The perfect design

I am currently working on developing a learning solution for adults in a corporate workplace, to help them build a sense of purpose, and drive motivation and engagement in the workplace. The primary motivation to pursue this was my personal experience with the problem and the idea of implementing a specific solution that was effective for me - coaching.

As for any learning design process, I began by analysing the current reality and identifying the needs of my target users. I scheduled interviews with my target users to understand what purpose meant to them, their thoughts about coaching and so on. To my surprise, not one of my end users felt that coaching was a practical solution. This left me disappointed because I was convinced that coaching was the right solution to the problem. I realised that I was trying to fit the problem, the users and their needs into a solution that I had designed.

In the end, our approach amounts to wild creativity, to a ceaseless push to innovate, and a confidence that leads us to solutions we’d never dreamed of when we started. - The Field Guide to Human-Centred Design

This is where Human-Centred Design(HCD) comes into play. What interests me about this framework is its intentional focus on mindsets and not just processes. There are two key mindsets that stand out to me in HCD. The first is empathy - 'How do we understand our users and what matters to them?'. In the context of my problem, one of the first and most difficult things I had to do was to remove myself from the equation. This allowed me to focus on the problem instead of a solution and approach my users with empathy.

In order to get to new solutions, you have to get to know different people, different scenarios, different places. —Emi Kolawole, Stanford University d.school (The Field Guide to Human-Centred Design)

Another key aspect of HCD is the focus on learning from failure. Initially, this sounded like generic advice, but the deeper I delved into my problem, the more valuable this sounded. In my case, the number of stakeholders was so large, and every end-user I spoke to seemed to have a different need, making the situation complex. When I thought of solutions, I came up with a list of twenty and none of them seemed to be 'the right one'. Before I get into what this means for learning design, I'll share something that surprised me recently. A few weeks back, I attended a talk in which the founders of Pratham, a successful NGO in India, shared their journey in bridging the education inequity in India. During the session, they said, "We spent 5 years solving the wrong problem" and this changed the way I looked at problem-solving.

Connecting it back to design, I realised that discovering one perfect solution is not always feasible while solving a problem. Especially in learning design, as the definition of learning itself has shifted, the only way to design something close to perfect is to continuously evaluate, improve and iterate.