Like some unwelcome drunken uncle, this question comes round occasionally. Here, Learning Circuits asks it once again.

My latest repost is based on some research I've been doing with designers in various disciplines (mainly product design, architecture and interiors). To any professional, in any design discipline other than e-learning, it's pretty obvious that ISD, ADDIE and their various similarly soulness siblings were always dead.

As many have said, (for example Clive Shephered, here), there's a certain intuitive appeal in the idea that one should start a design process by trying to understand the problem. So that's analysis. Then you design etc. etc. until all your ducks are in order. All neat and tidy. Well yes. But the problem is (!) that the problems we deal with as learning designers are often (always?) sufficiently complex that until we start designing, we can't actually understand them.

No - I'll go further. Many, many design theorists and researchers (read Bryan Lawson, "How designers think") have pointed out that in the real world, the nature of design problems is such that we don't really understand them until we've pretty much finished designing the solution. The solution is the only way to understand the problem.

Summarising what Michael Schrage says about design, the only way to cope with today's speed of change is to move from processes that rely on documents describing problems (vainly produced with the intention of providing solid milestones and confirming analytical outcomes), to processes that rely on prototyped solutions that help articulate the problem, and generate further ideas as to how to handle it. Rather late in the day, even the mainstream software industry is beginning to realise the error of its ways and adopt models like SCRUM and extreme programming which, God forbid, don't rely on ADDIE, documents (that nobody reads) and timescales that stretch towards the horizon.

A quick True/False question for all those Instructional Designers out there who are so familiar with such devices:

[Question stem] Google, Napster, Youtube and Second Life were all produced using ADDIE development methodologies.

[Option a] True

[Option b] False?

Duh!