Dr. Matt Brown - Inquirium, LLC: Designing to Support Learning Beyond the Lifespan of a Grant

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Humans of Learning Sciences. I'm your host, Dr. Monlin Monacoco. The Learning Sciences is an interdisciplinary field that studies and supports learning and classrooms, after school clubs, museums, and the outdoors. And while the learning scientists are united in their central commitment to trying to understand learning, there is a great diversity in how we do that work, and even in how we define learning. This podcast tries to take stock of and amplify these diverse perspectives. Our conversations will go beyond what you see on a website profile, CV, or scholarly publications. We want to dig deeper and understand the person who is behind the work. We'll ask questions like, what experiences formed your view of learning? How do you conceive of the learning sciences? And where do you think the field needs to go next? As your host, I'll be learning right along with you through these conversations and hope that they inspire even more dialogue about what it means to study and support learning. Join me on the Humans of Learning Sciences podcast. (upbeat music) Our final episode of season one of Humans of Learning Sciences is with Dr. Matt Brown. Matt is a co-director and aquarium, a design company that works collaboratively with clients to identify learning goals, and then develop custom learning environments and solutions to meet those goals. Inquiry must taken on vastly different projects, from designing exhibits at museums, to developing data visualizations that help teachers track student growth. As you'll find out in today's conversation, InquiryM's approach to tackling these transdisciplinary multimodal problems is grounded in part in Matt's experience as a learner, as a teacher, as well as training as a learning scientist. He talks about how products that are built through grant funded projects are often fantastic, but typically lack that final 10% of refinement and polish that can make 90% of the difference in terms of long term uptake. We also talk about the scariness of starting a company with other burgeoning learning scientists at a time when the field was brand new and how they distinguish themselves from other design firms with their focus on learning. And, at the same time, also adopt the existing practices and workflows from other disciplines like architecture to streamline and refine their own work. You won't want to miss this one, especially if you love the work of design and are looking for a non-academic position in which to use your skill set. We'd love to hear about your reactions and takeaways from our first season and also how we can improve this podcast. Our email is humans [email protected]. Design-based research or DBR is a hallmark of the learning sciences and yet, the messy, uncertain, and emergent nature of the design process is seldom discussed and published. In their book, "Design a Scholarship" case studies from the learning sciences, the Necessvilla and Richard Reefright. Traditionally, published works have been sanitized to mask the design early complexity of the work that we do. This provides not only a poor example of how we do our work, but further may discourage scholars with promising ideas from pursuing them. These unrealistic portrayals of brilliant science being carried out brilliantly provides little source of inspiration for others to build on. In today's conversations, I get to talk to someone who's been steeped in the work of design and get a glimpse into what happens, quote, "under the hood." Dr. Matt Brown is the director of Inquerium LLC, a design company that focuses on developing educational technologies to support learning. Matt and his colleagues at Inquerium draw on their experiences as teachers, researchers, technologists, and importantly, learning scientists to their work. As they design tools, exhibits, and products with a razor sharp focus on the learning objectives they wish to accomplish through their designs. Welcome to the Humans of Learning Sciences podcast, Matt. Glad to be here. Matt, can you tell me a little bit about how you became interested in studying and designing for learning? Were you always aware of sort of how you were learning and what you were learning as you headed into the learning sciences? Well, I was brought up in a context where love of learning was always at the forefront. I'm a product of a John Dewey inspired progressive education in my elementary and high school days that always prioritized Inquery and Curiosity. But I think in addition to that, I've always been kind of interested in just my own process of learning. And from a really young age, we always found myself aware of how my mind was working in both in terms of cognition and consciousness. And that predates any involvement that I had as a teacher. But I think it's probably what inclined me to head towards education. So as a teacher, what subjects did you teach? And where did you teach? I was a history teacher. And I entered education actually through the back door. I had no experience taking any education classes as an undergraduate. But I did start out working with a summer program that put high school and college-age students as both the teachers and administrators of an academic program for at-risk middle schoolers. And the program was all about the premise of put some exciting fun and interesting high school and college-age students in a classroom with these middle school students and create a fun learning environment that also supports the development of study skills. And that helps those middle schoolers get applied to competitive high school programs. Programs called summer bridge. It's now called the Breakthrough Collaborative. And it has a dual mission of turning young kids onto learning and then older kids onto teaching. And so that's how I got into teaching. I wound up through summer bridge getting a job as an independent school teacher, a place that didn't require that I had an educational degree. And then even in my professional development time, I was always kind of urged by mentors to sort of stay away from the traditional educational methods classes that they're in this sort of innovative, progressive world of ed reform that I was aligned with, that I would be much better off sort of following my own, instincts and guide. But at the same time, teaching is incredibly difficult. There are certainly practices and processes that really certainly do help the development of becoming a professional teacher. And also, I think regardless of whether I had had educational background or not, me and my colleagues, really, I mean, even though we were teaching kids and getting good results, there was always this kind of mystery as to what was happening. When kids succeeded, when they failed, what were the causes and factors of that? Learning was really just a black box. You could create evaluations and assessments where maybe you'd kind of see if the kids were succeeding or failing, but you really didn't know why. And you really didn't know what was going on there. And so I think that this was one of the things that-- and this is true