Designing Experiences for Learning

Can learning be fun? Aid a sense of discovery and exploration? Can it ever be open-ended and interpretive? Foster emotional and social connections with the environment around us?

This post will function as a log of my personal thoughts, reflections and design processes as I navigate through the “Designing Experiences for Learning” course in my final semester at Carnegie Mellon University, USA.

What does it mean to design for learning?

Designing experiences that engage people in educational activities that enhance their learning through meaningful, memorable, and enjoyable interactions with information is vital to the well-being and advancement of our society and planet. In striving to aid this effort, we will investigate the intersection of design thinking, UI/UX design, cognitive studies, social sciences, instructional design, and educational pedagogy as a way of developing knowledge and skills in designing experiences for learners. Through readings, projects, and class exercises, we will explore how people perceive and process information, what motivates them to learn, and what constitutes an experience. We will investigate topics that are often difficult to grasp and collaboratively build a taxonomy that generalizes and links learning challenges and design approaches. We will also study traditional and emergent learning tools and methods as a means of defining affordances and limitations of various learning approaches and mediums. Our investigation will provide us the opportunity to apply our discoveries in the design, testing, and assessment of learning experiences that we create. Let’s Learn!

(taken from the course description of DES EXPERIENCES FOR LEARNING 51886, Spring 2025, CMU)

LxD | Week 2 | 21 January 2025

Coming from a country where education and learning were defined as cornerstone of growth and development that could only be achieved within the confines of closed walls and rigid, inflexible structural constraints I struggled with trying to comprehend when free exploration and play yielded better learning results- in terms of absorption, retention and reinforcement for me. Why is it that I enjoyed learning through play? Why was it that I remembered how photosynthesis worked when I touched and felt the veins of leaves and the condensation on them versus reading about it in our school textbooks. I recall looking at the images supporting the text, and trying to imagine how sunlight was absorbed into leaves, and how it nourished the plant aiding in its growth.

I particularly remember struggling to continue to stay stationary and focus all of my energies on “reading”, believing that my inability to focus and learn fast was due to my inherent laziness of wanting to move around. I pushed aside the flashbacks of times when moving around listening to lessons on my ipod, and watching videos helped me retain concepts and reproduce them in exams. So imagine my surprise when I read that “.. the development of a child’s mind comes through his movements.” It felt then like the earth had tilted on its axis. As a user experience researcher, it made perfect sense how our learning product was aiding our users’ in learning — it actually gave me some pointers on how to develop it further so as to organically become a part of a child’s learning process. However, the child in me couldn’t stop feeling shocked and betrayed. After years of being told that “I could do better, if only i learnt to sit still and focus”, I started realising how the system failed to recognize the fundamental building blocks that constituted ‘learning’. As I grieved the innumerable opportunities that I had lost out on, because of not being part of a system where exploration and free play were seen as drivers of learning and growth, I also started to realize that I would not let the system fail others like me.

It just wasn’t fair.

This course, Designing Experiences for Learning is one of the many sources of knowledge I am seeking to help understand the phenomena of learning and finding ways it occurs naturally in environments with stimulus that may or may not be self-initiated and man-made. As someone whose learning has been stifled with curricula and institutional structures, society’s perception of how learning should be, look, and feel — I aspire to join others who are working towards redefining and reimagining learning.

My aim with this course is to be able to marry learning theories with observed behaviors and design experiences that will aid learners in exploring, discovering things that make them tick, and find joy in knowing about ‘new things’. I aspire to walk away with a newfound knowledge of how to design for play, how to design for growth and how to design for joy. Notice, how I do not use the word ‘learning’ here- because learning is as ubiquitous as breathing. We are always learning. By watching, listening, feeling, moving — we are constantly picking up new things about the environment around us, and finding ways to build a schema around where we fit into the fabric of reality that surrounds us in the moment. As a designer, I aspire to make us more aware of the idea of learning and find joy in doing so.

As David W. Orr, mentions in the Foreword of the Third Teacher, ‘the best learning occurs when children spend unplanned and uncounted hours investigating, experimenting, exploring and playing’ , I believe this course will give me the knowledge and the required know-how to design experiences that enable the ‘best learning’- where each learner has autonomy of what they choose to learn and how they choose to learn.

LxD | Week 3 | 28 January 2025

Julie Dirksen mentions how highly motivated learners will learn, regardless of the quality of learning experience. Unmotivated learners are a challenge even for the best teachers, and drives home the point of how important it is to understand our learners’ attitudes, motivations and behaviors, to tailor our experiences accordingly.

She discusses intrinsic and extrinsic motivations along with providing strategies for improving learning experience for both. As I read this, I wonder.. Does our professor in this class use a mix of both? Does she already identify whether I have intrinsic or extrinsic motivation?

I wonder now, with respect to our Phipps’ Project, how many of the visitors are eager to learn? How many of them are just there to explore?

How many are there on a date or with friends- where the extrinsic motivation to come to Phipps is to hang out with friends or fill your social interaction quota for the week?

