ABSTRACT
Design is fundamentally about specifying how something should be implemented in order to best fulfill its intended purpose. Many of the things we use every day are designed so as to make the performance of a particular task possible, easier, more pleasant, and in some cases more affordable (see, for example, Norman, 1988). In short, design permeates our experience of the world in the form of various artifacts and technologies. As a consequence, the literature on design is vast, and far beyond a fair review or summary in this volume. This is still true if we limit our concern to instructional design, although instructional design has much to learn and has borrowed extensively from the general field of design. In this chapter, the focus will be first on some general principles of design and then on principles to consider when designing systems and environments to support learning, instruction and performance.
