Recently, while filling out one of those mundane online forms that asks general demographic info like education level, industry, and various demographics, I was a bit puzzled that within the preconfigured options for occupation, my exact title of “Instructional Technology Consultant” wasn’t an option, though “Instructional Designer” was.

I admit now that I shouldn’t really have reason to take pause. For most of the ITCs I work with, instances like this wouldn’t faze them at all. I’m well aware that our nomenclature doesn’t really change the fact that what we do is, in fact, instructional design. Yet I have to admit that before that moment I’d never really seen myself as a designer—at least not in the sense of what people think of when they traditionally think of a “designer.” Consultant? Sure, I can easily recognize myself there, but not as a designer.

Maybe this is because I’m the first to admit that I have little to no sense of fashion or style in my wardrobe. Likewise, my personal sense of home décor is likely far more unimpressive than I had imagined anyone else in an occupation with “designer” in the title would live with. I don’t have any particularly artistic talents either. In any of the other (admittedly stereotypical) ways I thought of what a “designer” should be, I hadn’t seen myself.

This cognitive dissonance left me frozen, staring at the screen. I began to dig into how this could be—how I could be doing this work all along, yet apparently without the outward traits of what I thought “designers” should have. To figure this out, I started to take stock of my work practices, principles, and predispositions. This was my first clue.

Designers look for specific practices and the patterns within those practices. This is either to identify successful flow between states, places, or moments so that they can be streamlined, opened, and repeated—or they work to find interruptions or disruptions to that flow that fall outside the pattern. Dissonance is an excellent motivation for design, since it indicates a lack of flow or a missing piece.

This bridges the connection to the “consultant” role as well. I realized that whenever I meet with an instructor looking for advice on how to move a course online or to update an existing course, the first thing I do is to open up a digital notebook and begin interviewing them and taking notes. I write down what they like about their courses, what challenges they’ve faced, what values or principles they try to instill in their projects, and how the students access these concepts.

We go into their existing courses to “tour” the pedagogical styles they’ve built their current courses around, and I copy down links to the assignments or projects they most identify with or enjoy. There are pages and sections in my digital notebook for new apps and services I’ve stumbled upon, concepts I’ve drafted for assignments, websites or articles I see as trends in the educational field. Our sessions usually end with a rough sketch of the course, along with a few questions I kick around in my mind to see where things land.

These notebooks become the initial canvas for the course. They are my sketchbook of concepts I can later pitch to the instructor, or to use as a palette to build up the features and style of the course. This also makes it easier to keep the big picture in mind—both for the course, the instructor, and our institution.

Having this canvas of concepts makes it easier to recognize and facilitate what we’ve come to describe as the pedagogically distinct features (PDF) of our courses. These PDFs allow us to identify what an instructor does as a practice, a style, or even as a personal “brand” that makes their courses worth taking—and how can we build outward from those elements.

I began looking into the bookmarks and folders in my browser and cloud storage and realized they are full of links to videos and articles about “future visions” of technology and education, or innovative and unique assignment ideas. As I travel and explore I collect ideas, stories, and pictures about ways to help people experience the world, and uncover the hidden aspects around us that show us how things work.

In all these approaches I’ve realized that instructional designers are closely related to user experience (UX) designers or game designers, since our thoughts are often focused more on the experience of things and the end results of things, than they are on the aesthetic side of the designs—which do matter, just maybe not as a first priority.

I’ve shifted my thinking in my approach to work, looking for those patterns and processes to focus in on. I’m paying closer attention to collecting inspirations through new apps and services, looking at creative assignments, documenting my findings and sharing my findings with others around me. Choosing to engage in the thought processes of design helped me to more closely identify with my role beyond being a consultant.