I agree with the author that I do not want to feel stupid. As a learning designer, I most definitely do not want to make my readers feel stupid as well. As I read the chapter, especially the section about books being titled “how to [..] for dummies” being a hit among the audience, I realised that with respect to the Phipps project- I need to be just as mindful as this.

The questions posed by students in class, as well as the categorisation that our Professor conducted of all our post-its made me realize that we were all subconsciously gravitating towards certain aspects of the visitor experience. I, for example, was interested in who our audience were, what they were thinking, feeling and doing as they decided to visit Phipps and while they were at Phipps. I wondered if I could enhance their in-situ experiences as well as extend it even after they left Phipps. I was additionally interested in looking into how people were engaging their other senses. There were a bunch of students who were also interested in content specific questions — in exploring if visitors knew of Phipps history, the flora present there, and how might they find opportunities to instill a sense of stewardship among the audience.

I am not someone who is very interested in plants , and probably so because I’ve never had the opportunity to explore and study them outside of school. Without the threat of exams, and a need-to-learn-all-about-a-particular-type-of-medicinal-herb, I‘ve never been the person who actively sought out plants, and spent hours on the internet reading fun facts about them. And I’m sure there are others like me as well. There might be some more people who are interested in plants, and can talk about which families specific plants belong to by looking at the veins on their leaves. Since the visitors of Phipps will likely lie on a spectrum with respect to their literacy about the flora, I will need to be extra cautious when designing experiences for this wide range of audience. My mantra for caution, would then be to not make the experts feel bored , or worse, forced to learn , and at the same time, not make the novices feel dumb (Dirksen, 2015).

I also wonder… is there a way for my design to bring together novices and experts in the same space organically? The experience could happen in real time, and not feel forced — it could accommodate visitors who come in by themselves, as well as those who come in groups.

Yet another errant thought: Phipps Conservatory knows about native and non-native plants. Is there any on-going research at Phipps? Anything that the scientists at Phipps are currently struggling / working towards answering? Is there a way this knowledge can be made public, and actually become a way for the public to help Phipps’ folks in their quest to discover answers.

Plans for my next steps:

• A visit to Phipps , to shadow people and observe the interactions they have with other people, with the learning artefacts present in the space, etc.
• Note the conversations, to get a sense of what an average weekend at Phipps Conservatory “looks, feels and sounds” like

Observe learners aka visitors at Phipps to gather:

• How are they learning?
• Where are they learning?
• What are they learning?
• How are takeaways being formed or how are they talking with others about what they’ve learnt?

This Thursday, some of our classmates presented learning experiences that they had discovered, unpackaged and analysed to the rest of the class. I found Yilin’s example of KidZania in Tokyo, very interesting. In Yilin’s words, KidZania is “An immersive space for children to explore the adult world through role-playing in a scaled-down city designed just for them”. I found it interesting how KidZania functions as an informal learning museum and how role-play here is a key proponent of learning.

Kiwico by Caitlyn was also an example that stuck with me, which are educational subscription boxes that teach complex math and physics ideas in a physical form for children. Children like tangible interactions. They tend to use their sense of touch which helps them engage yet another sense when interacting with the world around them. This helps them absorb, assimilate and retain concepts better.

Although I am wary of going down the path of solutioning without even beginning my research yet, I am making a note of the ideas shared in class, and thoughts that I find interesting, so as to come back to those later on when I’m generating concepts for my design.

LxD | Week 4 | 4 February 2025

We opened our Tuesday class with an overview of some more learning experiences that were shared by my peers. I’d looked into Toca World — a video game developed by the Swedish video game development company Toca Boca who primarily were known to design games for children that facilitated discovery and exploration. There weren’t any rewards, or goals that the players had to reach, but the process of interacting with the game was in itself the entire learning journey.

Toca World by Toca Boca

We referenced the reading by Dirksen (2015) in class and discussed “how we might create something that has a challenge to it, but doesn’t feel insurmountable?”

Furthermore, we discussed the ways in which we could potentially turn extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation in the context of Phipps. What are some of the things that the visitors there enjoyed doing?

Dirksen(2015) also discusses arranging and presenting information in such a way that learners can instantly find where and how to retrieve and store this information from. As we imagine our memory to be a closet, with neat compartments that house specific items which we can peruse as and when the need arises, I wondered how we might design a learning experience that not only makes learners feel empowered and puts them in control of what they want to learn, but also makes it extremely easy for them to store and retrieve information as they go about their visit.

I’d asked Stacie, if this act of providing the tools to learners to construct their own shelves and compartments that work for their learning styles depends on the learners as well. Obviously, the answer was a yes. In such a case, when Phipps sees visitors of all categories — as young as kindergarteners, young adults, middle-aged folks as well as senior citizens — I wonder how can I provide tools to all these learners of varying learning styles, prior familiarity and knowledge in order to equip them to built their own shelves?

How might we create a flexible learning space for these visitors?