both of me as well as teachers who had gone through formal education training. And this is one of the things that kind of got me curious about that. And also, when I was a young teacher in the mid '90s, these were the early days of the internet, I think I was still on AOL dial up at the time. And you had President Bill Clinton talking about, let's put every kid on the internet. And many of us were like, doing what? What is the goal here? Like what's the educational aim? What are we trying to accomplish in terms of teaching and learning that we can't currently do? What are the affordances of using technology in the classroom and how is it going to support learning? Not new learning goals, but even traditional learning goals. You also had a lot of schools buying huge amounts of computers that were sitting locked up in a computer lab down the hall. If you were lucky, you could book it for one day a week maybe. By the time you got the kids assembled, got down the hall, got them set up, got them logged in. You maybe had 15 minutes left to actually do anything. None of it was integrated within the curriculum. And so after a couple of years of doing that, I was kind of faced with a position where I was being tapped by my school to become this new thing called a technology coordinator. Again, without the conversations happening school wide about what are our learning goals and what are we trying to accomplish with the new technology. So I sort of saw myself as being tapped to basically fix printers and help teachers who learn how to use a mouse. Or I could go to grad school and learn a little bit more about not just what are these mysteries of the learning process, but also how can we use new tools to unlock them. When you pursued a degree in the learning sciences, you were an early cohort, so to speak, right, in the learning sciences. Was it what you expected in terms of the reasons why you were entering into a program? And are there any sort of highlights in terms of experiences that you had during graduate school that you still think back on to this day? Even though I was sort of in the earlier days of learning sciences, I would describe myself as part of the second wave, where the initial wave were a lot of people with computer science backgrounds, maybe in some cases, design backgrounds, who were interested in education. And I was an educator interested in learning more about the technology. And so I think in my program at the learning sciences, there was one person who was a year ahead of me who had been a teacher before, and but really in my year was the first group of people who had school-based experience. So I think one of the goals of bringing in people like me was that it's one thing to develop a really cool educational tool built on great ideas about learning. But if it's not designed in a way that fits with teacher practices and with the culture and lifecycle of school, then it's just not going to get used. So you can have a great idea that could work outside of a school context, and a lot of the stuff that was being developed was like that, sort of like, let's blow up the schools and start fresh. There also was a group of people with the focus of like, OK, well, let's work within schools. But that means thinking about teacher learning. It means thinking about how classrooms are structured and how class days are structured, how professional development happens within schools. So I was really focused on teacher learning and understanding teacher practices. And in particular, as we were designing really cool educational software, how could we use that to support teacher practices and how could we develop educative curriculum? Yeah, that's really interesting thinking about learning sciences from multiple angles, like from the technology angle, the computer science angle, from the school-based teacher student angle. I think there's also another angle, which is sort of the informal work. And it feels like they all kind of push on each other, right? And all of these different perspectives inform this really rich perspective on how learning happens. I think I was drawn to the classroom, just because that's where I had really blood and sweat and really sort of cut my own teeth as an educator. Ultimately, what I wanted to do was to build tools and curriculum that impacted classrooms. And I think that's what was most exciting for me about getting involved in the learning sciences program at Northwestern is that I was actually building a software and curriculum. I wanted to develop curriculum and global climate change using GIS software that was based on professional GIS software, but was designed with the kinds of added supports and scaffolds that students required. And so it was sort of a learner-oriented and teacher-oriented GIS tool, along with a project-based curriculum that was actually using inquiry techniques to explore real world problem. But again, not all classrooms were set up to just drop everything into a six to eight week immersive classroom project. So over time, there was also a lot of thinking about, OK, how does this fit with standards and how do you break it up within smaller modules that might fit what teachers are already doing? So we learned a lot over the course of that time, but I think that's what I like the most about that kind of work. What you're describing, sort of technology pushing up against the infrastructure of schooling and trying to not say, well, that's an afterthought, but rather like how do we, at the outset, think about how learning plays out and what the constraints are and then think about how the design fits within that framework. Yeah, it's a push and a pull, because on one hand, you're trying to change the situation, but on the other hand, you also need to work within those constraints. Yeah. And I can imagine that other people who-- I guess it depends on sort of your take on things, like you can either work within the system where you can try to break the system and it feels like technology at times has tried that second sort of approach to kind of just break everything apart. But I'm curious, if during graduate school, as you were doing all of this design work, if you were ever just thinking about kind of like claims or propositions about what the lever is for the change, is it from a technology angle, do you start with a teacher learning piece, do you start with a design of the curriculum materials? I'm curious if you were thinking about that and trying to figure out which of these entry points would be maybe the most efficient path or the most productive path in terms of trying to change the kind of learning that happens in schools. One thing that struck me, as I was in grad school, is that the kinds of learning that we were trying to support or the kind of should say more the kinds of educational principles, project-based learning, inquiry, student-driven work, these were nothing new. I mean, these had been around going back to John Dewey and probably even before then. What was new was that we had a new medium, a new opportunity and everyone was getting involved in using technology. And so it was a great way to think about re-envisioning classrooms in ways that could further