Practice
From evidence to changed practice.
Research rarely tells us exactly what to build. Practice requires moving from observation to explanation, from evidence to judgement and from judgement into forms that survive real constraints.
How I see
Two halves of one practice
This site is built on a design system I call Atlas & Loom. The two halves are the two halves of how I work.
Atlas
Maps · terrain · contours · scale
Geography is the core of how I approach the world. It teaches you to read a place first, and to treat terrain, scale and interdependence as causes and consequences. That’s why I start with the room before the furniture, and why I read a learning space as an argument about what people are allowed to do in it. Atlas is the half that reads the terrain: the domains, and the scales the work moves across.
Loom
Weaving · networks · threads
Complexity, systems and making are all about how things hold together, and how a change in one thread turns up somewhere nobody was looking. Loom is the half I’m building now: a framework that braids futuring, complexity and ways of thinking tightly enough for a team to pick up at once. It carries both names, because a challenge that won’t hold still needs the terrain and the threads. It’s also the games and the making, where I first learned most of what I believe about designed experience.
A map shows you the terrain. A loom shows you what it’s made of, and what moves when you pull one thread. The work I find interesting needs both. So, it turns out, do the games.
Atlas
Read the terrain. The scale changes. The question stays.
System. Policy, implementation, capability, complexity and long-term change.
The designed conditions of learningDomainLoom
Cross two threads and something gets made.
C1 · Learning × Making.
Maker educationLibrary shelfThe Atlas & Loom framework
A framework for making sense of challenges that won’t hold still.
Futuring expands what could be. Complexity changes how we understand interaction. Different ways of thinking change how a situation can be framed. I’m working out how the three combine into one framework for making sense of challenges that won’t hold still.
Explore the frameworkQuestions 01 to 05 of 10
- 01 Surface the assumptionWhat must currently be believed for the present arrangement to make sense?
- 02 Change the boundaryWhat happens when we include actors, effects, or timescales currently treated as outside the problem?
- 03 Change the scaleDoes the problem look different at the learner, classroom, school, system, or societal level?
- 04 Find the feedbackWhat consequence of an action later changes the conditions that produced the action?
- 05 Read the dispositionWhat is this situation already inclined to do, without us?
In the works
Named, not yet written
Listed here so the rest of the site has no dead ends. Each one moves to its proper place when it’s worth reading.
Practice cases
- When ease of use is not ease of learning · Digital platform
- From educational principle to usable resource · Curriculum and resources
- Why a good intervention changes when it scales · System implementation
Notes
- What counts as evidence of learning? · Evidence of learning
- Completion is not competence · Evidence of learning
- Measure the change, not the state · Evidence of learning
- What dashboards cannot tell you · Evidence of learning
- Engagement is evidence of activity · Evidence of learning
- Designing questions that reveal thinking · Evidence of learning
- Why delayed measures matter · Evidence of learning
Guides
- Privacy, security and ethics · Craft guide 17, written, not yet online
- Designing learning spaces · In progress
- Using immersive media · Planned
- Designing interactive experiences · Planned
To take away
None of this is finished, the method included.
If you’ve tried one of the questions or moves on a real problem, tell me where it broke. That’s how the next version gets written.