We ended the class with being introduced to stakeholder mapping — to think of our top 3 stakeholders, and map their hopes and fears.

On Thursday, Stacie showed us some examples of current learning experiences designed by prior cohorts in class — that were either physical or digital and in some cases, had both of those components in the experience.

She explained that at this exploratory stage it might be better to consider our challenge as a general challenge faced by visitors at Phipps, as opposed to a design challenge. A design challenge is a statement that contains the problem statement but is formulated from a designers’ perspective.

This is how I perceive them:

General challenge: Existing learning experiences at Phipps aren’t inclusive of all age groups and motivation levels

Design challenge: How might we create an inclusive learning experience at Phipps across all age groups and knowledge levels

Learning something fast and slow

In the context of Phipps Conservatory, as visitors walking through the space, how might we design interventions so that they learn fast and slow?

When you wish to add a learning goal — ask yourself:

1. Why is this important for someone to learn?
2. What will happen if it isn’t achieved?

In the context of designing for a physical space, especially one where people come for respite, I find it quite an interesting challenge to identify how learning can be scaffolded, and unfold over different touchpoints, and be flexible — so that even if a learner misses a certain step, they don’t realise that they’ve missed out on something.

The class ended with us being put into tentative teams — I am working with Quinn and Maria, and we were asked to map the Learning gaps, by identifying the current state and Preferred State of every stakeholder corresponding to our problem statement and identify ways to bridge these gaps.

Our team (team name: TBD) met over the weekend to discuss the learning gaps we had identified so far for our stakeholder groups. We chose three stakeholders groups — families with children, teenagers / young adults who come in groups, and visitors who come in for momentary respite , but once we started listing the “Current State” which was reasons why stakeholders aren’t meeting the objectives for the visitor experience we realised that some of the current issues surpassed specific target groups, and in fact were global issues.

The Learning Gaps : Defining States and Bridging Gaps

In the first column we listed down the Current state reasons- i.e., all the reasons why our visitors were probably not meeting the current objectives. We then added colored tabs to them which signified why this specific issue persisted in the current state.

For eg: visitors were not aware of what Phipps conservatory provides to different age groups. Our hypothesis was that the reason this happened was because visitors did not have the information, or know where to access this information about the different exhibits of Phipps, and if there were any specific exhibits that were tailored to specific audiences — like, their kids. This was a communication gap, since the audience has limited or no information on gathering information around what they need.

The preferred state for this would then be for visitors to realise that “every age group has something for them at Phipps”. In order to make them realise this, we as designers need to intervene to improve the journey for them. We, as designers, need to bridge the gaps between where Phipps is today, and where Phipps wants to be. The Bridging gaps section gives us the opportunity to brainstorm ways to improve the current experience by listing what we need to do, to move the experience from the current state to the preferred state. In the case of this example, we as a team, identified that within the physical and digital space we need to provide touchpoints to users to access information about the exhibits at Phipps for different audiences.

The GIF below gives a sneak peek into the work that was done today.

Preview of our Learning Gaps exercise

The post its on the leftmost , in yellow are the current state. The post its on the far right , in pink are our preferred states. The post its in the middle , in green are the interventions that we as designers have collectively decided we need to make in order to change current state to preferred states.

My quick takeaways on the learning gaps exercise:

1. Although this is only a first draft, I wonder if the core issues we are noticing is a lack of effective communication within Phipps’ physical and digital spaces which effectively communicate what it can offer to people.
2. Most of our learning gaps overlap with each other. For example: issues with both motivation and communication, such as the audience choosing not to visit Phipps because they have nothing relatable or appealing is a motivation gap (current state). However, it is also a communication gap, since they’ve been provided little to no information on what to expect, what to look out for, and how to navigate for the most optimal experience possible. In such a case, I wonder how might we design for exploration, towards fostering a sense of discovery while also slowly initiating them to the unique value proposition of Phipps- which might (preferred state) ?
3. The more i come back and look at it, I wonder if all the problems can actually be traced back to 3–4 major underlying pain points. I’m still unclear around how to move forward, scope of specific problem statements within these areas and come up with design approaches to solve them? But I am super excited though!

Like this week’s reading by McCarthy (1996) indicates “Learning is meaning-making”

“We attend, we reflect, we understand, we try, we adapt, we integrate” McCarthy (1996)

I want to imbue the same in my design.

LxD | Week 5| 11 February 2025

For our first exercise- the stakeholder map, we put ourselves into the shoes and minds of the different visitors at Phipps and the points of synergy that we saw was the collective worry that the trip to Phipps wasn’t worth it. This could be because of they lack of knowledge of what to expect from Phipps, and not having the tools/metrics to measure if the experience was worthwhile or not, other than the fact that they spent $22.95 on the ticket.

Our preliminary research was informed by our inference that visitors at Phipps might not understand the value that Phipps provides.

This happens due to some specific learning gaps in their experience. For starters, a key knowledge gap noticed here is that they can read the name card, but don’t know why it matters to them? or how knowing its scientific name is of value to them? They struggle to see the immediate value that Phipps provides. A skill based problem then is that learners walk out knowing the scientific name, but cannot apply this new name anywhere.