support these schools. Because these are the kinds of things that were always difficult to do. Maybe technology can help us do it in new ways or maybe technology was just our opportunity to revisit our practices. And so it was kind of almost like a Trojan horse for just inserting ideas about progressive education and project-based learning. So I think in many ways, they were age-old educational questions just with a new medium. But at the same time, technology was changing things in a very particular way. I mean, one of the models that one of my faculty mentors always would use was that if you want to understand something, you got to change it. And I think that was really part of the enterprise, which is that we could learn new things about how kids learned and about how teachers taught by shaking things up. You shake up the boggled box, the letters fall in a completely new different way, and you see new patterns. And so I think that the technology really was a great opportunity to just explore age-old questions about teaching and learning to answer the other part of your question about where the opportunity really was. I think that you could answer that in a number of different ways. Yes, thinking about new modes for student learning was obviously at the core of everything. But for me, it was teachers who were creating the learning environments. And so I just saw that as being the place where I was best suited to impact classrooms through teacher practices. And in particular, teachers are learning not just to use a new technology, so it's a new tool. So there's a dexterity in using the web or a GIS tool. But you're also exposing new ways of thinking about students as learners, which teachers may not have considered. Sure some did, but some never really thought of what it really meant to have a student directed classroom or guided inquiry. What did guided inquiry mean if you're doing project based learning? Does that mean that everything is 100% up to the students or does it mean that you're sort of their steering things in a certain way? Or if some teachers view it as like, well, I'm still the authority. And so I'm just going to use these tools to kind of keep doing what I've been doing. So for me, the thinking about teacher practice, there was the learning that was involved, the rethinking of your practices. That was really kind of like the rich opportunity that I liked diving into. So after you've finished graduate school, having had all these rich experiences, what were you hoping to focus your efforts on? What were you sort of entertaining as a next step in your career as a learning scientist? I would say that question began while I was in grad school, both for me and for a lot of my cohort. I mean, the coolest part about what we were doing is that we were building products that could be used in the classroom. And we were doing that alongside design research. But at the same time, there really weren't that many academic departments doing the kind of work we were doing. I mean, Northwestern had a pretty innovative program. And there were others around the country, but not a ton. And even so, the incentive structure for entering into a tenure track professor position was still based around publishing papers. And getting tenure. And more so in the education departments where we were aligned, more so that than say, for example, building a portfolio of design work that might have been more established in other design fields, such as architecture. So ultimately, that track is focused on getting tenure. And so there's always going to be that tension about the amount of time that you spend building your tools and making your change and doing your ed reform versus the amount of time you had to spend publishing. The other thing is that the products that we were building were awesome, but they often lacked that final 10% of refinement and polish that can really make 90% of the difference in terms of teacher uptake. And so we oftentimes saw products wither on the vine once the grant cycle ended. And so many of us were considering what other paths were there outside of the academy, and where we could continue building products that impacted classrooms, and then also followed these learning sciences principles about teaching and learning. So that's really where Inquiry came from. It was a group of learning sciences students who wanted to continue designing and building cool research driven tools, but doing it outside of the academy. So it was kind of a bootstrap process. We all finished at different times. I was personally-- I was the baby of the group. There were people like three and four years ahead of me that were involved. And initially, after any of some of us started out as postdocs, I started out as a postdoc at UIC, Eric Baumgartner. One of my partners was doing a postdoc at Berkeley. And Cole Pinkard was doing a postdoc design research position at University of Chicago. Ben Lowe got a job in the Ed Department at the Brookfield Zoo. And Brian Smith was another founder who went on to the MIT Media Lab. So we were doing-- some of us were doing this stuff alongside of our other gigs. And we were building up some Inquiry and projects here and there. Ultimately, it became a full-time gig for Eric Ben and Ming while Nicole and Brian continued on the professorial track. I did interview for a couple tenure track positions, but ultimately, I think my heart wasn't really in that. I think I really was much more interested in a place. But this was also in a field that didn't exist. So we're creating a company in this educational technology design, but really coming at it from this bleeding edge research perspective. There weren't a lot of us out there. In fact, there were almost none of us out there. And so it was a real risk. But I think we kind of tentatively had our feet planted, at least in these other positions, until we were sure that Inquiry and could really support us. How would you distinguish the design work that you wanted to do or that you aspired to do from the kind of design work, whether that was in learning or education or elsewhere? What do you think was the thing that you all had wanted to focus on? What was missing at that point that you all wanted to get started? There were a lot of people building a software of all times, such as educational software and websites. But what they lacked was the learning science's perspective. So you had, for example, textbook publishers, which were probably the one entity that was out there that was already selling stuff to educational institutions like schools. They had the sales force. But at the time, the technology was really built around supporting their main sales product, which is textbooks. So there would be ancillary technologies that would help them sell more textbooks. Maybe those CD-ROMs that you would get in the back of the textbook. And so what was missing there was the learning science's approach towards learning, towards teaching, towards inquiry. And we felt that we had that value added. And we could bring that perspective to the table. And in addition, a lot of education departments didn't necessarily have the same technological expertise. So a lot of us