Instructional Design and Glassblowing – Science and Art

On a recent flight to Madrid, I sat next to a glassblower from the Portland area and we talked shop. After hours of discussing the intricacies of blowing and shaping glass, I tried to explain to him where my work as an instructional designer and technologist finds overlap with his occupation.

I learned that working with glass requires an eye for the artistic and a concern for the technical. Glass can be stretched, colored, tempered and rendered opaque; yielding common tableware or a postmodern work of art. However, for most glassblowers, artistic concerns often take back seat to the exigency of making a living. So, the glassblower’s primary focus on any given day is to create objects that meet customers’ requirements: price, time frame, color, size and other form-related variables that can be manipulated. While cable TV often portrays the art of glassblowing in showy and captivating clips demonstrating dramatic movement of metal rods shaping molten glass, much of the work of the glassblower is in fact invisible to the customer. In fact, much of the behind-the-scenes process has little to do with the act of shaping glass. The more he talked, the more I realized how much instructional design resembles glassblowing.

1. Like glassblowing, instructional design is systematic. According to my glassblower friend, the customer sees the plate, vase or sculpture and marvels at its beauty while grumbling about price. Like instructional design, much of the cost around producing a deliverable is buried in the process of qualifying what approach to use, the audience’s needs, the scope and complexity of the project, ensuring accessibility and usability, and so on. Business maxims about 9 parts planning and one part execution are as true about glassblowing as they are about course design and production. To some, glassblowing might resemble a systems approach to design (Dick and Carey’s model in particular)—interrelated parts working together towards a predefined goal.

2. Glassblowers generally start their project by determining their patron’s constraints. Time, cost and complexity are most frequently the core considerations that define project specifics. If nothing else, these factors help keep the utility of the produced item at the forefront, prevent scope creep, and help establish project expectations early in the process. While there are glassblowers who spend more of their time creating art, this is the exception in the industry, and for most, constitutes a small portion of time on the job compared to those projects that allow one to pay the bills. Instructional designers also live in a world where constraints matter. Does a customer bring $300 or $300,000 to the project? Do they need it next week or next year? Is the course one hour long or one hundred hours long? Many businesses over the last decade have utilized e-learning as a means to cut costs of travel and this factor also feeds into a systems-based approach to instructional design. Are high-level stakeholders primarily motivated by cost cutting or by instructional concerns? The reality is that both viewpoints tug on a project and help shape its limits, tone, and utility.

3. Glassblowing is technical. Sketching, painting, shaping clay are artistic expressions that are generally accessible to the novice, albeit there are technical aspects found in each art form. Blowing glass requires access to a furnace and knowledge of how to inflate molten glass into shapes that depend on the molten glass viscosity. In short, the skill of the gaffer or glassmith is one that demands attention to the technical. Instructional designers must also be intimately familiar with how the various parts of a course fit together: process, production, editing, evaluation, distribution—and competency in each area should be developed enough to allow one to complete each step of the process with little or no assistance when the project demands it. And so, it might be fair to say that both the glassblower and the instructional designer are misunderstood: The glassblower does inflate molten glass and the instructional designer does design. But, both share a title that captures only a single piece of their occupational focus.

There is tremendous variety in what defines a glassblower. Some work in factories, others for cable TV. Some craft art and others are all about utility. At the end of the day, process and technical considerations are what all glassblowers have in common. While my new-found glassblower friend might find my analogy full of hot air, I still think back to our shared conversation and see the similarities between the life of the glassblower and the instructional designer. Like glassblowing, instructional design is both a science and an art. Moore, Bates and Grundlind  believe that instructional design is both a science and an art (2002): “a science because it is rooted in learning theories and an art because the designing of instructional materials is a highly creative process.”

Dick, Walter, and Carey, Lou. (1990). The systematic design of instruction. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman/Little, Brown Higher Education.

Moore, Dermot, Bates, Annemarie, and Grundling, Jean. (2002). Instructional design. In Mishra, Arun K. and Bartram, John (Ed.) Skills development through distance education [on-line]. Available: http://www.col.org/skills/.

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