Badge System Design: ideas to build on

Hey there, happy new year! I hope that the new year is going well and continues to go well for everyone. Over the holidays—and for quite some time actually—I’ve been meditating on some thoughts about badges and systems. And in the interest of starting 2014 off right, I have decided to throw them out here for discussion. Some of the ideas I’m pretty committed to and others are drifting in a bit more of a nebulous state. Still, overall there’s good content in here worth discussing, content I plan to build on throughout the year.

So how about a bit of context for this content? Last year saw me working closely with Radhika Tandon on ideas for illustrating and communicating badge system design tenets. Her innovative thinking led me to rethink some of my own proposed concepts and continue to explore others. What you’ll find below in the first set is a distillation of some ideas previously expressed in the (still fledgling) white paper about a the framework—previously principles—of a complex adaptive badge system. You’ll note that I’m now intentionally including the “complex adaptive” descriptor. Why? Because it’s a mistake to call an effective badge system a simple system. Indeed, a truly functional system is one that grows, changes, and evolves. It is one that adapts and eventually produces emergent qualities. I’m hoping that we can begin talking about and seeing some emergent qualities emanating from complex adaptive badge systems this year. (Suggestions welcome!)

Outline / framework for badge design
A quick explanation of the list: it began with enumerating a set of single words that encapsulated a primary, defining idea for badge system design. The second word came into being when I began to try to explain the first word from a slightly different perspective. Interestingly enough, the second word performed more of a conceptual rounding out than I had anticipated. Additionally, the second words provided new ideological possibilities because the first and second words began to create sets. In other words, they had a multiplying effect that resulted in sums greater than their parts.

I’m listing these quickly here in an effort to get them out there so we can begin talking about them in detail. Obviously, they’re somewhat stripped of their context—that will come! Even so, I’d love to hear your response to these basic structural tenets. No doubt the third one will invite a lot of discussion. I certainly hope so. But, here they are.

1. Ethos / Intent
2. Content / Recognition
3. Assessment / Estimation / Appraisal / Reckoning
4. Visual / Interpretation
5. Tech / Implementation

7 aspects of roadmapping + resource management
This set of ideas sprang from our MOOC on badges. In addition to building the badge system for the MOOC, I also ran two labs; one about badge system design and one about badge system roadmapping. What you see below is the streamlined view of the latter lab. I truly enjoyed this lab: it stretched my capabilities in thinking about and expressing tangential yet vital aspects of developing a complex adaptive badge system. The order is not necessarily pointing toward any deep meaning; however, some of the enumerated points may be contingent upon others.

I hope to dive into this list this year. There are many ideas here that deserve their own discussion. For example, Funding appears to be a continuing concern for many badge creators. This concern might possibly be mitigated by developing partnerships between organizations. In my discussions and research, this has not been a typical finding. Okay, so take a gander at these, we’ll be visiting them again this year.

1. Funding
2. Partnerships
3. Research
4. System design
5. Timing / time management
6. Technical resources
7. Design resources

2014 is going to be an exciting year for the open badges ecosystem and I’m looking forward to discussing it with you here, during MOOCs, on blogs, and during the Mozilla Open Badges Research / System Design call.

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Much more soon.

Tagged: badge system design, badge systems, complex adaptive system, drumbeat, mozilla, openbadges