Keeping the Why: Armature and Design Data Infrastructure for Learning Engineering

Learning engineering has mature infrastructure for recording what learners do and almost none for recording how the designs they experience came to be. The reasoning that connects a learning need to objectives, activities, assessments and outcomes has no system of record. Within a project, the relations between design artifacts live in documents and memory. And there is no shared bridge between design and learning data. This paper introduces Armature, open infrastructure for design data: a schema and an API over a versioned graph that records design artifacts, the named relations between them, and every change with its author and reason. Tools are designed to write to the graph as a byproduct of ordinary design work, and the graph returns analysis computedfrom its structure. The paper then checks Armature’s architectural decisions against the literature on earlier attempts to record design, from executable learning design languages to design rationale systems and decision records. Those attempts mostly faded for recurring reasons, and Armature’smain decisions are designed to answer them. Two conditions lie beyond what the architecture can supply: reasons good enough to use, and a professional norm that sustains the record.