Sometimes learners don’t see the value in Phipps (knowledge gap). And because of this, they choose not to go to Phipps, which is a motivation gap. This is because just a walking tour of Phipps is not properly conveying the value of the Phipps experience (environment gap). It also doesn’t help that the signage and the artefacts just speak to the plants there (plant names, etc.) but do not include the learners in communicating the value of these plants to the learner, thereby providing the learners to see (measure and reflect) the value of their time and experience at Phipps. If done so, this communication gap can be bridged which might cause a ripple effect and bridge other gaps as well.

McCarthy’s learning cycle is helping me align learners go through and design according to their respective learning styles. As a learner, I could probably be focusing on why a piece of information that is communicated to me is important? If I was initiated into the experience with an interaction that ties my life to the space around me, I’d probably feel curious or even excited to spend some more time exploring it. In this case, as a designer creating experiences my focus must then be on a quick initiation to the value that their presence in that moment has on Phipps (for ex: how being there makes them / the world a better place, or perhaps being there gives them knowledge that not a lot of people have).

As the learners begin their journey, the information that allows them to process might be showcasing what information do they as learners need? For a learner, having articulated components of the experience to help them create and affix value to their visit. As a learning designer, it is our responsibility to communicate this key information in an effective way, perhaps by leveraging interactions that span over different mediums to reiterate the value of each exhibit they interact with. For example: by using a story or anecdote to introduce a flower or plant, sparking curiosity and encouraging learners to explore more about flowers and plants, including their meanings.

The challenge

Learning new information is tricky since it’s a challenge to retain it. While the way this new information is designed and presented to you is important, it is also important to have this information reiterated to a learner, or by providing them enough opportunities to repeat and practice this information. For example: if we are talking about a learner whose biggest challenge is not being able to instantly attach value to their visitor experience in Phipps, we know that ‘a hook’ is needed to pique their curiosity, push them to explore on their own accord, and feed them with key information at regular intervals which makes them feel engaged and invested in exploring more. Through their journey they might need interactions that engage them to stop, reflect on what they’ve absorbed, and how it applies to their current knowledge repository. As they near the end of their experience, this could further be augmented by introducing experiences (tools/ strategies/prompts) which nudge them to think of ways they can take this knowledge outside of Phipps and apply it to their daily lives. For example: fostering a sense of exclusivity — feeling as if they’re among a select few who have experienced this space/ acquired this important information to be applied outside of Phipps, can redefine what value visitors have gotten from this trip. The human mind will then associate value with the visual, aural, temporal experience of interacting with the plants at Phipps as well as the mediums through which they’ve learnt this information as well as the ways in which this newfound knowledge can improve their lives.

(from L-to-R, Maria, Quinn and I) Us during Thursday’s design jam activity

Thursday’s design building activity in class also helped us orient ourselves to the various kinds of visitors who visited Phipps and imagine what might their hopes and fears be (typing it back to our very first stakeholder activity), how might their current perceptions of Phipps be indicative of their existing learning gaps (reference to the Learning Gaps exercise) and investigate their learning styles (through the lens of McCarthy’s 4MAT cycle). McCarthy’s 4MAT learning cycle was a callback to one of my project’s from when I was working as a UX Researcher, where we had studied kids’ learning styles, and come up with the four stages of how kids learn : by exploration, conceptualisation, implementation + application and finally, advocacy. We had created this “Cycle of Expansive” learning based on the learning behaviors we were noticing among children during the COVID-19 pandemic. With education taking on a more virtual medium of delivery, kids started spending a lot of time online, and discovered their interests through different sources of inspiration and followed it up by exploration — usually within online spaces. Once they found spaces that interested them, they would then spend much more time diving deep, and learning about these topics as much as possible. They were developing a rough schema around their subject of interest at this point and soon enough would try to find avenues to apply this model elsewhere to validate their knowledge. Once they established comfort and familiarity over this subject area, they would develop confidence over the topic and would go on to advocate for themselves as experts in that field. McCarthy’s 4MAT cycle exercise reminded me of that experience.

McCarthy’s 4MAT cycle of learning styles

A snapshot of the Expansive Cycle we’d designed

A day trip to Phipps and some observations:

Spending a couple of hours at Phipps made me realise a couple of things. First, Phipps saw a fair amount of couples or groups of friends visiting as dyads/triads, families with children, and senior citizens.

Nobody seemed to be in a hurry, and walked leisurely, taking their time and clicking pictures. Furthermore, since the experience was meant to be rejuvenating nobody really focused on if they were visiting all the rooms or not. One could start from the Palm Court, and right towards the Serpentine Room, and walk from there to the Fern Room, Stove room and completely miss the Orchid room. We saw one such couple who actually did this, and then one of them looked at the other people walking into the Orchid room and went “Babe! I think we missed that one.”