coming out of Northwestern had either before Northwestern or maybe developed at Northwestern. And so if you look in the ed world, you saw maybe a lack of design and production capacity. And if you look at the existing design and production world, which is basically textbooks, you saw, I think, a lack of that sort of innovative educational thinking and research mindset. So I think that's where we sort of positioned ourselves as being, on one hand, technologists, but on the other hand, cutting-edge researchers and hopefully bringing those two together. That's great. Now you are the co-director at InquiryM, which is a design company that really takes on a range of really fascinating projects with a focus on designing to support learning. Can you tell me a little bit about the structure of the company and then also the ways in which you work with clients? I'm a co-director, along with Venlo and Eric Baumgardner, who are the two other active principles. And we work on projects together, but we also will, you know, each sort of spearhead an effort, you know, and so in some cases, we're working sort of independently from each other and relying on each other for advice and additional insight. In some cases, we're working collaboratively. We work exclusively with education and nonprofit organizations. You know, we've had opportunities to work in a business sector, but that's not really what our company ethos and mission are. So we're really-- and it's not where we're interested in having an impact. So we really focus really on education and nonprofit organizations. And you know, that includes museums and zoos, especially more so in the early days. I think these days, we ultimately have drifted more towards educational partnerships with the universities. Ultimately, those are two very different fields in terms of the way they operate. The conferences that you go to to meet people. But definitely some of our most interesting stuff developed through the museum and informal learning world, a lot of our stuff these days, is really K-12 classroom-based projects that we do with universities. They materialize in all kinds of ways. We've never actively had to hunt for work, fortunately. People have sought us out. And we've always had sort of like a full dance card. So we haven't had to dig too far away from our core mission, which is very-- I consider ourselves very lucky in that regard. Sometimes we are approached by partners who already have funding, and they're working on a project, trying to improve learning in some way. And they need somebody to work with who can help them reach their goals, help them design something, or build something. And so they will either solicit us directly, or we'll ask us to reply to an RFP. In other cases, we work with partners on actually developing grant applications. Sometimes we've been co-PI's, and other times we're just subcontractors on the grant. Our involvement really can range from the earliest stages of ideation all the way to the delivery of finished products. That includes early state idea development, needs analysis, and goal refinement, helping people articulate their learning goals, and help them maybe also do technology feasibility to figure out what's the best kind of technology to use, and what's the best educational approach to adopt in terms of the overall learning environment, to we actually do full-on design work. And that includes everything from user experience design, visual design, user interfaces, mock-ups, prototypes, story development, all that kind of stuff. And then we do production and development. So we will run production teams, and we will also do a lot of development ourselves. But we put together oftentimes specialized teams for specific projects. Everything is highly iterative. We get new clients all the time. However, we've also developed some really long-term relationships. And when I say really long-term, I mean really long-term, so some of our clients date back more than 20 years to the early inception of InquiryM. And maybe we haven't worked together every year throughout them, but they'll come back to us when they're ready for another round of something, but we get new clients all the time. One of the projects that you took on was an exhibit called Take a Stand at the Illinois Holocaust Museum. It was a few years back, but I'm curious at what stage in the design process in QuiryM entered in. And what kind of learning objectives you all had for that particular exhibit? What kinds of interactions do you want to encourage amongst the museum, the museum goers, and just a little bit about the design process? Yeah, that's one of my favorite projects this day. The Illinois Holocaust Museum actually was founded originally as a tiny little storefront, I believe, on Church Street and Skokie in response to the Nazi marches that happened in Skokie. I believe it was in the '70s. And this was a group of Holocaust survivors who created the Museum and Education Center as a place to begin educating people about the Holocaust. And it was an appointment only place that you could bring field trips. It was literally in a non-descript strip mall that you could drive right past and not even notice. And we got involved as they were beginning to develop a brand new world-class museum and facility. There were Holocaust museums in Washington, D.C., in Jerusalem. And they felt that really Skokie, given the place that it has played historically in terms of awareness of the Holocaust in the United States, really deserved a world-class institution. So the project was really being developed. I think one of the early spear headers was our current governor, J.B. Pritzker. And Stanley Tigerman was a world-famous architect who was creating this building. So we got on as they were developing that museum. And we were in touch with them the number of different mechanisms ultimately wound up partnering with a museum consultant who they had brought in to help them build together teams of exhibit designers and people particularly around the Youth Education Center. So there was the main exhibit, which was a more traditional Holocaust exhibit. And then the founders of the museum, the board members, the survivors who were aging, really cared deeply about this Youth Education Center in terms of what they wanted to teach. And so their goal was to teach kids about the universal, what they call the universal lessons of the Holocaust. These were not historical facts about the number of people that were killed or the specific historical context that gave rise to Nazism. It was about noticing when something unjust was happening and speaking out, not being a bystander, not letting it happen, even when it was difficult, things like that. And so they weren't interested in teaching young kids about the historical aspects of the Holocaust. It was maybe a little young for that. People felt like people under the age of 12 maybe was a little sort of shocking to dive into those historical details. And so people would just avoid it. But they felt that there was a lot to be taught about these universal lessons. And so that was really the mission that we had. That was like the charge that we were given. So we worked with