One of the things Amy asked us to think about during our Design for Change track at Digital Pedagogy Lab was what our design principles might be. We didn’t need to have an answer, but she wanted us to start thinking about it, especially since we had begun to build our toolkit and to discuss broader questions surrounding design. Before sending us off to contemplate our personal design principles, Amy shared hers with us:

1. Indispensability
2. Togetherness
3. Embodiment
4. Wonder & Delight
5. Emergence
6. Palimpsest
7. Agency

I had no idea what my design principles might be—I wasn’t even really sure that I was a “designer.” How could I have principles for something that I didn’t think I engaged in? Or, at the very least, that I wasn’t sure I engaged in?

By the end of the week, I saw myself in a different light. I am a designer, though perhaps not in the traditional sense. A turning point for me was when I realized that my own definition of design was rather short-sighted—I didn’t consider myself a designer because I work with programs that have a pre-determined course structure, and I don’t consult with faculty as they’re creating assignments, class activities, and the like. For me, design was exclusively related to course content and after had a concrete product that you could point to, such as a syllabus or an assignment.

But during our discussion of design principles and questions, Amy told us that design doesn’t ultimately come down to creating a product—it comes down to creating an interaction. Design is crafting an interaction between students and faculty, between students and an assignment, between students and course materials, between people and ideas, and between people and technology. Design itself is an interaction, a coming together of people to create even more interaction. With this new understanding of design, I could absolutely call myself a designer.

The vast majority of my job, then, particularly with COPLACDigital, is designing interaction and helping faculty and students design their own interactions. I consult with our faculty and students to determine which digital tool(s) would be best for the research they’re trying to showcase. I help them learn how to use these tools. I help them navigate issues of web design and how they can showcase their research in a visually compelling but academic way. Thinking about each of these acts as an interaction, or a series of interactions, I’m constantly designing: designing how students communicate research and information, how students interact with and think about digital tools, how students interact with and interpret archival materials and local history. I’m designing how faculty work with each other and translate their interests into a digital space, how they learn to work with digital tools, how they help students work through research and digital issues, how they can give their students agency in learning and designing.

Now recognizing myself, as a designer, I can certainly say that I have design principles. Some of these principles are new to me, gained from Design for Change, while others are principles that have always guided my design—my interactions. My design principles are:

1. Indispensability
2. Value
3. Wonder & Delight
4. Excitement
5. Safety
6. Perpetual Beta
7. Flexibility

I’ll briefly explain each of these principles, what they mean to me, and how they guide (or will begin to guide) my work.

1. Indispensability — The idea that everyone in a learning space is indispensable. Every single person matters, and if one person is removed from the equation, it drastically changes learning. (I wrote about this idea more extensively in my last post.) I believe that seeing each person as indispensable is critical, but practically, I’m not certain as to how I can consistently implement this principle. Perhaps my following design principles will get me there.
2. Value — I think value is inherent in the idea of indispensability, but it bears repeating on its own terms. Each person and their contributions are valuable. Without them, we would lose value.
3. Wonder & Delight — These principles are self-explanatory, I think, and they are feelings that we should feel as we are designing, as well as feelings that our designs should elicit from others (not in an extracting manner, but in a realizing manner) as they experience our designs.
4. Excitement — This principle is also self-explanatory, but I want to explain why I included it as a principle separate from Wonder & Delight. Excitement is something that I have experienced for years as I’ve interacted with digital tools, with research and archival materials, and with anything that I’ve created, and it is what keeps me coming back to the things that I do, whether those things are creating websites with WordPress or with knitting baby blankets. Excitement is an essential part of the design process, and it leads me to want to share my designs and experiences with others—with the hope that they, too, might experience excitement.
5. Safety — Safety means different things for me, and each of those meanings is encompassed in this principle.
   • Safety means a space where students and faculty have control over their digital identities and their data. They should be able to critically question each tool they use, and they should be able to take measures to protect themselves (using a pseudonym, etc.).
   • Safety means a space where students and faculty feel comfortable with experimenting, and most importantly, with failing. So often, I have students and faculty with high levels of technological apprehension who are afraid to do almost anything in digital spaces without having a set of very detailed instructions. They are afraid to try something for fear of “messing up” or failing, or they are afraid to publish any work because it’s still a work-in-progress. I want my students and faculty to feel that the spaces we ask them to work in are “safe” spaces, where they can experiment and fail. And when they do fail, they know that it is okay—that failing is part of the learning and the design process.
6. Perpetual Beta — This principle is related to my second definition of safety, and is one that my good friend and colleague Jerry talks about. It’s akin to Amy’s principle of palimpsest: that something can be altered or used for a different purpose, but traces of the original work remain. The idea of a “perpetual beta” is similar: our work, our designs, are never in their final form. They are always in progress, in a state of perpetual beta, because our world (and technology) is constantly changing, and so too, must our designs. Who we design for is constantly evolving, so our designs must do the same.
7. Flexibility — Flexibility is what I was looking for when I came to DPL and began Design for Change, so it’s something that I hope I can carry into my future designs and can help others design. Like indispensability, I think the rest of my design principles will help myself and others design with flexibility in mind.

