The Critical Constructionist Design Tapestry
In our chapter, “Critical Constructionist Design: A design framework and analytic tool for developing and documenting speculative learning experiences,” published in the book Speculative Pedagogies: Designing Equitable Educational Futures, Mike Dando, Isa Correa, and I propose a framework for creating and analyzing speculative learning experiences. We’re quite enthusiastic about all of the excitement around speculative design in the LS community! However, because these learning environments are messy and complex places, it can be challenging to empirically document the relationship between the design of our speculative learning experiences and the outcomes or activities of learners.
The Critical Constructionist Design framework (or CCD for short) is a framework we first proposed in a Learning, Media, and Technology article to create speculative design experience that engaged learners in using speculative and futuristic design to critically reflect on the past and present. This new publication examines how the framework can be used to analyze what happens in these designed spaces. In it, we share two analytic tools we call the design tapestry and analytic tapestry.
Leveraging the CCD framework, the design tapestry asks designers to reflect on how specific design features of their environment or activity invite learners to reflect on the past, present, and future. To construct the design tapestry, the designer first identifies a list of designed mediators—or design choices in the speculative learning experience—and then identifies how each designed mediator might support learners to connect to their past, reflect on the present, and to project possible and probable futures. The purpose of the design tapestry is to provide a framework to help the designer to consider the ways in which the activities, tools and materials, and physical space and culture of the space engage learners in speculative practice. The tapestry below represents the design assumptions of the Remixing Wakanda implementation described in the paper.
The ways in which a participant leveraged different designed mediators through the exploration of personally meaningful topics or goals is represented by the analysis tapestry. In the analysis tapestry the original design tapestry is preserved as a base of horizontal threads that represent the designed mediators we assumed would encourage participants to connect to the past, present, and future. The actual ways in which one participant makes those connections is now illustrated in vertical threads that weave through the horizontal threads to complete the tapestry.
The analysis tapestry described below represents the experience of one learner (though we could imagine creating tapestries of social experiences as well). Using qualitative coding strategies, the researcher first identifies topics or goals that are represented in the data. This could be coding a student’s design journal, a focus group held with multiple students, video taken of an implementation, etc. The researcher then looks for co-occurance. For example, what design mediator played a role in a learner’s exploration of a particular code. By plotting these codes, and co-occurance counts along the vertical bands, an analysis tapestry is created. The analysis tapestry below makes visible the relationship between the designed mediators of the Remixing Wakanda workshop and one student’s particular using speculative design to make connections to her past, present, and possible futures. This interlacing allows us to empirically validate the alignment between our design assumptions and one participants’ actual experience.
Together we hope the design tapestry and the analysis tapestry help educators interested in creating speculative design experiences to both build learning experiences that invite critical examination of the past and present, not just make neat futuristic artifacts, and empirically evaluate the role played by specific design choices in the learner’s exploration.
For two more examples, consider the design and analysis tapestries below of the Lion Man project described in the chapter. Notice the design tapestry looks quite different than the one created for the Remixing Wakanda project. Likewise, the analysis tapestry created for this student and their experience in the Lion Man project highlights the different role played by the designed mediators.
The above discussion of the CCD framework and the design and analysis tapestries are adapted from our chapter “Critical Constructionist Design: A design framework and analytic tool for developing and documenting speculative learning experiences,” published in the book Speculative Pedagogies: Designing Equitable Educational Futures.