Let me step back for a moment to the reason I wanted to become an instructional designer many years ago. It was at a time when eLearning represented attractive cost savings, efficiencies and profits to businesses willing to invest and embrace digital transformation. Sounds familiar? But in many cases, rushed rollouts led to content dumping and poor-quality learning experiences. I could see the potential of digitally mediated learning to be effective - extraordinary, even - so I built my professional practice upon this principle and the belief that technology should never lead the design.

Fast forward to 2018, the year I founded Lexedio. The initial aim was to support others into the profession I love, at a time when there were no accessible or recognised career pathways. A secondary aim was to explore and challenge what it means to be a learning or instructional designer. After eight years, I'm proud of what we've accomplished on both fronts. We collaborated with industry leaders to develop the first digital learning designer apprenticeship standard, and we led the design of its first training provision. We've also successfully delivered learning design projects that showcase holistic and postdigital approaches, where even digital work keeps the human experience at its centre.

In recent years, you may have noticed increasing use of the term learning experience design (LXD), coined by Dutch pioneer Niels Floor in 2007. His definition resonates closely with my own practice at Lexedio - multidisciplinary and designerly, but also postdigital in philosophy. That last word is worth a brief pause: postdigital thinking doesn't reject technology, but it refuses to treat it as the starting point. It insists that human experience comes first, and digital tools serve that experience - never the other way around.

Don't get me wrong: we still take genuine pride in designing engaging, interactive online courses and activities. Digital content will always be part of what we do. But we shouldn't bury our heads in the sand. The days of developing SCORM packages in tools like Storyline, to be curated in an LMS, are numbered. I'll look back on those years with nostalgia - but it's time to move on.

My research has led me to believe that the evolution of learning design roles will align with three phases of machine learning development.

We are currently in this first phase, where AI depends on digitised human knowledge - books, research papers, webpages - to understand subject matter and model how humans learn. In a rush to exploit the speed and cost-cutting potential of generative AI, many businesses are directing learning designers to produce massive volumes of AI-generated content and implement superficial interactivity - chatbots being a familiar example.

The way we've approached this period is uncomfortably reminiscent of the eLearning boom, suggesting some lessons were never learned. Developing prompt engineering skills is a reasonable starting point for learning designers right now. But ideally, we should be engaging with AI at a more critical level - and helping our learners do the same.

It won't be long before we enter a second phase, in which AI develops rapidly through multi-modal inputs. AI will begin to process real-time biometric data from wearables - heart rate, sleep patterns - cross-referencing it with digitally recorded behaviours and habits.

Eventually, AI will be fully integrated with human life - understanding human states through what we eat, who we talk to, and our physiological responses to real-world experiences. By this point, learning designers risk becoming administrators of learning experiences rather than designers of them.

In theory, a designer could input specific organisational or academic constraints and let AI orchestrate everything else. But I would hope their purpose remains something more meaningful: to advocate for human learners, and to ensure that digitally mediated interventions translate into experiences that matter in the physical world.

It took years of painstaking work to establish a practical career pathway and accreditation system for digital learning designers. The apprenticeship standard and professional frameworks available today, such as CMALT, will need to evolve quickly to help designers become critical humans in the loop, stewarding technology rather than simply operating it.

But in reviewing the apprenticeship standard as part of a subject expert panel over recent months, I've realised that my own practice has already moved beyond digital learning design as most still understand it. As the role specification evolves in response to AI, I expect it will rightly place greater emphasis on how to use technology ethically and effectively for instructional design tasks. But that is not the direction my practice is heading. My work increasingly treats digital technology as an important but often radically downgraded consideration in the design of human-centred learning experiences.

I believe there is a growing need for a professional pathway rooted in designerly practice - one that draws on multidisciplinary approaches to facilitate holistic, human-centred learning experiences.

Such a pathway would support the kinds of work I'm already doing: educational escape rooms, creative public awareness initiatives, papercraft and natural material games, and bespoke professional development programmes. All of these incorporate physical, analogue, off-screen - even off-grid - activity. This is not a retreat from relevance. It's a response to where human experience actually happens.

This emerging specialism sits comfortably among existing recognised design professions, and it can tap into the innovation and investment we're seeing in a rapidly growing experience economy. By working outside the bureaucratic and economic pressures of many higher education and L&D environments, this new breed of experience designer can pursue the creative freedoms necessary for genuine innovation - and hold themselves to a standard of excellence that institutional contexts rarely permit.

The work of this new professional, who may or may not go by the title of learning experience designer, will transcend the "best practices" and standard toolboxes of models, taxonomies and frameworks that currently define our field. Instead, they will conduct field research and engage with subject matter and experts from across disciplines: psychology, performance arts, linguistics, tourism, anthropology, literature, even ethnobotany. They will develop bespoke experience design models and provocative learning journeys that no AI model could ever template.

As external experts in human-centred and physical world experiences, they will lead postdigital learning strategies - as consultants, educators, writers and thought leaders. They might work as freelancers or within design studios, responding to creative problem-solving briefs: tasked with a public health challenge, for example, and perhaps responding with a multisensory learning experience delivered through public transport spaces.

Crucially, their work will also be essential to the ethical and effective use of AI in education and L&D. They will research and develop new holistic frameworks for understanding human learning and experience. They will gather physical, sensory and non-digital data from a variety of contexts, translating it into formats AI can use. They will be contracted by businesses, universities and edtech companies to train AI models and advise on human-centred implementation strategies.

This is my vision of the new professional role that will be needed - to balance the impact of AI on the digital learning sector, and to ensure that humans are genuinely learning, not just machines.

For the past year, I've been conducting research and laying the groundwork to develop this vision - deliberately working with industry experts and organisations outside the digital learning and learning technology networks I know well, so that this new pathway can be explored from a completely fresh set of perspectives.

This means that while I will continue working on digital projects, my professional affiliations and engagements will increasingly move toward design communities where postdigital thinking already has roots. In a sense, this reflects a deliberate strategy of legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) - consciously positioning myself at the edges of new communities of practice, where the questions are different and the assumptions haven't yet hardened. It is, I think, how genuinely new professional pathways get made.

We're in the early stages of establishing a special interest group that would bring together practitioners, researchers and designers from adjacent fields to help shape what this pathway could become, and I'll be sharing more about that in the months ahead.

If this project resonates with you, please follow along via our Instagram account.

Albris, K., Fast, K., Karlsen, F., Kaun, A., Lomborg, S. and Syvertsen, T. (eds) (2024) 'The Digital Backlash and the Paradoxes of Disconnection'. Gothenburg: Nordicom. Available at: https://www.norden.org/en/publication/digital-backlash-and-paradoxes-disconnection (accessed 27/04/2026)

Floor, N. (2007) 'What is learning experience design?' Available via lxd.org: https://lxd.org/fundamentals-of-learning-experience-design/what-is-learning-experience-design/ (accessed 28/04/2026)

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). 'Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation'. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511815355

Skills England / Institute for Apprenticeships. Digital learning designer apprenticeship standard (ST0974). Available at: https://skillsengland.education.gov.uk/apprenticeships/st0974-v1-0 (accessed 28/04/2026)