A few days ago, as I was researching more about the practice of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), I came upon an intriguing idea related to designing for "unpredictability of use". It isn't the first time I have heard it or read about it, but this time around, I approached it with a UDL lens as a way to be more inclusive in the design of learning experiences.
Do you think about the unexpected use(s) of the learning products/ services you create? Do you imagine how your “learning product” may be reused, reshared, or remixed in serendipitous ways? In my effort to learn more about this idea of the unpredictability of use, I ventured into a few compelling reads, and here are some highlights that were uncovered from that exercise:
- "Between specificity and openness: How architects deal with
design-use complexities": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142694X19300869
Liesbeth Stam, Peter-Paul Verbeek, Ann
Heylighen, Design Studies, Volume 66, 2020, Pages 54-81, ISSN
0142-694X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2019.11.010
"Anticipating use entails a
continuous testing of solutions between specificity and openness. Seeking
a balance, these architects repeatedly ask themselves how open their design can
be, such that it can still support specific use practices (e.g., meeting
colleagues, recording or editing video's). And vice versa: how specific can
they be in imagining use such that different interpretations (e.g., by users or
the client) remain possible? These questions are explored continuously. To
foster particular social outcomes, architects develop specificity into their
designs. To deal with the unpredictability of use architects aim to create open
designs.
- "Users as co-designers: Visual–spatial experiences at
Whitworth Art Gallery": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095263519300275
Ahlam Ammar Sharif, Frontiers of
Architectural Research, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020, Pages 106-118, ISSN
2095-2635, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foar.2019.04.003
"This paper implies that
designs and users are co-created by the ways they interact, which means that
the success of designs should not be determined by how they align to specific
uses but by how they are adaptable to the multiplicity and unpredictability of
use.
Designs could be recreated by uses in
different ways, making them more livable. Designs could further uncover new
potentials because of the creativity of their usage. In the case of museums,
users could be mistakenly expected to interact with an artwork in specific
ways.
On the contrary, users bring new
potentials to the building while inviting different types of interaction.
Accordingly, designs should be adaptive to and flexible for different
categories and functions to invite more users and stimulate their creativity
with respect to the ways they interact with the building."
- “Serendipitous Reuse” IEEE-Serendipitous_Reuse.pdf (vinoski.net)
Steve Vinoski, Verivue
Steve opens his article with a powerful
quote: “Engineer for serendipity. —Roy Fielding” Taking an enterprise
architecture perspective, Steve asks:
"If we’re wise, we never assume
that serendipity will come along just in time whenever we need it. So is it really
possible, as Fielding suggests, to make a given situation more amenable to
serendipity? Is it feasible to arrange the primary elements of an area such as
enterprise integration in a way that encourages the "development of
beneficial applications that the enterprise architects never dreamed of?
The more specific the service
interface, the less likely it is to be reused, serendipitously or otherwise,
because the likelihood that an interface will fit what a client application
requires shrinks as the interface’s specificity increases.
Highly specialized interfaces inhibit
general reuse because only purpose-built clients can invoke them. Should
requirements change — and they will — modifying such highly specialized
services and clients to fulfill the new requirements can be costly because of
the high degree of coupling between them."
-.-.-.-.-
All of this is to say that there is an
important relationship between design and serendipitous use. Even though we
design things based on what we know and what we might imagine happening in the
future, it is still a lens that’s based on trying to solve the problems we are
facing now. But knowing that the future may not be anything like the present,
if we don’t design for serendipitous use and unpredictability, our designs have
failed from the get-go.
Needless to say, we can’t plan for all
possible uses. But what we can plan for is to create those opportunities and
spaces for the unpredictable to happen. Infact, I’d say that designing
for unpredictability is a critical part of designing for inclusivity.
The two key ways I have found I can do
this are to:
- involve a range of stakeholders in the design process including the
learners, and
- give learners the choice and voice in
exploring and participating in the learning experience by providing a
variety of ways to develop skills and competencies in ways that meet their
specific interests and needs. This can mean anything from simply unlocking
course navigation to more complex choices about what resources to explore
and how best to assess their own learning.
Essentially, when we design for the unpredictability
of use, we give back the learners some control of how they want to engage and
learn and more importantly, how they want to represent and express what they
have learned.