this museum consultant plus some-- actually a team that included some Disney Imagineers and other museum design people to kind of try and figure out what kind of experience could we create that could help kids learn these kinds of lessons in a meaningful way in the context of a museum, where you don't have a ton of time. So we started with really story development. And thinking about what are the different ways you could explore these things? The bread and butter for the museum for this youth center was really field trips. Ultimately, I think we arrived at some kind of social simulation as being really the most powerful way to experience that. But at the same time, how do you build a social simulation that explores these rich challenging issues? And also do it in a way that didn't emotionally damage kids. So we then turned it into a game. And we created a physically interactive museum experience where kids entered into this space that was an imaginary space. It was a lily pond in a sort of swampy area where there's frogs swimming around this lily pond, jumping on and off the lily pads, and eating flies. And we created a game experience where kids would get quickly immersed and they would, it was touch free. So you'd move around and as you moved as you entered the space, there were these motion trackers and the ceiling that would identify you as an entity. But then there were these virtual objects on the screen. So you could walk up to one of those virtual objects and we'd sort of pair them. And you would become one of those frogs. And as you moved around, the frog would follow your motions through the space. And everything was projected on a giant 25 foot screen. And so you and maybe three or four other students would be controlling these frogs. There were some computer controlled frogs also. And you'd jump on a lily pond and eat flies. And as you did this, you got this really rewarding score. Like you get this-- yeah, I got more flies and you try to get as many flies as you possibly could. And then also these other frogs would come in. And they'd start harassing the computer controlled frogs that you were sharing a space with. So they wouldn't harass you directly. They would harass these computer controlled frogs. I think you were a green frog and maybe you were a gold frog and the computer control ones are red. And so you'd see that they're different and see that you could either, that they were being harassed. Now, if you decided to intervene, you could actually get in the way of these bully frogs. And I think they flared up and then they would run into the AI frogs and then you'd hear a yell. And so it was a negative, a bit of a negative experience. You could get in the way, in which case, the bully frogs would now start harassing you. But eventually, they would go away. So it was kind of like this rich series of interactions, which really mapped so much to the historical context. So you saw that these other people were being impacted. You could choose to not do anything. In which case, you got more flies, but actually eventually, you lose the game. It's eventually the bully frogs would take over the entire space. Or you could intervene, which had short-term consequences. You put yourself out there. You would get harassed. But eventually, they'd swim off and you'd actually win the game because there'd be more flies for everybody. And so a very rich experience and no two games were the same. So this one of being a docent facilitated experience. So the docent would give a brief introduction. You'd walk in, you'd play the game. And then you'd come out, and they'd lead a quick discussion. One of the big constraints you have in informal learning is you get people's attention for a very short amount of time. And the things that we were teaching were very deep. We were exploring this allegorical experience. So we had to tweak the simplicity of the game and the simplicity of the lessons you could come out with versus how much time was the museum interested in supporting the field trips and how much time would kids get in the space and how much docent facilitation would happen. So really, it was best done with a docent facilitation, where you could play the game, have a discussion, and go back in and play it again. We had never built anything like this before. And in fact, for all of our projects, we're completely technology agnostic. We choose the technology that fits the situation, not the technology that we happen to have the most experience with. But we put together teams. In this case, we hired a programmer who had game design experience. We farmed out minor jobs to programmers who had experience with the particle physics of games. We did a lot of the design work ourselves. We learned how to do 3D modeling of frog skeletons in order to get realistic behaviors and did a lot of the art development on our own. And one of my partner's bends has an art background. It was definitely a trial by fire, but it created something that had never existed before. And we wanted our experience to be something that would give kids a direct experience of taking a stand, dealing with bullies. And if you look at the kids' experience at the DC Museum, it was based on Daniel's story, which is basically experiencing the historical Holocaust, but from the perspective of the young kid. So that was your way of insulating kids from a lot of the more traumatic parts of the history. We took a completely different approach, created something that hadn't been done before. And it was so much fun. So you were talking earlier about scaling down these big overarching goals, because in some way, the constraints are that this is an exhibit at a museum that the museum goers will interact with for maybe on the order of minutes. I'm curious how you took these big, big goals and scaled them down to things that were appropriate for sort of the magnitude of experience that you would have at the six of it. I think the guiding force behind any productive design process is constraints. And constraints are ultimately what are running up against all these crazy, wonderful, ambitious things you want to do, but they're also a designer's best friend. Because it's through the process of evaluating your constraints and your force to really hone what you're trying to do. And so I think I can't point to any one situation, but I know we had a number of different ideas on the drawing board, but we were constantly sort of running it through the constraint gauntlet to see how could this actually work within the setting. So there were a lot of ideas that we had that just sort had never made it sort of left on the cutting floor. But ultimately, the idea of constraints is something that we explicitly negotiated with our clients. So there were partners in this process. And so we were asking them, what do you envision to be a typical interaction for a group that's coming in on a field trip? Because there were other experiences outside of our exhibit that were part of this youth center. And so what they talked about, here's the amount of time they have. Here's the amount of people that we have guiding them. Here's the group sizes. And here are the things that we want them to experience. And