lore, design heuristics, technical data, measurements, judging criteria, algorithms, design and development tools, design processes and practical considerations. There are several benefits of the layered view: A designer can use layers to adjust the order or priority of design decisions Design tasks can be bounded and assigned to design team members Structures between layers can be aligned independently, giving rise to design architectures that are more modular, internally consistent, unconflicted, and (ultimatley) economical (See Baldwin & Clark (2000), Design Rules: The Power of Modularity, MIT Press I am continuing research into layers and their utility for designers. I believe this will result in connections with work on architectural concepts of instructional designs, particularly for computer-based instructional environments where the logic of the medium interacts in significant ways with the conceptual design. Efforts in this direction are represented by a paper co-authored with Joel Duffin, "Decompressing and Aligning the Structures of A CBI Design" and a Technical Report produced for the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) with Jon Nelson,"The Architeture of Instructional Simulation: A Design for Tool Construction". Another key publication in this area is "The Nature and Origin of Instructional Objects" (In D. Wiley (Ed.) (2000), The Instructional Use of Learning Objects, Bloomington, IN:AECT).

Contact me at:   andy_gibbons@byu.edu