Design & Education Futures

The idea of design

Design is core to my identity — education is the space I function within, but I try to approach everything I do as a designer. Herb Simon, in The Sciences of the Artificial, wrote that “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones,” situating design across graphic design, architecture, medicine, and social policy — and, just as much, education. Which is why I prefer to call myself an educational designer rather than an educational researcher. It’s no surprise, then, that one of my favorite courses I teach is called Education by Design — a course about design as a way of thinking, a process that values collaboration, context, and diverse perspectives, generating creative solutions to the wicked problems of educational practice.

Framing Design in Education

The five spaces for design in Education

Everything in education is designed — the curriculum, seat-time, learning metrics, the very idea of “school” — these are human creations, not natural facts. But designing a textbook is not like designing a chair, and designing a school is not like designing a single lesson plan; the differences come from scale, complexity, and human psychology as much as anything else.

Melissa Warr and I developed a framework for this: the Five Spaces for Design in Education, which argues it’s productive to think of five spaces for design in education — artifacts, processes, experiences, systems, and culture — each requiring different tools, practices, and judgment.

6 videos on the 5 spaces framework

Publications emerging from the framework

Story

I was invited to give a keynote at the 50th anniversary of the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) at IIT Bombay, where I studied visual communication design in the late 1980s after finishing my engineering degree. It was at IDC that I was introduced to design — something I didn’t know much about before, but seemed to fit right into. Everything I’ve done since in educational technology builds on what I learned there. You can watch the keynote here.

Designing theory

Theories let us understand, explain, and predict — but the standard model, where data lead to laws that lead to theories, has been undermined by philosophers of science for a while: theories are usually under-determined by data. In Warr, Mishra & Scragg (2020), we argue it’s productive to see theory development itself as a process of design — creating a conceptual artifact with “a structure adapted to a purpose” and “goodness of fit” — which could lead to stronger theoretical and practical scholarship.

Teachers as designers

What does it mean for a teacher to be a designer, or for teaching itself to be an act of design? Warr & Mishra (2021) synthesizes a decade of educational research (2007–2017) on teachers and design, using citation-network analysis to identify 10 strands of work and how the roles teachers play as designers have shifted over time — evidence that teaching isn’t just design-adjacent, it could be considered a design profession in its own right.

Connections to current work (GenAI)

Design questions run through my GenAI work. In The Ethical Consequences, Contestations, and Possibilities of Designs in Educational Systems (Close, Warr & Mishra, 2023, TechTrends), we examine how designed educational systems carry values whether or not their designers examined them — an argument that lands differently now that algorithms do more of the designing. The systems and culture spaces of the Five Spaces framework are where I spend much of my time these days: working out how schools and teacher-education programs should respond to GenAI is a systems-level design problem, and that’s how I approach leading the AI in Education Learning Futures Collaborative at ASU.

Impact / spread

The Five Spaces framework now has a body of scholarship of its own — Melissa Warr maintains a running list of publications and presentations at talkingaboutdesign.com, spanning journal articles, book chapters, and conference work by a growing group of collaborators. The ideas also got a full-scale test in practice: during my years as an associate dean at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, design framed how we approached principled innovation and the Learning Futures work, treating whole programs and systems as things we could deliberately redesign. And the ASU Learning Sparks videos gave the framework an audience well beyond academic journals.