We have explored designers having empathy for the audience of focus, designers using empathy as a means to an end, and designers using empathy to deliver a meaningful design deliverable. Our research has evolved from studying how designers reflect on their own design context and the audience's given circumstance to designers acting on moments of…

Behind the curtain is where what makes things happen, happens. How do design teams really design? Five doctoral students from Learning Design and Technology programs across the US had a unique opportunity to pay attention to graduate instructional design teams behind the curtain designing open educational resources for a non-profit that provides…

With the challenges of a global pandemic, political and social unrest, and the consequences these issues bring, there is a universal call for empathy as we attempt to maneuver through this tumultuous time. For instructional designers, this includes employing empathy and empathic design as they grapple with how to design instructional interventions…

In an effort to create meaningful user experiences, instructional designers participate in continuous projection and reflection during design. Empathic design draws on instructional designers' sensitivity toward their learners as a reference for design. Empathic forecasting, or predictions about an emotional reaction to future events, is an…

Within design thinking, designers are responsible for generating, testing, and refining design ideas as a means to refine the design problem and arrive at an effective solution. Thus, understanding one's individual idea generation experiences and processes can be seen as a component of professional identity for designers, which involves the…

As the design thinking approach becomes more established in the instructional design (ID) discourse, the field will have to reconsider the professional identity of instructional designers. Rather than passively following models or processes, a professional identity rooted in design thinking calls for instructional designers to be dynamic agents of…

Instructional design focuses on solving problems in a multitude of contexts. As such, designers are investigators, gathering evidence to optimally design solutions to learning problems within the identified context. The challenge described in this case study was the need to create an educational activity to promote interaction and collaboration…

As designers utilize design thinking while moving through a design space between problem and solution, they must rely on design intelligence, precedents, and intuition in order to arrive at meaningful and inventive outcomes. Thus, instructional designers must constantly re-conceptualize their own identities and what it means to be a designer.…

Design-thinking is an inductive and participatory process in which designers are required to manage constraints, generate solutions, and follow project timelines in order to complete project goals. The researchers used this exploration study to look at how designers in various disciplinary fields approach design projects. Designers were asked to…

The following design case illustrates the approach a group of advanced graduate online-design students, two design coaches, and an instructor used to design an online instructional intervention as a service-learning project for parents interested in improving their parenting skills with their pre-teens. This design case is distinctive in that it…

As the need for instructing a globalized workforce increases, instructional designers must embrace the constraints and the opportunities these projects provide in order to move the field of cross-cultural instructional design (ID) forward. Cross-cultural projects offer multiple avenues for growth in ID practice, overcoming cultural barriers, and a…

This article discusses technology integration literature used to guide the design and implementation of a technology professional development intervention (TPDI) for secondary education teachers. Qualitative multiple-case research methods were used to examine teachers' perceptions of the TPDI factors to provide a deeper understanding of which…

This article reviews practice variation in the field of instructional design. First, it compares instructional designer practice as reported or observed in several classic research studies. This analysis is framed by the standards established by the International Board for Training, Performance, and Instruction competencies for planning and…

This is a report of one case of a design and development research study that aimed to validate an overlay instructional design model incorporating the theory of multiple intelligences into instructional systems design. After design and expert review model validation, The Multiple Intelligence (MI) Design Model, used with an Instructional Systems…

This is a report of a developmental research study that aimed to construct and validate an instructional design (ID) model that incorporates the theory and practice of multiple intelligences (MI). The study consisted of three phases. In phase one, the theoretical foundations of multiple Intelligences and ID were examined to guide the development…