Map of Phipps that was stuck between rooms

The map that nobody looked at

Glimpses of the visitors in the Sunken Garden at Phipps

The most interesting thing however, was the myriad bits and pieces of conversations that I’d picked up while touring the space. Most people did not seem to know the layout of Phipps, and weren’t bothered about missing out on visiting some of the rooms. They came there to walk and relax, and only seemed to focus on conversations with their company and in occasionally stopping and trying to read the name cards on the plants. The occasional loud exclamations were reserved for when someone saw a plant from Argentina or Madagascar or from some other countries, and pointed it out to their group and said, “Oh! I knew that it was from Madagascar! I saw it in that animated movie — the one with the funky lion you know”.

Towards the end, I myself had gotten lost somewhere near the Nature Play Garden, and as I was in the midst of finding my way back, I met a family with two young children who were also making their way from perhaps the Gallery room. When I asked the mother of the girls what rooms she’d been too, she didn’t remember the names of the rooms but counted them off of her fingertips going “Oh, that room with all the ferns. Then the one that smelled really refreshing. Honey, what was that? (she asked her husband, who couldn’t recollect)” When I prompted if she’d checked out the desert room, she remarked, “I don’t think so. But anyways, it’s all just plants anyway. I don’t think I’m missing too much.”

The family left soon after, but something that I found very interesting was how at the end of the trip, all these unique experiences mish-mashed into one collective , underwhelming takeaway of “it’s just plants”. It reminded me of a Reddit thread that I had come across in my research earlier on where people were criticising Phipps for charging full price for the admission ticket, while restricting access to some of their exhibits.

The trip proved to validate the underlying user problem

That visitors did not know the value that Phipps offered to them. They often equated the value to the time that they spent seeing plants, and the number of rooms they had access to.

This posed a challenge because for a first-time visitor, how one room differed from the other wasn’t very clear. To them it was ‘all just pretty plants’.

Pictured here is Upasna, my roommate who walked into the Fern Room just to turn around and ask me “Which room are we in now?” Notice the name on the glass. She had completely missed it.

LxD | Week 6 | 18 February 2025

As someone who is a native Pittsburgher, how might we design interventions so that they realise the value of Phipps beyond the plants it houses? What kinds of interventions will help drive awareness, acknowledgement and finally an appreciation of what the Conservatory offers to our visitors?

As Wiggins (2005) puts it, how might we gauge how much they truly understand?

Some unprecedented shifts

One of our teammates dropped the course and I and Maria were put into different teams. However, I still continue to retain the key problem statement that I had around creating value for Phipps among its visitors beyond being a space to walk and watch plants.

Goals for this project

My new team has goals which echo similar goals that we did and I’m excited to carry them forward through the rest of this semester.

While Tuesday’s presentation proved to be quite effective in sharing our thoguhts and reflections and progress with Jennifer from Phipps, to me, it was instrumental on two fronts:

1. Gathering feedback on our budding ideas
2. Getting an insiders’ view on how feasible our problem statement was, and how we could expand it and better ground our approach w.r.t Phipps’ spatial and temporal aspects

Jennifer articulated our goals, by stating how impactful it mgiht be to get visitors to think and reflect on ‘why they were visiting Phipps in the first place? What were they seeking?’ and then use our design as a way to bridge what they wanted with what we provided.

From asking ‘ Why are you visiting Phipps today? What do you seek?’ to stating ‘We can help you with that information / learning.’ — a form of potential expectation setting

We also learnt that they are currently working on designing an app for navigating Phipps, and incorporating accessibility measures, so that visitors can hear which rooms to enter, and the key offerings of each room.

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My peers gave us equally insightful feedback, with Ashley suggesting that the issues of ‘wayfinding’ that we’d noticed (of visitors not knowing to take the left or right side as soon as they entered, and the lack of orientation wrt space and the rooms) might be solved with guided pathways, stickers on the floor to show which parts of the space are accessible for people with canes, walking sticks or wheelchairs, vs which are kid-friendly.

Our idea of an interactive map that visitors can choose based on their time, interest, was further extended by my peers suggesting that it could be positioned as an artefact that encouraged repeated visits. By having the map suggest potentially different routes one could take so as to make sure that they have a unique experience every visit, it could drive engagement, a sense of newness and discovery with visiots feeling motivated to visit Phipps again.

This could be useful in tackling yet another pain points of Phipps (which we had not covered in our presentation), of some areas within Phipps being under-appreciated.

Pivoting to a new team: a new topic of interest, but a similar problem statement

I’m now a part of Kimberly, Caitlyn and Ashley’s team who aspire to create an awareness among Phipps’ visitors by positioning how PLants are technology. They aim to target the adult male audiences (in addition to others), since Phipps sees very few visitors who identify as male visiting the space unless they are with families or their spouses. While this is a welcome addition which broadens my scope of interest, I am also now finding ways to design for older adults, since there are so many old people who come there for rest and rejuvenation, and are also visitors who explore and experience the space by taking their own sweet time.

