Intention of designer

The intention of the designer is what an instructional designer intends or expects to occur as a result of a person's use of or participation with an educational product or experience. The intentions of a designer include what they intend for people to learn (i.e., learning objectives), how they intend people to participate and interact, and how they expect the overall educational product and its individual design features or technologies to be used.

Definition

The intention of the designer are the specifications about an educational product and the expectations on how it should be used, how people should participate, and what effects on learning are expected as a result of using the product.

Additional Information

In any design, a design team will intentionally include features and prescribe actions that are intended to help participants achieve their goals. In the case of educational design, the goal is to encourage learning in some way (based on the learning objectives). Activities, interfaces, and aesthetics are designed with the intention that people will participate and act in a certain way that will lead to better learning.

Every activity that is placed into a learning experience by a designer should have some intentional purpose as to why it was placed there and that the activity is expected to promote a specific outcome. Even if a designer does not document these choices, every element and activity that is included in a design can be assumed to be included for a purpose and not just a random occurrence. By documenting and specifying the intentions of the designers, the product can be evaluated on whether it met these intentions or not when conducting an evaluation of real-world use cases and data.

When an educational product leaves development and is implemented and used by many people in real-world settings, it is the goal of the designers and evaluators to identify whether the product as implemented and used was to the intention of the designers. This is often referred to as fidelity of implementation (FOI) or the intended-enacted-achieved chain. It is important to understand how closely aligned the actions of implementers and participants were aligned with the expectations and intentions of the designers, as departure from the expected the intended-enacted-achieved chain can indicate areas that the product does not plan for and encourage relevant and useful activities for learning.

Tips and Tricks

• Every decision that you make as a designer should serve an intentional purpose toward helping people learn. The activities that you instruct people to do in a learning experience, the designs of the learning environment and interfaces, the media and technology that you use should all serve to promote learning.
• Your expectations and intentions may be transformed as your product gets used and implemented. Communicating your intentions clearly and having well documented instructions for how to participate in activities and perform tasks are essential to ensuring that various features of your product get used as you expect and that people interact in ways that you intended.
• Consider examining how people act within your educational product to understand how people used the product and participated in activities as you intended during the design process. What you plan and what actually happens quite often look completely differently!
• Consider measuring fidelity of implementation (FOI) if you use an external implementer to use of your product or administer it to participants (such as a teacher or facilitator). FOI measures give you an opportunity during evaluation to understand the degree to which the activities that you planned and intended were actually carried out as you intended. Departure from your intentions do not mean that a teacher was bad or wrong, but instead that your intentions were not clearly communicated, or that the teacher was required to adapt the activities to meet their specific needs for their participants.

Related Concepts

• Fidelity of implementation (FOI)
• Instructional design
• Learning objectives and outcomes
• Interactions and activities

Examples

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External Resources

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