Practice
I do not use one fixed method for every project. These are the decisions that keep proving useful across different kinds of work.
View the workRecurring decisions
01
A recurring first move is to question the structure that arrived with the brief. A content portal can become a service around working moments; a migration can become a coupled delivery system; repeated course decisions can become a design system; regulation can become assessment reasoning; a self-service default can become a facilitated environment.
02
Product and engineering, platform and content, regulation and interaction, facilitation and interface are not automatically separate workstreams. The work is strongest when consequential dependencies stay visible long enough to improve each other.
03
Sometimes the useful unit is an interaction. Sometimes it is an experience, a platform, a product or the relationships between them. The unit of design should widen or narrow with the problem rather than with a preferred deliverable.
Current operating description
These are overlapping modes rather than four steps. A project can move between them repeatedly as new information appears.
01
Clarify the situation, audience, constraints and the problem genuinely worth solving.
02
Turn that understanding into product, learning, experience or system architecture before inherited implementation becomes the brief.
03
Prototype, design, build and produce at the scale the problem requires — from interaction to system.
04
Separate intention from implementation, observation and validation; qualify what the work can safely claim.
Selected evolution
Interaction and course production are still part of the work. What changed is how often the problem now requires product, platform and system decisions around them.
2015 · Artefact · Experience
Pathways stretched an authoring tool into a non-linear, stateful environment built around the conversation happening in the room.
Read the analysis2015–21 · Artefact · Experience · System
Course artefacts, assessment reasoning, responsive context and production practice sat inside six years of broader learning work in an aviation safety regulator.
Read the analysis2024 · Experience · Content · Platform
Migration, learning architecture, more than sixty rebuilds and operations had to move concurrently rather than wait for clean hand-offs.
Read the analysis2026–27 · Product · Experience · System
Product strategy, experience architecture, service relationships and production implementation now operate together while still resolving into useful participant moments.
Read the analysisSpecialist depth
Technical depth matters when it lets the learning or product behave in a way a simpler implementation cannot.
Begun in 2024: reusable learning patterns, components, branded implementation layers, accessibility, governance and xAPI conventions treated as one operational system.
View the eLearning Design SystemSpecialist Rise design systemsTAFE used it for a non-linear careers environment. CASA used it to make assessment reasoning visible. ISQ rebuilt more than sixty courses while the destination platform was still being shaped.