it's sort of on a spectrum. And then you find the spot on that spectrum that you can feel that you can comfortably address. And there's times when clever design helps you push deeper on that spectrum into deeper types of design. But there's times you have to totally pull yourself back. Because if you try to get too heavy or sophisticated for what the constraints will allow, it'll just fall flat. So it's a constant negotiation. But that's where the creative tension comes in. I think to this lesson that I had in a visual arts class that I took as an undergraduate, it was a drawing class. And the teacher would have us never start with a blank sheet of paper. She would say, step on it. Take it in the shower with you. Crumple it up. But put something on the page for you to bounce off of. And I think constraints served that role for a designer. When you have something to bounce off of, it forces you to be really creative. Yeah. I like that. I think about how I write papers because I need to buttlish things. But I think that's one of the biggest fears that I always have is that that blank page, right? But I find that if I've had something, even though I know it's not going to work, at least I know from just reading that and looking at it. I know what I don't want. I know what I can modify. And it's just, it's much less daunting for me to make that next step. Because I have something to build off of. And that's the whole story, narrative, education, learning goal side of this project, right? The other side of the project was, how do you find a short throw projector that can, you know, the room's only 18 feet deep, but you have to expand it to a 25 foot screen in a way that, you know, since it's shining from behind you, isn't going to cause people's heads to create shadows on the screen. Like these, these gnarly technical issues, you know, that, that, you know, and how are you going to get the bully frogs to be noticeable? Like in early prototypes, kids weren't noticing that the bully frogs are even there, right? So you had to constantly build up graphical elements. And so this is one of the, in aquariums, always been a virtual company. We've always worked remotely. But this is one of those times we actually did rent a studio space. Yeah, because we had to actually create this physical prototype. And we just brought, you know, groups and groups of kids, anyone that we knew, you know, whether they were, you know, we, our own kids were pretty young at the time, friends, family, whatever just brought them through. And we're just constantly, yeah, revising the story. You know, it was very much like a, you know, we even read books on Hollywood script development because, you know, and especially stuff around Pixar. I was really inspired by Pixar at the time. I remember thinking of a frog of a bug's life. It was being another case where there was sort of this animated character who was standing up to bullies. So, you know, we, we were just throwing a lot of creative stuff there and doing lots of iteration and constantly tweaking and refining. You as a designer probably have to learn the thing that you're trying to get others to learn. And so I'm curious about how, how much of that you've been, that you have to do as you toggle between all of these different projects that you're handling. To what extent is understanding the thing that you're actually designing to support key to sort of your design work? Have you encountered moments where you feel like you just don't have enough depth of knowledge to, to think about the design critically? Like, because I think as a research faculty, I'm also on multiple projects. And I find that juggling incredibly difficult. And it feels like, you know, you have these general, maybe design principles or processes that you can apply, but serve the nuts and bolts, like you say, when you center the phenomenon or the problem, these are different questions that you have to ask and to address them. You really have to know what's going on. So I'm curious a little bit about your own process and approach as you get into territory that maybe you're not an expert in at the outset. What's that like? - I think recognizing what's interesting about all these domains that we get to dive in, it's the coolest part of the work that I do, we get to work with these experts and learn about their fields. Not only just needing to learn about them ourselves in order to be conversant as we're going through the project, but also helping them articulate what they know in ways that they might not otherwise do. So I think there's three different ways of answering that question. Number one is, we have had projects where we've interviewed domain experts to try and understand what it is about what they do that's interesting. And then we built tools that help model those practices for learners. So some of the early work we did at the Brookfield Zoo was understanding how their biologists do population modeling so that they can understand when to support animal breeding in ways that help to ensure the survival of that species. So when they need to do trades with other zoos and stuff like that in terms of understanding animal traits. But we needed to sort of extract and extrapolate what are the key practices that they're doing and then build an interface that helps students go through the key stages of that process. So that's one way in which interacting with experts has kind of shaped the work that we're doing. Another way is to help experts who know what they're trying to have happen but don't quite know how to do it, help them realize their things. So helping them articulate what their learning goals are and then helping them build a tool that will actually support those learning goals. And the third is ultimately, we're trying to help kids get from sort of point A to point B and experts are really good at navigating that terrain getting from point A to point B. But they're not necessarily always sure about what they're doing or they're not always explicit about what they're doing in order to get there because it's happening in a sort of second nature kind of way. So in many ways, we get to work with experts to help them express how it is that they're doing these things that they're so good at and then building out, helping to articulate what it means for a kid to become to develop expertise in that area. So really mapping out the learning trajectory. - And if you could reflect on the design work that you've been doing over the years and things that you had an eye on maybe in the field, are there things that you've seen change either as a function of sort of the sharpening of what design processes are like in the learning sciences or maybe shifts in technology like you were mentioning earlier? What do you see as sort of a design trajectory maybe for the field? Do you see any sort of themes or patterns emerge as you think about design work over the last maybe 20 years or so? - That's a big question. I mean, the learning science has always been a multidisciplinary field and it's drawn its methods from other fields, right? So a lot of learning scientists draw upon anthropological field study techniques or maybe development cycles