Design: Dependence or Daydreaming?

 Based on your reading and your own experiences, 

Describe what you find most interesting about the authors' thoughts about design, especially as it relates to your previous/current/future work in education or other work settings where learning/teaching/training happens. 

What questions did your reading raise for you about the nature or role of design and instructional design in your work, be it past, present or future?

What I found most interesting in the discussion across the first two chapters of our textbook was the urgency it seemed the author's had to justify our field as something as relevant and necessary to world as what it was comparing the work to; art and science by Parrish and Nelson (2017). Bannan (2017) further extending the inflation of instructional design as a field that deserves the attention of cognition research and the potential of commonalities of the work of the field with other fields relying on design as their purpose and practice.

I had not considered the concept of 'design' in its different contexts as those then could be used to conceptualize design in the instructional technology or instruction in digital spaces. I felt a bit bewildered by the author's insistence on the crucial nature of this task, as well as holding it up against the (what I realized I considered much larger scope lenses) the ways art and science are 'done' or 'carried' out in the world. 

It was amusing to me that so much of this was built on the agreed upon premise by both Parrish and Nelson that design is not a privilege, when so much of the arguments and points they worked to make thereafter, seemed to me, the very definition of a concept founded in privilege. I do not feel that making a case for instructional design as a human need was effective, however the work of reconciling it as such, or asking myself and thinking critically about why I feel that way was certainly a learning experience akin to the last line of Gibbons (2017) about nature having a sense of humor.

In library school, and in my work in libraries, the focus in the digital experience of libraries - academic and public - is the user search and information gathering behavior. I found some crossover with the points made about instructional design, but not as many as I anticipated. Perhaps because library science as a field on the whole is much older, and is adopting a new technology into a well established field, versus instructional design being a field created by the technology still cutting its teeth on an established identity independent from curriculum authoring, lesson design, and the field of education on the whole. 

I found a lot lacking in these article in terms of the humans that the design is intended to be for. I found a lot of talk about broad scope - similar to the analogies drawn in architecture, but I would say it was also a missed opportunity to compare the field to city or urban planning. The ideas espoused in the arguments around design felt much more inline with professionals who saw themselves as those who create the environment in which people must dwell, looking moreso at the patterns of humanity vs the patterns of individuals. There was some pushback by Bannan that felt more holistic to the human and their experience as an individual, but it still felt like these points from all authors swung wildly from micro theoreticals to macro theoreticals and missed the also very real opportunity to discuss how culture, language, and geography are apart of this conversation as well. Though perhaps this is what was being alluded to by all authors in their labors to clarify and define instructional design in the panoply in which humans exist and interact with the world (if that is the definition of design we ultimately settle on). 

 Questions that came up for me during the reading:

- Is instruction a 'need' as we would consider other Maslow defined needs?

- What would a discussion centering on relationships to Collaboration as a way to distinguish how Design is an independent process from that of 'doing' or 'engaging' in Art or Science yield? Rather than parsing where Focus falls on the process and outcome scale of the three?

- How are we defining Objectivity in this space? Is it also something we should seek to adopt from other fields? Or does it too need to be understood and re-investigated differently when considering design and instructional design specifically?