After attending the first project call today, I found it especially interesting how they are trying to showcase the practical applications of plants to a broad range of audience while infusing aspects of Pittsburgh’s history within the entire experience. I was suggested to skim through the Silent Spring, an environmental science book by Rachel Carson which discusses the the environmental harm caused by the indiscriminate use of DDT, a pesticide used by soldiers during World War II. I wonder if in the context of our project, this might be used to study if and how these pesticides have affected Pittsburgh’s native flora, and how that change could potentially impact the applications of plants that we are trying to demonstrate.

Exploring new ideas

We discussed the potential of exploring Chlorophyll Printing as an idea.

Chlorophyll Printing, is alternative photographic process where photographic images are developed on natural leaves through the action of photosynthesis. This organic technique does not use chemicals since the photographs are exposed directly to the sunlight on plants or trees leaves.

While the idea sounds interesting i suspect one challenge. Visitors may embracing the inherent “slow” process which might rejuvenate them, since it takes hours to days for the process to be completed. However, the visitors in the space might not be patient enough to wait around?

Is there a way then that we get them to participate in the process- set some milestones within the interactions, so that they feel motivated to then carry this back home and continue on with their experience? Kim liked the idea, and we plan on exploring it further.

A reference of Chlorophyll print on different leaves

LxD | Week 7 | 25th February

“When it comes to Introducing a skill to learners vs teaching them — teaching takes time and practice, while simply Introducing may not.”

Introduction is simply familiarising them with the first step.

As I read this, I am transported back to my time as a UX researcher in India where we were asked to map how kids were learning in the digital age of the COVID pandemic. This was a request for one of our key products, that was similar to Google Lens, which served as a portal to bring in students from the physical world into the digital world. The goal behind the product was that a child who is studying using their textbook, might run into an issue, say, with a new concept that they have been introduced to. In such a case, they take their device, open our app, and tap on the camera icon (which is how the Portal feature was supposed to be on the homepage), and the computer vision technology, scans the keyword and then returns relevant results — in the form of learning videos, bite-sized content for children to quickly get familiarised with the concept, as well as gain mastery over it.

When we started our research, the problem we realized went far beyond wondering “Why won’t kids use our Portal feature?” We unearthed how children were learning, and we loosely outlined the various stages of their learning journey. Kids discover something of interest, pursue it by exploring it further on multiple mediums, and then find avenues to practice or apply the knowledge they’ve learnt and finally, after a string of successes in this application, they develop confidence over their knowledge and start advocating for themselves and the need for this skill / knowledge among their peers. We’d named this as the Cycle of Expansive Learning, because every time they learnt something new, they built off of their existing knowledge about it.

The Expansive Learning Cycle as designed by us in 2021

As I was reading McTighe (2005), I wondered then if similar to our expansive learning cycle — if just introducing them — ie., by inspiring them and giving them the tools to spot opportunities and avenues to explore and implement their new found knowledge might be enough?

Wiggins and McTighe mentioned that the 2 key components to developing a skill are practice and feedback.

Practice: Creating opportunities for learners to practice

The way we structure practice:

• By outlining the Goals of practice: proficiency and unconscious competence, while maintaining this balance since bombarding learners with too much info leads to the brain using too much fuel and the brain starts to hurt.

LxD | Week 8| 11th March

Right before heading into Spring break, our team did two main activities:

1. A blockbusting session where we challenged our own ideas, through iterative round — all designed to by eliminating our mental blocks. For example: in one of our rounds, we began with listing absolute must-haves for the redesign of a product that we were assigned, and challenged ourselves to make sure that the design task is tackled without the must-haves we had identified in the previous round.

Takeaway: I am excited to see the results a blockbusting activity might result in if we were to conduct this in our group. We did not have the time to do so in class, and the next class was our stand-up presentation for Jennifer.

1. Feedback from Jennifer: Jennifer was excited about our idea and we received good feedback from the cohort on our idea of creating a station in Phipps which describes the ethnobotanical uses of plants and positions them as the fundamental blocks of technology. We further proposed that we would like to provide visitors with take-home, DIY kits to enable and encourage them to practice chlorophyll printing at their homes as well.

Takeaway: we were pushed to find ways of incorporating Pittsburgh’s industrial history with that of its flora. How might we bring about that aspect strongly throguh our experience?

A slide from the learning theories that we were keen to explore and implement through our designed experience

LxD | Week 9 | 18th March

As we enter into Week 8 of our Learning Experience Design course, we look at one of the key things that can make or break any learning experience: Motivation.

The dictionary defines motivation as “the general desire or willingness of someone to do something”.

According to Lovett’s Model of Motivation, we’ve learnt that motivation is dependent on expectancy and value. Value is guided by subjective goals, and value can be attainment, intrinsic or instrumental value. Attainment is the satisfaction that one achieves through mastery of a concept, while Intrinsic value refers to the satisfaction that they get from doing the task itself, and instrumental value is when what they learn helps them accomplish other goals.

