Some of the participants, learning the visual alphabet from Dave Gray
I’m going to make what I anticipate is a bold statement: If you’re reading this, you have little or no training in the process of design.
Don’t get me wrong. You may have a degree in instructional design. You may have participated in a number of workshops, webinars, and conference sessions on instructional design over the years. You may have read books on learning theory and taken courses to develop your proficiency with authoring software. But if you’ve read the same books, gone to the same workshops, and yes, even have the same degree that I have, you have learned few processes for working out creative solutions to problems.
And don’t feel bad… Frankly, until this last weekend, I hadn’t either. That’s not to say that you and I aren’t good designers, but I’ve now realized how much of that is probably due to natural talent and hard-won experience, rather than a full toolbelt of design techniques. The more I read books by and talk to designers in other fields, the more I realize that all of them, through their culture and/or formal education, do have these tools. They’ve learned them, developed them, continue to refine them. That isn’t really part of the education of most instructional designers, whether formal or informal.
But something happened this last weekend to change that. The first Up to All of Us, an unconference geared toward design in learning, technology, and society, took place in Sedona, AZ. Designers from several fields, primarily learning, gathered to think, sketch, play, learn, brainstorm, bodystorm, and design some wicked problems and even more wicked solutions. I’m happy to have helped create some new directions, but I’m even happier to have come away with some new ways to look at problems and start to creatively unravel them. I feel like I’m always telling our industry what it needs more of — in a sense, that’s how I choose the books for Well Read — but I hope this message comes across as a positive one. Because I’m learning more and more every day that what we need already exists; they just exist in different disciplines. We can learn those, adapt them, improve them for our use.
There’s so much to be shared from Up to All of Us, so I’m grateful that David Kelly has included it in his conference backchannel posts. And as resulting projects get launched and calls for help with projects go out, you will hear about every single one of them here, too.
Thank you to Aaron Silvers for conceiving and organizing — or, as he has said, summoning this event, and thank you to all of the people I was lucky enough to connect with. We’re going to build ships together. Great. Big. Ships.
Photo credit: jaycross on Flickr
Update: Jay Cross has published an outstanding list of the actual activities we did, games we played, and things we learned about on his blog. Definitely check it out.
