"Ideas are debt"
Ideas can spark action—but not all are worth the investment.
👋 Hi! Thanks for reading. Welcome to the 11 new subscribers to Learning, Designed! 🙌 I get a rush ⚡️ with every new subscriber invested in driving change in education using design.
I’m writing because education wasn't designed around students but we can improve the learner experience through design. I share stories, tips, and work in progress weekly.
Why it matters: Ideas are the starting point of a commitment to action: time, energy, and attention. A lazy, ill-formed, or institution-centric idea will require the same investment (often more) as a thoughtful, targeted, human-centered one. Ideas are easy to create, be vigilant with your purpose and commitment you make to pursue them.
Go deeper:
Getting into edtech and an intro to design
I joined EAB in 2013 during the meteoric growth of a student success product designed to support academic advisors and increase retention and graduation rates. I advised students on campus in a previous role and worked with senior academic leaders through a Board I served on at the time, so they overlooked that I was new to tech. But, as the primary contact and consultant for a dozen Universities launching the tool, I had to learn fast about the tech world. I learned about development and release cycles, effort, and product strategy and roadmaps. I collaborated with business analysts, product managers, engineers, and UX designers. It was fun, moved fast, and we learned and built the plane as we flew it, as our partners demanded.
A lesson from Benno
Enter Benno. At the time EAB was a growing division of The Advisory Board Company (ABC), a healthcare research, consulting, and tech company. Benno worked at ABC with a new product manager, Grace, who would later become my girlfriend and, eventually, wife. She would tell me stories about the team she worked on and the designer who was slowly building her knowledge and experience with human-centered design by staying close to the consultants who were working with their products users every day.
As a result of their work together and our time at many meetups and beyond, I’ve learned many important kernels about human-centered design from Benno. In fact, he was the impetus for my attendance at the 2016 DC Service Jam where my design career “began.”
Lately, in the crest of the AI wave and the wake of 2025 posts about the future of education, there’s one insight from Benno that rings loudest these days:
“Ideas are debt.” -Benno
A strange sentiment coming from a designer, right? Those sticky note pushing, creative artists often found telling us to suspend judgement and pursue our curiosity. When framed with the discipline of the design process, not really.
A few notes on ideas
Benno’s point requires some nuance:
Ideas are important as they are the starting point for action.
Not all ideas are created equal.
High-value ideas stem from a deep understanding of the needs, motivations, and behaviors of the people they are designed for.
High-value ideas align to criteria about what they must do to address the problem.
To test ideas, identify the assumptions embedded in them, deliberately isolate them, and gather information and insights to refine them with learners over time.
Why ideas are debt
These guiding statements help illustrate the larger point— to bring an idea to life, it takes effort. It requires time and co-creation, ideally with the humans it is intended to help, as well as the necessary time, money, and resources to transform the idea into something they can engage with and respond to. Ideally this process is done in small, quick, cheap ways that help the team learn, but it requires effort nonetheless.
Benno’s point was about the many possibilities a team can explore, and the many directions they can go in, as they explore their problem space. All these possibilities and directions, all these ideas, become debt: design debt, technical debt, or budget debt. This is the trap many teams get caught in: trying to do too many things, wandering too far from the problem they need solve for their learner. Or worse, building too much before they get input from the people whose problems they’re trying to solve.
Focus on ideas that address your learners’ needs
This isn’t an indictment of ideas or forced scarcity. It’s a challenge to understand your learners’ real needs and evaluate the best fit opportunities to pursue before you commit to a path to “solve” them. Ideas become an asset when they are grounded in real learner needs and solve a real problem. Ideas that are refined through disciplined testing and iteration adapt to become solutions— the goal of all that ideation.
So don’t cancel that upcoming brainstorming session with your team, but approach it with a different mindset and some important preparation with insight from learners.
What I’ve been up to and how this connects
This idea is fresh on my mind as I’ve been advising and mentoring design interns at the UC-San Diego Design Lab. This week, they shared their insights from 10 weeks of design work on community projects in the Lab. Next, they'll begin brainstorming solutions to prototype and test.
When a problem feels big, it can be overwhelming to figure out the next right step in the world of possibilities to meet the needs of your learners. But doing so is critical, as is evaluating their quality and testing them deliberately.
This concept came to life this week in separate meetings with Don Norman, Steven Dow, and their teams who are working on integrating AI into design in various ways.
We tested their early prototypes live as they asked for feedback on the experiences, and we discussed the best users for further testing. They know ideas are a form of debt—the sooner you get something to users, the faster you reduce risk, clear that debt, and make real progress.
The takeaway
Focus on the real needs you’ve surfaced, explore potential solutions that address those needs, start small, learn, and iterate (often) to meet the needs you discovered.
And please, don’t (build) or call it a “pilot.” Not right away. That’s for another day.
Insights from the Field
Bringing you voices from across education to answer:
What advice would you give to someone driving change in education?
“When looking to drive change in higher education, start by exploring new, creative ways to engage students and faculty. Focus on tools that improve both learning and administrative efficiency. Think about analytics for student success. Engage faculty early and often. Champion flexible, hybrid learning environments that address multiple needs. Be willing to iterate and improve—often! While addressing potential gaps, remember to honor the present and the past through open dialogue. We say “be innovative” probably too often; it's really about fostering a mindset of experimentation and agility. Encourage a culture where trial and error are seen as steps toward improving education and make space for faculty and students to propose new ideas that challenge the status quo.“
Errin Heyman, Associate Vice President, Learning Experience at National University
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