Comments on: Refining Designing

By: Impactful decisions - The Upside Learning Blog

Impactful decisions - The Upside Learning Blog — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 09:02:48 +0000

[…] to design to develop those capabilities. We should be designing the complements to our brain, and then developing our learning interventions. Doing it right is important! That means using models (see […]

By: Denise Littlefield

Denise Littlefield — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:26:05 +0000

I think your focus on the Performance Resource is key. part of the learning experience should be about making the best use of the resource. Also, designing the resource so it is integral to the performance. Eventually a grocery store cashier will remember the product #s for most of the fruits and vegetables, but in the training and in the early experience, they need to focus more on how to ring up the item correctly, not memorize the product #. Thus, the look up screens on the registers. And everyone will run into vegetables or fruits that are rare at the register.

By: Dave Ferguson

Dave Ferguson — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 23:38:57 +0000

With regard to human performance technology, I’d agree on the general idea of working backwards: you begin with the gap between optimals and actuals (as Allison Rossett put it); you look for possible causes in the area of information, tools, and incentives (on both the individual and the organizational level), and you look for evidence of those causes before you decide, well, looks like a Training Problem.

I don’t know that I’d say “we have to create what’s in the world” so much as “we need to provide it, or a really good equivalent.” This is a bit of a quibble, but I am more and more leery of the self-regard that some designers have: they’re sure they can reproduce everything necessary, instead of using things that already exist.

I know you well enough to realize this isn’t your intention; I’m just skeptical about “creating” what’s in the world. On most days, I’d be delighted to come reasonably close to a believable approximation of a meaningful chunk of what’s in the world.

Otherwise, you end up with yet another simulation that spins its wheels recreating inconsequentials, the way a lot of office-building metaphors forced people to go through imaginary doors and ride on imaginary elevators before sitting at imaginary desks and opening imaginary drawers.

Surely somewhere there’s someone looking for his imaginary stapler.