Strengths & Accomplishments

While I understand the design process to be highly iterative and not always cookie-cutter neat, I am skilled at staying organized within each design phase, no matter where it takes me.

• Design Journal - I keep track of important details and ideas for design that come up throughout the overall design process. My design journals are formatted as a methodical tracking system, but are also presented concisely and aesthetically enough to show an outside reader and have them understand it. For example, I often record information in the form of a process flow or other type of graphic organizer (i.e., Venn diagram), which both organizes and visually demonstrates my research and ideas. In other words: I believe a design journal is not just a notes dump!

• Design Decision Tracking - I record all design decisions I make throughout the process for two key reasons: 1) To be able to connect each decision to research, literature, feedback, and other sources of inspiration or ideation, and have those labels written down; and 2) To allow for more rational and systematic design justifications. When I keep meticulous record of the decisions I make, I can more easily justify how each piece of the design goes together and why it works.

Learning Engineering is a highly interdisciplinary field, so I am constantly honing my skill of making connections and making sense across the related disciplines I interact with, including:

• • Learning sciences

  • Design thinking

  • Cognitive science

  • Educational psychology

  • Technology

  • Research, evaluation, and assessment

Each of these disciplines offers a wealth of information and research; my strength lay in finding the common denominators and common themes woven across these sources, and pinpointing how they connect.

• • Within design work - During the research and ideation phases, I prioritize connecting incoming information and seeing how the pieces all work together (conjecture mapping helps with this!). Synthesizing the smaller pieces helps me understand how they will work together within the big picture to form expected outcomes in the learning environment.

  • Across academic courses - With my Digital Portfolio project in particular, I was able to see how one idea not only led to another ("snowballing"), but that when I made connections to sources from my Learning Engineering courses in Cognitive Task Analysis, Motivation, Theory of Change, and Observing Designs in Use, I could more effectively grow these ideas out further.

My years as a management consultant have reinforced the importance of building trusting relationships with clients, and as a designer, I will continue to foster and value this type of relationship. One of the key ways to do this is to leverage my skill of applying what I know about how people learn from learning sciences literature and empirical studies to justify my designs.

• • When Researching - Being informed by the literature means being able to pick out what's useful, and not taking it all as Gospel. When I am doing extensive and varied research for a design project, I interpret the literature as suggesting what I should pay attention to, rather than telling me what to do. This approach is more amenable to applying and adapting what I've learned from existing studies for a novel use or context.

    • For example, I read a study about tangible interaction and cultural forms (Horn, 2018) for the Computational Environments for Learning Technology Module, which discusses how tangible interaction creates new opportunities for designers to build on cultural foundations by shaping objects to evoke "cueing forms," or existing cultural forms. Although the author discussed learning experiences that were strictly tangible or physical (i.e., physical computing), I extracted the more general point here about using cueing forms to ground a novel experience in something familiar to the learner, and applied it to my design of a coding activity.

  • When Interacting with Clients - My approach is to provide the "hot take" of why I made a certain design decision or why I am making a certain recommendation, while knowing that I could dig deeper into what the literature is saying if I am asked. In other words, I think it's more important to tell the story of the research without needing to get into the explicit details.

  • Bridging the Theory-Practice Gap- Some literature makes implementation of findings seem like a back-burner issue, but it doesn't have to be that way. As a designer, I can have some control over the theory-into-practice situation by being informed by the literature in order to be deliberate about what I actually want to see happen in real life with the learners.

    • For example, as I note on the Insights page under Supporting Mental Model Building, designing a learning experience around making an artifact or model is a way to put the theory of constructionism into practice. As a designer, I often look for those pieces, like making, that seem the most "implementable" or ready to put into action in a learning environment.

Design is an iterative process, and that sometimes means jumping around from one phase to another; maybe right after testing, I have to jump back to the research phase, while also starting to come up with prototype revisions. This can end up putting a lot on a designer's plate at once. To tackle this challenge, I leverage my strength in breaking up my design work into manageable pieces, prioritizing, and being aware when I am taking on too much at once.

• • Example: Testing Scope - I believe that prototypes can be low fidelity and represent small pieces of a full design. Showing an audience a "Wizard of Oz" preview instead of the real product can still garner helpful feedback.

    • For the Stress Management project, for example, my team produced about a week's worth of journal pages for our students to test with. The full journal product has at least 3 month's work of pages, but we tested the pieces that just pertained to one full week to keep our testing plan within a manageable scope.

    • Similarly, for the Digital Portfolio project, my first round of testing was with paper prototypes. Rather than building out a fully functional digital interface for the portfolio prototype, I chose paper versions so that I wouldn't get bogged down in the form and be able to instead focus on function.