UGA Design Based Research Conference Proposal
Putting the Design Back in Design Based Research: Problem Seeking and Scaling Insights
from Mobile Learning
Dr. Brenda Bannan – Associate Professor, George Mason University (bbannan@gmu.edu)
Dr. John Cook – Professor The University of the West of England (johnnigelcook@gmail.com)
Applicable Incubator Forum Themes:
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Innovative approaches to DBR methods and analysis
Validating instructional theory and principles through design experiments
Vexation
How do we optimally incorporate design process and scaling into design research to
generate/validate theory and principles? This vexation continues to provoke our thinking/action
across multiple DBR projects. This recurring issue lies at the crux of the intersection of
inductive creative process and deductive research efforts and the interplay of both to inform
learning, design and practice. Several projects will be highlighted in this presentation including
primarily a current European Commission funded mobile learning design research project
addressing workplace learning, as well as mobile augmented reality user research project and an
inquiry-based geosciences learning project.
Venture
To address how to integrate design processes and scaling to generate theory and principles for
designs and learning, we need to first examine a few current models/frameworks of design
process and design research. After reviewing these models/frameworks, we speculate on the
extension of these to address the difficult issue of incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives on
design process, generating theory/design principles from the wicked process of design and the
complexity of defining, orchestrating, implementing and scaling outcomes of DBR. To begin,
we address one framework that evolved from the first author’s work in design research.
The Integrative Learning Design Framework (ILDF) has the general intent of generating
research-based insights about informal or formal teaching, learning and/or training situations as
well as applied solutions that provide and inform practical understanding and applicability to
real-world design projects. The ILDF is a design-based research model that incorporates design
process efficiencies from multiple disciplines such as instructional design, object oriented
software development, product development, and diffusion of innovations research. |It aims to
provide the opportunities to leverage the design process as a vehicle for analyzing, codifying and
documenting what is learned when the designed artifact is enacted and in the context of the
design process. The progressive yield from iterative and connected research and design cycles
are often lost because it is not always carefully documented (Bannan-Ritland, 2009). It is
expected that the design process for creating mobile learning (content and interactions) will offer
several new opportunities to generate best practices and guidelines for both co-design process
discussed below and design research.
This framework consists of four phases (see Figure 1 below), and aims to solve the problem
often encountered in traditional research of not capturing the research-based knowledge and
important factors relating to learning context, culture, and technology within the design process
(Bannan-Ritland, 2009). The ILDF requires that researchers contemplate the entire design-based
research processes by phase in order to realize the scope of the research effort, from initial
conceptualization to diffusion and adoption embedding theories of learning into designed
artifacts (Bannan-Ritland, 2009). The four phases of Informed Exploration, Enactment, Local
Evaluation and Broad Evaluation presented in the ILDF provide a process model for conducting
more rigorous, design-based research iterative cycles, resulting in more comprehensive
qualitative and quantitative research efforts than what formative evaluations alone can provide.
The interconnected design research cycles can generate new knowledge about design principles,
but also it can provide additional information on deeper aspects of learning, cognition, expert and
novice perspectives, as well as stakeholder positions and organizational policy decisions
(Bannan-Ritland, 2009).
The co-design process offers some additional and varied insights into DBR frameworks/models
such as ILDF presenting a different emphasis interestingly referred to as “research-based design”
rather than “design-based research.” This design process, also called co-design, was conceived
and articulated by the Aalto University’s Learning Environments research group and has been
developed internally over a decade of international research and development projects. In
research-based design, the artefacts generated from the design process, which can include tools,
are considered to be outcomes. In this process, the researcher is the facilitator that guides way to
the outcomes. We can distinguish certain phases in the process, although, one of the most
important aspects is that many activities are going on in parallel, and often in the iterative cycles;
indeed one may be required to go back to previous cycles. The process also claims to allow
different strands of design that are in different phases to go forward within the same project. This
is important to notice because one of the advantages is that even though there are strands that are
on different phases these can potentially still feed knowledge into each other due to the iterative
nature of the cycles. The main phases that can be distinguished are (see Figure 2): Contextual
inquiry, Participatory design, Product design and Software prototype as hypothesis phase.
