Explore / Working propositions
Working propositions
Some ideas are useful before they are finished. A working proposition is a claim that seems coherent enough to test but premature to treat as a principle.
Publishing these makes the uncertainty explicit and creates something that can be challenged, refined, contradicted, or abandoned.
WP-01
A product becomes educational when its interaction changes what the learner must think about.
Current reasoning
Technology does not become educational simply because educational content passes through it.
The more consequential question is whether the design changes the learner’s cognitive activity: what must be retrieved, compared, explained, constructed, noticed, decided, or revised.
What would weaken this proposition?
Strong evidence that passive interaction structures regularly produce equivalent durable learning and transfer under comparable conditions.
Revision history
- v0.1 — 26 September 2026. Initial proposition.
Related Learning science (Evidence) · Interactive learning experiences (Related argument) · Principles for designing learning materials (opens in a new tab) (Operationalise it) · Concept index (Follow the concept)
WP-02
Removing friction from an interface and removing difficulty from a learning task are different design operations.
Current reasoning
Friction in an interface is effort spent on the tool: finding the button, recovering from an error, working out what state the system is in. Difficulty in a task is effort spent on the idea. The first is almost always waste. The second is often the point.
The two are routinely measured with the same instruments, such as time on task and completion rate, so a change that removes the wrong one can look like an improvement.
What would weaken this proposition?
Cases where reducing interface friction reliably reduced durable learning, which would mean the two kinds of effort cannot be separated in practice as cleanly as this claims.
Revision history
- v0.1 — 26 September 2026. Initial proposition.
Related Ease of use is not ease of learning (Related argument) · UX foundations and design systems (opens in a new tab) (Operationalise it) · Good UX removes friction (Challenge it)
WP-03
The unit of educational design should usually be larger than the digital artefact.
Current reasoning
A learner meets the interface, the task, the room, the assessment and the teacher’s workload at once. Improving one of them while the others pull the other way produces a good artefact and an unchanged lesson.
The claim is “usually”, not “always”. Some artefacts are self-contained enough to be designed alone. The difficulty is knowing which ones before the evidence comes back.
What would weaken this proposition?
A run of products designed as isolated artefacts that performed as well in varied schools as they did in testing, with no adjustment to the conditions around them.
Revision history
- v0.1 — 26 September 2026. Initial proposition.
Related The designed conditions of learning (Related argument) · Service design and systems thinking (opens in a new tab) (Operationalise it)
WP-04
A scalable intervention must specify what may change as clearly as what must remain invariant.
Current reasoning
Every school adapts what it receives. If the design does not say which parts carry the effect, the adaptations fall on whatever is easiest to change, and that is often the part doing the work.
Naming the permitted variation turns local adaptation from drift into information.
What would weaken this proposition?
Evidence that strict fidelity to every component outperforms specified adaptation across varied contexts.
Revision history
- v0.1 — 26 September 2026. Initial proposition.
Related Adoption and change in schools (opens in a new tab) (Operationalise it) · Education reform: why change is slow and what scales (opens in a new tab) (Evidence) · Successful pilots should be replicated faithfully (Challenge it)
WP-05
A group needs structures for independent thought before it can benefit fully from collective thought.
Current reasoning
The value of a group comes from the differences between its members. Open discussion from the first minute lets the first and loudest view set the frame, and the differences never surface.
Individual thinking first, written down, protects those differences long enough for the group to use them.
What would weaken this proposition?
Consistent findings that groups discussing from the outset reach decisions as good as groups that first work independently, on tasks where members hold different information.
Revision history
- v0.1 — 26 September 2026. Initial proposition.
Related Designing collective thinking (Related argument) · Nobody in the room has to be wrong (Related argument)
WP-06
The usefulness of an educational metric decreases when the metric becomes a substitute for the construct it was meant to approximate.
Current reasoning
A metric is chosen because it moves with the thing that matters. Once people are judged on the metric, they find ways to move it that do not move the thing. The number keeps rising and stops meaning anything.
This is Goodhart’s and Campbell’s point, restated for dashboards. The proposition part is the practical claim: that the decline can be spotted early by checking the metric against a slower, harder measure of the construct.
What would weaken this proposition?
Metrics that stayed valid under sustained pressure without any check against the construct.
Revision history
- v0.1 — 26 September 2026. Initial proposition.
Related Evidence of learning (Related argument) · Learning analytics (opens in a new tab) (Operationalise it) · Dashboards create visibility (Challenge it)
WP-07
The most durable output of an innovation may be the capability the organisation develops while implementing it.
Current reasoning
Tools are replaced, platforms are retired and pilots end. What stays is what people learned to do while making them work: how to run a trial, read a result, or change a routine without a mandate.
If that is true, an innovation should be judged partly on the capability it leaves behind, and designed to leave some.
What would weaken this proposition?
Evidence that capability built during one innovation rarely carries to the next, because it stays tied to the specific tool or the people who leave.
Revision history
- v0.1 — 26 September 2026. Initial proposition.
Related Design for translation (Related argument) · Ask what persists (Operationalise it) · Innovation should be novel (Challenge it)