The Pervasiveness of Design Drawing in ID

Introduction

This chapter applies a layered concept of instructional design (ID) architecture described by Gibbons and Rogers (in press) to a taxonomy of design drawings described by Stubbs (2006) to produce a refined category system for describing the use of drawing and sketching in ID. The value of doing so is dramatized by Stubbs, who compares the use of design drawing in ID to its use in other design fields, detecting a large disparity. If Stubbs’ analysis is correct, then designers in other fields have a much richer tradition of the use of drawing in design and a literature that shows a much higher level of self-awareness in the use of drawings during design than most instructional designers would expect.

Design drawing might be considered the primitive of visual instructional design languages (VIDLs). In this chapter we hope to understand where we are with this basic form of VIDL to better understand where we are going.

Though instructional designers excel in the use of drawings of many kinds in their produced designs, it would appear that they lag behind other design fields in exploiting the value of drawings and sketches while designing.

This deficit has important consequences for the economics, quality, and quantity of instructional designs. Whereas other design fields have begun to capitalize on the power of computers as a design tool, instructional designers seem to be more at the mercy of the tools and design interfaces created for use by others who have more vibrant economies, such as Web and software design. Early attempts to create tools to express designs in the instructional designer’s vernaculars appear to have been swallowed up in the success of other design fields, notably the Web and Web development tools (Fairweather & Gibbons, 2000). Only recently has interest in the authoring of learning objects revitalized interest in design interfaces that emphasize ID structures, a trend that we hope will persist and broaden.