When communication fails, people get hurt. When a future newborn’s parents don’t understand how vaccines work, they swallow propaganda selling disinformation at a handsome profit and conclude they should engineer controlled exposure to build immunity — the irony flying overhead, unnoted. When law enforcement officers don’t recognize autism, disability can become culpability at the speed of a well-practiced gun draw. When the workforce cannot parse contracts or the electorate, ballots, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are relinquished by open palms.

Learning design is, at its core, a series of decisions that direct or redirect the steps other people take toward or away from their own good. It is also, therefore, the field in which I have chosen to further hone the instrument I most enjoy wielding: communication.

Persuasion Is a Design Problem

The first thing I want to learn better is the one I am already doing: constraints-bound, communication-powered problem-solving. Continuing to learn about learning design means continuing to think about how to move people with mere words. All I have to do is look at the first news notification on my phone or out the window at the grass where snow should be to know that human beings need to be influenced toward evidence-based decision-making. Learning design is, quite self-evidently, people-influencing. 

The craft I am pursuing here is precision: how to compete with marketing, rhetoric, misinformation, and disinformation using nothing but structure, sequence, and word choice — and win. The resource I will be working through is Create Accessible WCAG E-learning in Articulate 360 Storyline, because accessibility is not a compliance checkbox. It is the precondition for any communication that intends to reach as close to everyone as possible. 

Making Complexity Legible

Words can be translated, yes, but who gets to decide which people count enough to have their languages included? Symbols, on the other hand, have proven themselves able to cross nearly every border. Beachgoers can’t interpret a sign written in someone else’s language where a symbolic depiction of riptide could have been—and air-displacing saltwater doesn’t wait for legislation to catch up. I am not interested in decoration that flutters and flails around what needs to be said. I am interested in the potential impact of data visualization, the quality of which can be directly measured in the stakes of what was being communicated. The resource I will be working through is Graphic Design Master Class – Learn Great Design, which I will be approaching not as an aesthetic education but as a study in how the eye is directed and what the brain will make of it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Devil’s in the Details but So Is Divinity

I am ever-haunted by the possibility that there is a way to use whatever software in which I am operating at any given moment that would dramatically reduce the amount of time I am investing in relation to the returns — or that there is a more precise or impactful way to achieve my vision that I am not taking advantage of because I am unaware of how to use it. 

Immediately before I began this essay, I sent a communication to the branch of Michigan’s state government responsible for economic development. They had sent me a survey requesting feedback on the state’s career portal. I used it to notify them that their website has a glaring UX problem I first noticed over two years ago. I wrote the truth: since someone on their team has yet to stop dropping this ball, I wanted to provide my contact information and an offer to lend my expertise. Then I left them with this: I’m not joking or scamming. I am a real resident with real expertise who has noted a real problem that no one is solving, and I want to contribute because I actually understand socioeconomic interdependence: that helping my neighbors, my state, and its economy means helping my own family.

That is constraints-bound communication inside a tool — a government survey form — with severe limitations. I refused to leave its capability on the table. The tool I am most haunted by right now is WordPress. The resource I will be working through is Becoming a WordPress Developer: Unlocking Power with Code — not because I’m unaware of the many off-the-shelf web builder options or vibecoding, but because trading power for ease can breed nestling in, and with it, resistance to discomfort. On the other hand, the discomfort that inevitably accompanies challenges almost always heralds growth and growth is for the alive.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Looking Forward

Legibility, precision, and persuasion are not three separate disciplines. They are the same problem approached from three angles: what the reader can receive, what the eye can parse, and what the tool will allow. I do not study learning design because it is a career path. I study it because truth needs allies right now and incisive communication skills cut through noise. I intend to keep honing mine.