Social design-based experiments: A utopian methodology for understanding new possibilities for learning

Social design-based experiments (SDBEs) are a new design methodology in the field of education. The approach is gaining traction as a way of studying and organizing for equity and learning in complex, real-world situations. Social design-based experiments foreground the political and ethical dimensions of design research and our theories of learning. Doing so raises questions aboutissues including the kinds of problems that are best suited for social design-based experiment methodology, the role of the researcher and their participants over the arc of a project, and the desired impact of an intervention(s) that is situated in dynamic historical and cultural contexts. In this chapter, we offer an introduction to SDBE methodology. We begin by describing its relation toother design methodologies for studying learning and explain how it is distinct from these approaches. In the second section, we illustrate how we have organized SDBEs to address community-based problems, highlighting some of the tensions around doing this work in practice.