Value drives motivation, but people must also have the belief in their ability to complete the task — and this is expectancy. The expectations of being able to perform or not perform certain tasks are called expectancies. Expectancies are also of 3 types — positive outcome expectancies, which is the belief that specific actions will bring about a desired outcome, negative outcome expectancies –the belief that specific actions have no influence on a desired outcome, and, Efficacy expectancies represent the

belief that one is capable of identifying, organizing, initiating, and executing a course of action that will bring about a desired outcome.

In our case, our visitors must not only be able to identify and articulate the value of knowing about the ethnobotanical uses of plants but must also be able to build the belief that they can harness this knowledge in their everyday life. This is key because if we want them to learn about ethnobotanical uses, we want them to do so by trying it out in the space — at Phipps conservatory. This is more complex than it seems, as this involves visitors actually pausing or breaking away from their journey of just passively touring the exhibits at Phipps to come by and interact with our station. If they believe they cannot do it, we lose visitors even willing to come and try out our station in the first place.

According to Lovett, goals focused on performance may take two forms: performance-approach goals and performance-avoidance goals. In the case of our design experience, we want learners to take on initiative guided by learning goals. Owing to how hands-on our experience will be, it might be beneficial to allow our visitors to have a affective goal — engaging in a hands-on immersive exercise of Chlorophyll Printing.

Goals are important to be set at the beginning of the experience since they direct Learning and performance.

Introducing Plants and Technology, and getting visitors to buy into this vision, might be a big undertaking — especially owing to the environment. From our research we know that visitors come to Phipps for rest and relaxation and pitching something “new” for them to learn might cause some unrest and anxiety among older audiences — especially those who do not consider themselves to be very tech savvy. Looking at the general demographic of Phipps’ visitors, people older than 65 years , who come to relax at Phipps and walk around might feel overwhelmed if we position our design as a “learning experience”. It might also benefit to have it look playful, self-explanatory, and something that people can try out for fun, instead of burdening them with words such as technology- lest they start becoming unsure of their capabilities to complete the activity

We therefore, would like to leverage Zimmerman’s Magic Circle example to design a playful experience where visitors can freely explore, interact and learn from our design without the pressure of real world’s uncertainties, fears, questions around capabilities etc.

Below is a screenshot of our Magic circle, where through our design we want to create an experience where our rules of play allow them to make mistakes, allow them time and space for free exploration, provide feedback and constant guidance on how to do Chlorophyll Printing, as well as potential ways their prints could look cool!

The Magic Circle activity

Stacie introduced us to the Magic Circle through a fun musical chairs activity, where the rules of the world were done away with as we entered the “game space” or the “magic circle”. Owing to the layout of the classroom with the tables that were fixed and couldn’t be moved, we were struggling to find space to set up the chairs as well as leave enough space for us to go around. One of our classmates, Kim, suggested we put chairs on either ends of the classroom, sparking some interest — since doing something like that would have eliminated our issue of more people and not enough chairs for all. It was also interesting to see how we all were familiar with Musical Chairs as a game, and immediately abandoned the realities of the world to develop the play mindset, and jumped in with curiosity to explore and play. We all stayed engaged throughout this short game and also ended up betting on who would win at the end.

A quick game of musical chairs got us all into a lusory attitude

This experience encouraged us to think of a few things:

• First, how open-ended must our designed interaction be? Musical chairs are a well known game played across cultures, and all of us had some level of relatability to it. In the case of Chlorophyll Printing, not everyone will know of it. How then do we establish rules quickly so as to encourage users to explore and complete the interaction?
• Do we want it to be a game ? A game is close-ended, but the element of play is strong enough to generate some curiosity among people and push them to participate in the interaction. They are willing to “play” our game, and therefore, visitors successfully bring to the interaction a lusory attitude,i.e., the willingness to accept the made up rules for the pleasure the game affords. And if not, how might our experience in itself nudge people to develop a lusory attitude?

The success of our game is dependent on this.

Week 11 | 1 April 2025

Our broad long-term goal has been identified as making sure that through different interactions and multiple visits at Phipps, visitors slowly start to become stewards of the environment.

Everytime we have a team meeting, we discuss how the different experiences come together to create a change in people’s attitudes and behaviors towards Phipps, and plants.

Our deliverables for now comprise of 3 parts:

• Signage directing visitors to the Chlorophyll station at Phipps
• A Chlorophyll printing station at Phipps
• A take home kit or a pamphlet which provides step-by-step information of how to do chlorophyll printing

We envision that participants will enter the space, and encounter signage that will direct them to our station. This generates curiosity, and they arrive at the station, where they see the Chlorophyll prints laid out on a table.

ideas for signage at Phipps

We label this stage as “feel the experience” where the experience is led by a Phipps staff member. The experience at this stage is heavily visual and tactile, since our visitors learn through touching and sensing the texture of the leaves.

inviting learners to participate

There is a “live demo” section where visitors will see staff members showing them how it works by placing a transparency with a high-contrast image over a fresh leaf and securing it in a frame.

learn as you see

The Take home component of our experience involves an “instructional booklet on how to make chlorophyll prints”.

booklet to help identify materials needed, follow-along instructions

Our Learning theory

Our learning theory for this experience builds off of 3 different theories:

1. Lovett’s Cycle of Practice and Feedback
2. McCarthy’s 4MAT system
3. Dirksen’s Structured Flow of Goals

Lovett’s Cycle of Practice and Feedback

The experience begins with introducing learners to the concept of Chlorophyll printing and creating motivation for them to try it out. We drive self-efficacy in this stage by giving them examples of leaves which have been printed on, and through writing to let them know that this is a task that is within their capabilities.

