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Design, including instructional design, is one of most complex and ill-structured kinds of problem solving. Historically, instructional design has been conceptualized as a linear set of phases (e.g., analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation) that a designer progresses through. Silber (2007) has provided an alternative perspective on the instructional design process. He argues that instructional design, as it is practiced by experts, is moderately structured and heuristic, not procedural, comprised of thinking processes and guided by accepted principles. In this article, the author argues that design is ill-structured, and the primary thinking process that all designers (including experts and non-experts) employ is decision making that occurs in cycles. Decisions are driven less by accepted principles than they are by constraint satisfaction and beliefs, some of which are culturally accepted and others that are context specific. Unlike Silber, the author does not propose this process as a model of instructional design. Rather, he describes how design problems are typically solved and the implications of that process for designers and design education.
