Make visible the installed base of existing infrastructures and discern its relationship with the innovation¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

This second IMPROV action area focuses on surfacing extant infrastructures and their relations with an innovation. The article explains that "Extant infrastructures serve as an 'installed base' for innovation" and that their inertia may constrain the introduced innovation. Teams should use document analysis and interviews with key social actors to understand the installed base, then determine whether it sustains, is uninterested in, or contradicts the innovation, choosing courses of action accordingly.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Research methods such as document analysis and interviews with key social actors are needed to generate design options responsive to the installed base

Constraints¶

• The installed base is an actor in its own right and can either promote or impede change; users accustomed to it may resist the introduced innovation

Target Learners¶

• learning designers and researchers
• school leaders

Target Learning Goals¶

• anticipating how existing structures constrain or enable an educational innovation

Related Strategies¶

• Rally for coherence-making and infrastructure remaking activities between innovation and practice
• Identify key social actors and expand design areas to include design in-use by practitioners
• Orchestrate meta-design and capacity building so practitioners can engage in design in-use
• Plan for possible points of infrastructuring, including breakdowns and anticipation work
• Evaluate infrastructures continually using process-tracking methods such as ethnography and embedded sensors

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Chen, B. (2024). A framework for infrastructuring sustainable innovations in education. Journal of the Learning Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2024.2320159