Through the Cycle of Practice and Feedback, our aim is that our learners see and learn how to do Chlorophyll printing step-by-step.

McCarthy’s 4MAT system

The cycle of Practice and Feedback shows people how to do chlorophyll printing. We assume that repeated practice will eventually make learners comfortable with this concept and also make them think of different ways to do chlorophyll printing. From learning “How” to do it, learners now move into the “What If” scenario thinking of different ways of extending their knowledge.

Over time the “fun” aspect might give way to getting learners to think how this knowledge is of value to them, and why learning this makes them and their knowledge valuable to people around them. As they start associating the ‘Why’ to their learning, they become more reflective wondering their own competency, the value this knowledge could bring to their lives and their community and may engage in our activities to learn about other ethnobotanical uses.

Dirksen’s Structured Flow of Goals

This cycle applies to learning one of the many applications of ethnobotany. Maybe there could be multiple other applications, each of which fit within their own cycle of practice and feedback imparting knowledge on “how to do” a certain task, upon practicing which might help users think of the myriad other applications of ethnobotany.

“what if we could all use new ethnobotanical uses of plants to transition towards a more sustainable, environmentally friendly future?” could be a potential train of thought that our learners could be having. This could lead to further explorations and learning about other uses of plants, which could further influence the way they think of and perceive plants around them.

While smaller, short-term goals teach visitors familiarity and an ease of use when utilising natural materials in daily lives, overtime, we see this leading to a gradual change in behavior with learners becoming “stewards of ethnobotany”.

Over the course of their visit and with their interactions with different exhibits at Phipps, they could also ‘become a steward of Phipps’.

This could reinforce the long term goal of them becoming stewards of Phipps.

Week 12 | 8th April

For the Speed dating activity this week, we drafted a short deck explaining our research goals, the learning frameworks we were using to design our experience as well as showcasing our design through sketches to gather peer feedback.

I received feedback from Priyanshi and Yilin, and found it very helpful that they seemed to resonate with some ideas and they couldn’t.

Our participants wanted some agency in picking and choosing a print of their choice for chlorophyll printing. While we had taken prints of images of Pittsburgh’s neighbourhoods, and a few telling images of the industrial pollution in Pittsburgh, I think it felt too abrupt to our users and I received questions along the lines of “can’t I choose my own picture?”, “it could be Phipps related, maybe like a selfie of me at Phipps?”

My biggest takeaway from the session was that people only resonated with an event or a place if they were a part of it. For example, when I presented my rationale to Yilin around why we’ve pre-chosen our pictures for digital negatives, she said, “but I wasn’t around during the industrial era of this city. Pittsburgh to me, is CMU. So can I have an image of CMU?”

Yilin had also requested for an FAQ section in our kit and when I showed her the visual take home kit — or atleast, some components of it , she mentioned that that’s what she was looking for.

The visuals seemed to be quite self-explanatory, with both my reviewers exclaiming that it looks so easy.

This helped me realise that having a visual-heavy instruction guide, could help people follow-along with the technique of Chlorophyll Printing.

Quick snapshot of my notes and the feedback we received

questions posed by my peers during the speed dating exercise

Testing strategies employed:

1. a “think-out-loud” protocol: I’d asked my peers to think out aloud everything they were seeing on the screen, and had print outs of visuals ready which I started to hand over to them so that they could look at that too. I gave them ample time to look at the visuals, and process it the way they would if they had 30 second, 1 min and 3 mins. This was done so as to understand if the information on the manual can be skimmed easily or not.
2. Photo-Elicitation: looking at photos, and thinking-out-loud, where the interactions in these photos could live in Phipps, was helpful in refining the interaction touchpoints
3. Scenario-based research: I curated a few questions, which I asked my peers towards the end of each session. I gave them a hypothetical scenario to consider — what if they were designing this experience for Phipps, how would they do it differently? Placing peers in our shoes, helped them think big, and generate ideas freely.

References:

• The Third Teacher. (2010). United Kingdom: Harry N. Abrams.
• Dirksen, J. (2015). Design for How People Learn. United Kingdom: Pearson Education.
• McCarthy, B. (1996). About Learning. United States: Excel.
• McCarthy, B. (2000). About Teaching: 4MAT in the Classroom. United States: About Learning, Incorporated.
• Wiggins, G. P., McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by Design. United States: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
• https://www.alternativephotography.com/chlorophyll-prints/