The 4-day course that I participated in at Digital Pedagogy Lab was Amy Collier’s Design for Change course, and I chose it with the hope that it would help me find flexibility in the fairly strict course structures that I work with (and, in doing so, help me help others find that same flexibility). Amy’s course seemed like the perfect melding of my interests, work, and what I hoped to gain:

Participants in this course will explore and experiment with ways to bring positive change to educational institutions and to our world by engaging critically with digital tools, spaces, and practices.

We would also come out of the course with a toolkit to help us makes these positive changes, and I particularly liked the idea of having a toolkit as a concrete takeaway from the week. What I gained from the course, however, ended up being so much more than flexibility and a toolkit.

First I want to backtrack, though, and give a brief overview of the course structures in which my faculty and I operate. Part of my job involves working as the administrative assistant for UMW’s FSEM (first-year seminar) program. Our FSEM is tied to our Quality Enhancement Plan (a plan that we have to have and execute in order to be reaccredited), so with that comes all of the requirements of the QEP: learning outcomes, learning modules in Canvas, and the sacrifice of content to make room for skills development. The FSEM has a fairly limiting structure, especially for faculty who see the FSEM more as an opportunity to teach interesting content to students (which, at its inception back in the mid-2000s, was actually what the FSEM was for). Due to the demands of the QEP, many of our FSEM faculty now feel severely limited in what they can teach, and they suffer from FSEM burnout.

The other curricular program that I’m involved in is COPLACDigital. In many ways, it is much freer than the FSEM—it isn’t confined to our LMS, there aren’t modules that students have to complete, and we provide a fairly open space (WordPress multisite) for students and faculty to work in. However, COPLACDigital is grant-funded with very specific parameters, which means there are certain components that every single course must cover—meaning our COPLACDigital faculty also have to make some content sacrifices. Morever, as open as WordPress is (especially compared to an LMS), it still has its limitations. Some of those limitations are inherent, but many of them are ones that we (COPLACDigital) have placed upon it, whether practical, for security, or due to past precedent. So, while our COPLACDigital courses are much less restrictive than UMW’s FSEMs, they still come with limitations that can be difficult for our faculty and students to navigate.

In addition to FSEMs and COPLACDigital courses being restrictive to faculty and students, I myself feel limited by these structures, especially when someone comes to me with an idea that doesn’t fit with the predetermined format. For all of these reasons, I hoped that Amy’s course would help me, my faculty, and our students find freedom and flexibility in what we do.

Looking back, I can definitively say that I found the flexibility I was looking for. More than anything, Amy gave us all space. Space in which to think, to critically reflect, to appreciate (ourselves, our faculty, our students, and each other), to learn, and to develop. We all finally had time—four whole days—to think about how we approach design, and I think this time allowed us to free ourselves from the thought channels that we typically travel. And with that time and reflective space Amy gave us, we found our own space—and for me, with that space came flexibility and freedom.

In these new channels, we found questions and values to guide our design. The ones that resonated with me the most are:

1. Design as if everyone is indispensable.

This notion of indispensability really struck me in a way that I can’t adequately put words to. In a small group with Lindsay and Cathie, we discussed the notion of indispensability and how it can help break the mold that our institutions and courses are stuck in. It injects an intimate, human element into our curriculum that so often seems missing, and it does away with the monotone buzzwords that we all hear: “student-centered,” “accessible,” etc. In forcing us to see all our of students as indispensable, this notions asks a central question:

2. For whom are we designing?

This question is ongoing, and thus must be constantly addressed. And the answer is always evolving—it is not simply, “our students.” The answer is really a set of more specific questions: Who are our students—who are they really? Are they working moms? First-generation college students? Veterans? Full-time students? What is their race? Religion? Ethnicity? Gender? Sexual orientation? What challenges does each of them face, day in and day out? What makes them who they are? What do they need?

Thinking about the indispensability of whomever we are designing for, whatever they need, seemed to grant everyone (designer, faculty member, student) agency—if we think about what each individual person needs as we design, we can give them so many more opportunities than if we just designed for a generic person or group. And with this recognition of indispensability and the granting of agency, we suddenly empower ourselves and our faculty members and our students. We’re suddenly designing and working in spaces where everyone matters and everyone is valued. Where if one person is taken out of the equation, no matter who that person is, then our space and learning experience is drastically altered.

At the end of Amy’s course, I felt connected to and valued by everyone else in my track—but more importantly, I felt value in myself. Seeing everyone else as indispensable meant that I could see myself that way as well—an invaluable part of the design process, and someone with the power and ability to help faculty and students find their own agency. Looking back, I think Amy wonderfully modeled what she was hoping we could all do after DPL. She was our leader, and she asked difficult questions of us. She gave us general guidelines, a flexible structure within which to work, and here and there she shared her own operating principles with us. But overall, she let us guide the track and determine what would be most useful for us. She treated each of us as if we were indispensable, and in so doing, she gave us the ability to see ourselves, our faculty, and our students that way as well.