ABSTRACT
It was August 2007 in the desert – 120 degrees with dust swirling under the beating sun as the world’s largest mall sat unfinished – when I realized that this was not my typical design project. I had been hired to lead a small team tasked with designing instruction on how to clean the soon-to-be-open Dubai Mall for over 400 non-English-speaking laborers. All the information generated from our initial meetings, our initial needs assessment, and even the client’s initial request had suddenly become irrelevant. The project had veered onto a new course as the mall was behind in construction, the laborers were not yet in-country for training due to visa issues, and the instruction that we had already designed was no longer wanted. I was in a foreign country, with most of my design team in the US, when I realized that everything I learned in my ID (Instructional Design) courses could not have possibly prepared me for this. The only way I was going to be successful in this design project was by pulling from my 20-plus years of experience, my ability to live daily in the uncertainty of this project, and my willingness to rapidly design numerous solutions knowing that none of them might work and that I would likely have to go back and start again. This project forced me to realize that the students I was teaching would not be able to do this work if I continued to teach design the way I was taught and the way it was currently being taught in the classroom. Although I always knew that the step-by-step approach to teaching design did not apply outside of the safe confines of the classroom, I had not up to this point realized I was actually doing a disservice to my students. After seven years of teaching design, my methods of instruction were permanently altered by this epiphany.
