Design-principles

The design-principles approach

The design-principles approach stems from the design experiments research trajectory, initiated in the early nineties by Brown (1992). These experiments were the ancestor of the design-based research methodology described above. At the same period, Collins (1992), called researchers to refer to education as a “design science”. He based this notion on Simon’s (1969) famous book, which identifies various professions, such as architecture, engineering, computer science, medicine, and education with the sciences of the artificial.

The design-principles approach uses ‘design-principles’ as an organizational unit for synthesizing design knowledge (Brown, 1992; Brown & Campione, 1996; Collins et al., 2004; Herrington, 2006; Kali, 2006; Linn, Bell, & Davis, 2004; Merrill, 2002; Quintana et al., 2004). Bell, Hoadley, and Linn (2004) describe design-principles as: “…an intermediate step between scientific findings, which must be generalized and replicable, and local experiences or examples that come up in practice. Because of the need to interpret design-principles, they are not as readily falsifiable as scientific laws. The principles are generated inductively from prior examples of success and are subject to refinement over time as others try to adapt them to their own experiences.” (p. 83).

The Design Principles Database (DPD)

Based on this approach, the DPD (Kali, 2006; Kali & Linn, in press) was developed to capture, coalesce and synthesize design knowledge. The DPD is a mechanism to support researchers and curriculum designers to share their design knowledge in the form of design-principles, exemplified by descriptions of features from learning environments. The database is an infrastructure for participants to publish, connect, discuss and review design ideas, as well as use these ideas to design new curricula. The current entries in the Design Principles Database represent the contributions of over sixty individual researchers. The database includes about one hundred features (mainly from physical, life, and earth sciences), connected with several dozen design-principles. Each design-principle provides a general rationale, theoretical underpinning, and important considerations, such as pitfalls, tradeoffs and limits of practical use, to help designers benefit from the many example features it is connected with in the database. Although the database stems from the design-principles approach, the hierarchical structure of the database, the connections between design-principles in various levels and between principles and example features, and the constructs that make up a design-principle, follow the spirit of Alexander’s (1979) design-pattern language. In this manner, the Design Principles Database merges between the design-principles and design-patterns approach. Recent research has shown that the database can (a) promote collaborative knowledge building for communities who design and explore educational technologies (Kali, 2006, in press), and (b) assist novice designers in creating effective technology-based curriculum units (Ronen-Fuhrmann et al., in press).

Examples of features and principles from the DPD

Some examples of design principles from the DPD:

• example 1
• example 2
• example 3

Some examples of features from the DPD:

• example 1
• example 2
• example 3