[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/) # Fostering System-Level Perspective Taking when Designing for Change in Educational Systems ## Details **Authors** Weiner, Steven and Warr, Melissa and Mishra, Punya **Year** 2020 **Publisher** TechTrends, vol. 64, no. 5, pp. 779-788 (Springer, for the Association for Educational Communications and Technology) **Kind of work** article **Discipline** Education **Secondary disciplines** Systems Science, Public Policy **Kind of engagement** scholarly **Applied** true [Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-020-00529-w) 10.1007/s11528-020-00529-w ## In authors' words ### Abstract A core element of systems thinking is perspective taking. Perspectives help people distinguish between salient and irrelevant information, take particular types of actions, and make sense of the world. In this article, we consider what systems thinking and perspective taking means for designers in education. First, we present a framework, the five spaces for design in education, to illustrate design work in education. The framework presents five spaces for design: artifacts, processes, experiences, systems, and culture. We claim that most—if not all—educators participate in design work; however, the design spaces they work in vary. Consequently, educational designers often fail to consider the perspectives of those working in different spaces, resulting in failed reform efforts. We illustrate this concept through the technology integration attempts of the Los Angeles Unified School District. We argue more effective design in education occurs when designers both recognize their own design perspective and are aware of other perspectives. ### What they set out to do (purpose) To establish what systems thinking and perspective taking mean for designers in education, and to show that reform succeeds when designers recognize both their own design perspective and the perspectives of those working in other design spaces. ### Who or what was studied (sample) No human participants. The analytic object is a single documentary case, the Los Angeles Unified School District's approximately $1.3 billion iPad and Common Core software initiative under Superintendent John Deasy, contrasted with the approach taken by his successor Ramon Cortines. ### How they did it (methods) A conceptual article with an illustrative case reanalysis. The authors define design across Buchanan's orders and set out five spaces for design in education (artifacts, processes, experiences, systems, culture); introduce DSRP and isolate its perspectives rule; argue for taking on and then aligning others' design perspectives, using orchestra and jazz-improvisation analogies; and reread the LAUSD case through the resulting framework. Table 2 maps each of the five design spaces onto a point and a view. ### What they found (results) The authors conclude that large-scale educational change requires actors at many levels to share goals, coordinate action, and respond to local conditions, and that the five spaces framework shows how design perspectives either work at cross-purposes or align. They argue that LAUSD's first superintendent began in the artifact space rather than the system and culture spaces where a district leader's design capacity lies, and gave little weight to the views of teachers, instructional designers, and the curriculum head. They recommend judging designs as better and worse rather than good and bad. ## Commentary ### In short Weiner, Warr, and Mishra adopt the perspectives rule of DSRP as the analytic core of their five spaces framework for design in education, decomposing each design space into a point and a view, and use it to reread the Los Angeles Unified School District's iPad initiative as a failure to coordinate design perspectives. ### In more detail The paper's own contribution is the five spaces for design in education: artifacts, processes, experiences, systems, and culture. DSRP enters when the authors need an account of how a designer working in one space sees the work of another. They survey the systems thinking literature, call DSRP a particularly useful and clear way to analyze perspectives in systems, cite Cabrera and Colosi (2008) and Cabrera and Cabrera (2019), and state that DSRP complements and in some ways operationalizes the five spaces by adding a cognitive layer to them. They then narrow deliberately to the P. The machinery they import is the point-view decomposition from Cabrera, Cabrera, and Powers (2015): every perspective consists of a point, the viewer, and a view, that which is being looked at, with the point's mental models determining what registers as salient. Figure 2 diagrams this. The authors then work it through a single object. A teacher is a point who sees a classroom assessment from a particular view; an administrator, a teacher in another discipline, and a real-estate economist are other points whose mental models yield different views of the same assessment. Table 2, titled "Applying DSRP perspective analysis to the Five Spaces for Design in Education framework," generalizes this by naming the typical points and views of each space: coders, engineers, and teachers as points in the artifact space, with apps, devices, and classroom layouts as views; everyone, and school and district leaders in particular, as points in the culture space, with values-displaying events and activities as views. Some views, apps and devices among them, appear under two spaces, which the authors read as evidence that the spaces overlap in practice. The LAUSD reanalysis applies the apparatus. Deasy is treated as a point operating in the artifact space, procuring hardware and software, while the authority he held placed his design capacity in the system and culture spaces; the concerns raised by teachers, instructional designers, and the district's curriculum head are treated as views from points he did not take. Cortines, by contrast, is credited with assembling a task force drawn from several spaces before deciding anything. The other three patterns are named once in the exposition and not developed: the paper's part-whole discussion, in a passage on maps of San Francisco, is drawn from Barba (2019) rather than from DSRP. ### Response The paper uses the perspectives rule as the theory states it. A perspective is a point and a view, the point being the viewer and the view what is seen from it, and Table 2 holds to that distinction rather than collapsing it: the educator occupies the point, the design product occupies the view. The authors are also right that perspective taking is what lets a designer separate salient information from irrelevant information, which in DSRP terms is a perspective acting on a distinction, though the paper does not name it that way. What the paper leaves undone is the rest of the framework it borrowed. Its five spaces nest: artifacts sit inside processes, processes inside experiences, experiences inside systems, systems inside culture. The systems rule would make that nesting explicit and would say which design products are parts of which wholes. Having taken the P and set D, S, and R aside, the paper reads the LAUSD failure as a clash of perspectives when a part-whole reading is also available and sharper: a superintendent designing in the artifact space was making decisions whose wholes lay in the system and culture spaces, which is why the artifacts arrived without the processes, experiences, and culture that would have carried them. The reading the authors give is correct as far as it goes, and one rule further would have carried it. **Patterns it shows** D, P Shows it makes a difference **Added** 2026-11-02 **How to cite this** Weiner, Steven and Warr, Melissa and Mishra, Punya (2020). Fostering System-Level Perspective Taking when Designing for Change in Educational Systems. TechTrends, vol. 64, no. 5, pp. 779-788 (Springer, for the Association for Educational Communications and Technology).