that come from computer science or a professional computing world. And so even as grad students, we found ourselves looking to other fields for methodologies or insights or new ways of doing this work. And then as we started doing this professionally with InquiryM, you know, oftentimes, you encounter really quickly. So we could be very arrogant and safe, you know, we are distinguished from like traditional web developers because we have all these learning sciences insights. But then you look at professional web design firms and you see a lot of these processes, design processes that they've created, which are basically built on years of professional design expertise that really can inform how you actually support your design process. And we looked at a lot of the early design work that we were doing as learning sciences students is very ad hoc. And there actually is a lot you can learn from the instructional design field or just the, you know, just architectural design that really are these sort of great practices that help support iteration and help move you along the path. So I think that part of the development of learning sciences as it's gotten more mature is I think, you know, making some of those methodologies its own and questioning them and looking at them and they are now sort of more of a learning science as methodology that's maybe still informing the discussion that's happening in other fields. But it really, you know, it sort of pulls it into a new direction. And so, for example, I think, you know, learning sciences brings together, you know, some, some methodologies about like understanding cognition and observing cognition with, you know, methodologies for building tools, right? You know, these things kind of work together in very interesting ways. You know, I'd say that for us, what we've developed the most is in terms of managing design processes over time. And, you know, it's very difficult when you're working with clients who are paying you who want a certain product delivered on a certain timetable for a certain price. And at the same time, want the ability to do iterative design, you know, that's an impossibility. I mean, we always say, you know, you have, you know, you have budget, time, and scope, you know, you can fix too. And not any too, only certain too. But you can't fix all three, right? And so how do we work with clients that give them, they value that ability to work iteratively. They value the fact that we could put out, we could come up with a design spec at the beginning. But then of course, as you're using it, you're seeing all these new things that are coming up, but you're using it in the classroom or as you're reflecting on it. And so you're constantly getting new insights. It's like, you know, it's like a step ladder. Now that you're on, now that you're up on run number two, you have a whole different perspective that you didn't have when you were a couple steps below. And that's the point, right? And so you need to be able to change on a dime. But at the same time, you're still working within a budget. So, you know, we've adopted like the Agile software development methodology as opposed to the waterfall method where you're just sort of working from a scope and everything is related to that spec. And you know, that's it. And everything that you want to change has to come through sort of a change order. I mean, we're much more freewheeling than that. So anything goes. The client can come up with a new idea and it goes into the backlog, right? But there's this process then of stepping back in the design process and reflecting where you're constantly revisiting your backlog. And you're saying, okay, these are the things that you've asked for. This is how much time we have. This is how much budget we have. Where are your priorities? And their partners in that process and if they're partners in that process, then it's a collaboration. And then it's not attention, right? It's not like they're saying, oh, well, we ask for all these things and you're not giving them to us. And then we have to go back and say, yeah, but you also asked for this, this, and this. And that wasn't part of the original plan. It's more like we're partners in this process steering the ship together. And so just as we as designers of educational tools, wanna make things visible to learners, you know, in many ways we've been designers of a design process where we can make things visible to the people that we're working with in ways that help build stronger collaborations. It's probably one of the reasons why we just tend to work with the same people, you know, over and over and over again, is because you just developed this way of working together where your sort of, your goals are aligned. You know, hear new suggestions can come into the process, but we're working together to kind of choose which priorities we wanna focus on together. - This has been great, Matt. I'm curious what you think we can do better in terms of foregrounding design processes and imprenticing students into the work of design. I mean, I think as a graduate student, you have a short projects of a short lifespan. They certainly don't last 20 years, and you don't wanna be there for 20 years, but you know, when you think about something on the order of a year or two, how can we better prepare students for that emergent collective work of design? Are there experiences? Are there books that you would recommend, you know, when you look back to where you were as a student, what do you think could have been helpful as far as like tools or processes that can help you maybe think a little bit differently about the work of design? - Yeah, not books. I mean, I would say that grad students will have plenty of books. I think that, you know, we'll understand some more formal design processes. I mean, that's one area where, rather than sort of doing the seat of the pants, let's figure it out as we go, which is sort of what we did when we were grad students. I think that, you know, there are like literally project management and design practices that are, that we found are highly compatible for this sort of combined design and research process, right? And so design research is sort of where we live. We tend to live more on the design side of it, but we're participating in the research. But for people who are, you know, interested in doing design research, you know, spend some time looking at design methodologies. It's out there, right? And that's an area I think where, you know, it could beef up learning sciences training. You know, getting some hands-on experience in managing projects, assuming that they're focused on ultimately building products, right? And not all learning sciences students are that way. But, you know, I mean, put a plug for people who are interested in internships with Inquiryam, you know, participating in a project where you're seeing that it's both pursuing really interesting research questions and dealing with the day-to-day aspects of keeping things working in classrooms. I think that's really important. And that's ultimately, you know, where our focus is. We want the stuff to see the light of day. We want the stuff to be used. We