The research-based design process (co-design) starts with an exploration of the socio-cultural
context of design area. In the co-design, artifacts, tools, and services are used as a means of
providing boundary and shared objects (mediated artifacts) to communicate between different
participants during design activities. The idea is to avoid misunderstandings which can easily
arises from using expert jargon, especially if no concrete artifacts are used. However, unlike in
design-based research, in research-based design, the design is an essential outcome of the design
activities. The research-based design process is iterative and takes place in close collaboration
with various people concerned with the design. Outcomes of this phase in the Learning Layers
project, that second author is currently engaged in, has been for example the following: user
stories, interview descriptions, scaffolding concepts and design artifacts.
In the Learning Layers the participatory design phase involves the most intense input from end
users, partners and end-user representatives. The focus is on the actual and practical design,
namely, trying to pinpoint most interesting and worthwhile tools for scaffolding informal
learning and creating these ideas into gradually increasingly concrete prototypes. The involved
people create sketches, storyboards, mock-ups, wireframe, videos of acted processes. Outcomes
of this phase in the Learning Layers project has been for example the following: board games,
context cards, design ideas, storyboards, refined user stories, contextual factors, more refined
scaffolding “models”.
The product design phase which we have not reached yet in the Learning Layers project attempts
to define use cases, more specific technical requirements and works to define basic interactions
through the mediating artifacts such as prototypes from low fidelity to high fidelity. Outcomes
involve Scaffolding “models” that can be used for the semantic layer of technology, concrete
points of integration start to appear, functional prototypes.
In the last phase, the production of software as hypothesis, the agile software development is in
full form. Modular designs of the software is the focus in this phase. These can be tested in
actual use by the end users in the field. These prototypes are like hypotheses. In practice this
means that the modular functional tools provide potential solutions to the design challenges
defined earlier in the process.
The third diagram (Figure 3) under the visuals heading below represents a model for Design
Research that extends existing approaches so that they take account of design creativity and
scaling of design (the later in terms of numbers of users and the complexity of research projects).
The model draws on some of Rogers’ (1983) notion of diffusion of innovation, particularly his
‘model of stages in the innovation-decision process’ (p 163) and the ‘five stages in the
innovation process in the organization’ (p. 392). However, the experience of the authors and
other research have led to the model, we particularly draw on experiences of Learning Layers
Project for scaling in workplace learning and the Layers Design Team PANDORA which is
exploring collaborative support for maturing local living documents and the building personal
and professional learning networks using mobile and social media (Cook, 2013). The focus of
this paper will provide an innovative perspective on the potential of collaborative technologies
that are embedded in workplaces and practices, and which contribute to and help to scale
learning on the individual, group or organizational levels; specifically we will attempt to
expound on DBR methodological work (Design and Seeking model) and original technology
design examples that shed light on the identified vexations above.
Visuals
Figure 1: The Integrative Learning Design Framework (ILDF)
Figure 2: The Co-design approach of Aalto University
Figure 3: Design Seeking and Scaling Diagram
Conclusion
This proposed paper is meant to stir thinking about DBR in the context of educational design,
particularly mobile learning design, design process and scaling of DBR products. We look
forward to a potentially rich and productive exchange about these issues and projects that have
prompted DBR work and may potentially extend our current models.
References:
Bannan-Ritland, B. (2009). The integrative learning design framework: An illustrated example
from the domain of instructional technology. In T. Plomp & N. Nieveen (Eds.), An Introduction
to Educational Design Research. Enschede, Netherlands; SLO Netherlands Institute for
Curriculum Development.
Cook J. and Pachler N. (2012). Online people tagging: Social (mobile) network(ing) services and
work-based learning. British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 43 No 5 2012 711–725.
Rogers, E. M. (1983). Diffusion of Innovations. The Free Press: New York.