‘Nice’, ‘good’, ‘beautiful’, ‘exciting’, but remaining for ever gathering dust in its worked-out form on the designer’s shelf: this is sometimes the fate of a good design. The designer involved has not been sensitive enough to the practicality of the design. A worked-out design must be capable of installation in the systems for which it was made. This means that at the time of developmental testing there must be care for such things as ‘how is the new course or lesson going to be received by teachers as well as by students?’, ‘what rostering difficulties (if any) are going to come up?’, ‘will there be time and space problems?’, ‘does the design demand training of teachers and their assistants?’, ‘is the design just too new and too different to be accepted in an existing and perhaps conservative curriculum?’. Impracticality can be the Achilles’ heel of a good design.