want it to outlast research grants. You know, I think that that, I mean, that's where my learning has been since my days, you know, as a learning scientist. Yeah, on the flip side, you know, as somebody who's doing the work that we do, you know, it's been harder to keep up with the research, right? I'm still citing papers from, you know, the early '90s. (laughs) When I have the occasion to cite papers at all, right? So we, the closest we come to that kind of work is when we are writing research grants and when we are writing grant reports, because grant reports are essentially, you know, putting together the foundations of your findings. And we do participate in writing grant reports. And I enjoy doing that. I enjoy like stepping back and reflecting on the work. It's maybe not at the level that if I were writing ADRA papers or papers for, you know, for learning sciences conferences, I will say that we used to go to, you know, to those conferences for, I'd say, the first half of Inquanian's life, we'd go to ADRA and we'd go to the NSCSL and CSLS and conferences and all that stuff. But we do sometimes participate in writing those papers with our partners. We share data and share insights. We comment on grants, but the other part of it is that we don't have any kind of incentive structure to do that. I mean, aside from just the interest, right? I mean, we are getting paid by our clients to get work done for them. And it's different from, you know, being a salary employee at the university where the incentive structure is basically rewarding for going to conferences and publishing papers. You know, that's when we do that kind of stuff. I mean, I've been on advisory boards, you know, for grants. And that's another really enriching part of it that actually gets me involved in the research. But I've had to decline offers to participate in writing book chapters and stuff like that just because I don't have the time. - Do you miss that sort of publication side, sort of generating knowledge on paper for others to build on at all? - I do miss it, but I do get the occasion to do some of that stuff in grant reports and grant applications. But I think that I made the right decision. I don't regret not having gone down the tenured track. I, because I enjoy, I mean, I recognize the stuff I've been able to do in place of that. And that's sort of where my heart really lies. So I'm not saying that it always has to be an either-or trade-off, but in my case, ultimately helping to build in Quirium and building a company in a field that didn't exist that's been able to manage for 21 years now and support ourselves basically doing design work and doing design work with our research partners. I mean, I'm doing work with some of my original advisors and we have projects with some of our colleagues who are, you know, in our cohort and grad school who are now professors. And so we're still very much a part of that field. We're just in that field with a different focus. And I don't have regrets about that. Matt, if you think about for the grad students who are out there or early career folks who are kind of, you know, at the cusp of whatever is next for them, for folks who are interested in doing design work and having that be the focus and the core of what they do. Any suggestions or comments about how they can make that happen. Sure, not everybody can create and be a part of something like in Quirium, but curious about what kinds of experiences or opportunities that you would recommend people seek out. If this is what they really, really want to do. A lot of the ideas that were very hard to find a while ago have really, I think, gotten out there. I mean, as technology has matured, you know, the idea of having classrooms, you know, steeped in, you know, handheld technology and more. I mean, it's really all around now. So I think there's a lot more what I would have considered traditional design areas like technical publishing and curriculum publishing and stuff, where I think you probably have a little more freedom to explore learning sciences type ideas. And I think those ideas are a little more widely accepted now, you know, in terms of inquiry-based learning and project-based learning. And I think learning sciences scientists have learned how to talk in ways that are a little more compatible with, you know, school districts and, you know, standard systems and all that kind of stuff. So this is all, you know, what's happened in the last 20 years of the field. Look, if you're a grad student right now, try and find ways to understand how formal design processes work. So maybe a lot of the class in a more design and production-oriented field, you know, like architecture to see, or maybe even, you know, some people who already have computer sciences background, I think, do get this exposure in terms of understanding different methods for supporting software design projects. But, you know, there's a lot of great design houses out there, places that are just built around helping people think through design processes and learning some of those techniques. I think they can really be a great way that when coupled with a learning sciences perspective, it can really be powerful. So I think when we're thinking about design research, you know, think about the design methodologies that are already in use in a number of different professional fields. And you don't have to reinvent that wheel. You know, they're there. Of course, it's going to look different when you bring it into learning sciences. And the other thing is, I mean, again, to recognize it really, the driver for this stuff, I still think, it's the same educational questions we've been asking for 100 years, right? And keep thinking about, like, you know, ultimately, well, what's the new thing that's happening now that is providing a foot in the door for kind of doing that? I mean, it's no longer the web. Web has been in class for better or worse, right? But, you know, there are, you know, new kinds of new abilities to create and produce for kids to be creators and producers of media and of technology that weren't there before. You don't necessarily have to be a computer sciences person to be coding, you know, you can, anybody can, you know, get out garage band and begin creating, you know, amazing audio and, you know, all that kind of stuff. So, you know, I think that there are so many tools out there that help people create that are going to be sort of change agents in how things are happening in schools. And again, I always focus on where the change is happening in schools, and that's the opportunity where you get to explore new things or help instantiate these old ideals in new ways. - Mm-hmm. Well, thank you so much, Matt. This has been so much fun. - Thank you. I've enjoyed it. It's been a pleasure. I'd love to hear what you took away from this conversation and connections that you see to your own work. Send us an email at [email protected] and find us on Twitter @humanslspod. This podcast is co-produced by Andrew Kersack and Monlin Monica Co. Our work is made possible by the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Thank you for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)