You finish something.
A presentation. A dataset. A piece of analysis. A training resource.
You put it online, send it to somebody or make it available for others to see.
But another question remains:
What can the other person actually do with it now?
In July 2009, Keith Lyons made a short video to support the training of officials in canoe-slalom gate judging.
The video showed paddlers negotiating a series of gates at Penrith Whitewater Stadium. Keith supplied the relevant competition-rule context and explained some of the important features viewers should watch for. The video could be embedded elsewhere. A compressed version was available through Clyde Street, with a much larger file available if required. It was shared under a Creative Commons licence.
All of those choices made the video easier to find, share or reuse.
But one design choice is particularly revealing.
Keith wrote:
“There is no audio commentary in the video to enable any user to create their own voice over.”
The absence was deliberate.
Keith could have added his own commentary.
Instead, he deliberately omitted it so a user could create a voice-over of their own.
The design therefore leaves a specific action open to the user.
A user could potentially add commentary of their own. That possibility is visible in the resource design; actual use is not.
The distinction is small but important.
A finished object and an object designed around somebody else's action are not necessarily the same thing.
That does not tell us what happened next.
The Clyde Street post does not show that anybody actually recorded a voice-over.
It does not tell us how many officials used the video.
It does not establish that somebody learned more because the commentary had been omitted.
And it does not show that the resource improved the quality of gate judging.
Those would all require other evidence.
What the post does show is a visible design decision made around something another person might do.
That is already different from simply putting a finished video online.
What happens after you share it?
This problem becomes harder because making something available can itself involve considerable thought.
In September 2016, Keith was preparing a presentation on open educational resources for the AUSPIN conference in Canberra.
He described a practice he had already developed of making presentations available before the live event. For this presentation there was an online version, a published-to-the-web version with automatic slide progression, and accompanying audio in both OGG and MP3 formats. Keith explained his preference for giving people the opportunity to explore ideas before or after the synchronous presentation.
This is not careless dumping of a slide deck onto the web.
There is thought about timing.
There is thought about format.
There is thought about asynchronous reflection.
There are several ways into the material.
And yet Keith's own wording provides an important limit:
“I am hopeful that this open sharing transforms my presentation options at AUSPIN.”
Hopeful.
The source records an intention and a possibility.
It does not record the transformation actually happening.
That matters because it is easy to compress several different claims into one.
The risk is to move too quickly from Keith making several forms available to assuming that people used them, and then to assuming that the experience improved.
The source establishes the availability and the intention. It does not establish uptake or improvement.
It shows Keith making his presentation available in several forms and explaining why he thought that might matter.
It does not show what attendees subsequently did with those forms.
That does not make the work unsuccessful.
It does not make the different formats pointless.
And it certainly does not mean the presentation was unusable.
It means something narrower:
Making something available in more ways does not by itself tell us what another person was actually enabled to do with it.
Simon Nainby's question about conventional conference formats helped frame the immediate context. That question remains Nainby's contribution. The presentation, its advance sharing and Keith's decisions about its forms remain Keith's.
From seeing the analysis to exploring it
A later Clyde Street post provides a different version of the problem.
In July 2019, Keith was working with goalkeeper information from the FIFA Women's World Cup.
He created a Shiny application through which readers could explore information drawn from FIFA match summaries.
The app did not simply present one completed figure.
Keith said that it gave readers choices about how to explore the data, which were displayed through scatter and density plots. He also placed a copy of the application's code in a GitHub repository together with a CSV containing the goalkeeper information.
The important shift here is not that the analysis has been made simpler.
It is that the application gives the reader choices about how to explore the data.
Rather than only seeing Keith's finished representation, a reader can potentially choose an exploration.
The CSV exposes the underlying information in another form.
The code makes the construction available for someone capable of working with it.
Together, those choices create possible routes for continuation.
Someone could potentially inspect the shared data, explore the application or work with the published code.
But once again, the evidence has a boundary.
The post does not tell us that somebody did any of those things.
It does not show how many readers opened the application.
It does not establish that anyone modified the code.
It does not tell us whether the application improved understanding of goalkeeping.
And it certainly does not establish that an interactive object is inherently better than a static analysis.
What we can see is the design of the possibility.
FIFA supplied the underlying match-summary data. That remains FIFA's material.
Keith constructed the Shiny exploration and the surrounding code-and-data arrangement through which readers could potentially enter and continue the inquiry.
That difference is enough to make the judgement problem visible.
Usable for what?
The canoe-slalom video and the goalkeeper application are very different objects.
One is a training video.
The other is an interactive analytical resource.
But both raise the same practical question:
What is the other person supposed to be able to do next?
With the canoe-slalom video, Keith deliberately left room for somebody else to add a commentary.
With the goalkeeper analysis, he gave the reader choices for exploration and exposed code and data that could support continuation.
Those design decisions are tied to an action.
That is different from saying only:
Here is my work.
But the AUSPIN presentation prevents us from making the distinction too neat.
There too, Keith thought about the recipient.
He made the presentation available in advance.
He supplied different audio formats.
He described the approach as prioritising asynchronous reflection.
Those are meaningful design decisions.
What the source does not give us is evidence of what happened when those possibilities met actual people in the conference setting.
That suggests a useful restraint.
We can ask whether something has been designed for use without pretending we know that it was used.
And even evidence of use would not, by itself, show that the use was effective.
A coach can open a dashboard and learn nothing useful from it.
A student can access every resource in a course without understanding the subject.
A researcher can download a dataset without being able to interpret its construction.
A template can be reused badly.
Code can be run without improving the analysis.
The existence of an action and the quality of its consequence are different questions.
The work does not end at the object
This is easy to miss when we are the person making something.
A great deal of effort may have gone into the object itself.
The analysis is correct.
The visualisation is polished.
The slides are clear.
The resource is licensed.
The dataset is online.
The code runs.
From the producer's side, the work can feel complete.
But another person's encounter begins where that sense of completion ends.
In different situations, context, access to underlying material or room to adapt the object may affect what another person can do next.
The Clyde Street cases do not turn those possibilities into a universal design rule.
The canoe-slalom video does not become useful because every good training resource should omit commentary.
The Shiny app does not prove that every analysis should become interactive.
Multiple file formats do not guarantee anything about learning.
What matters is the relationship between the thing that has been made and the action another person is being invited or enabled to take.
That is a judgement, not a recipe.
What can the recipient do next?
Imagine an analyst preparing a dashboard for a coaching team.
It may contain accurate data, careful visualisation and technically sophisticated analysis.
But what is the coach expected to do with it?
Notice a pattern?
Question an assumption?
Compare two players?
Prepare the next training session?
Ask the analyst for another view?
The answer changes what designing the dashboard for use might require.
The same question applies elsewhere.
A teacher can upload twenty excellent readings. That does not yet tell us what students are expected to do with them.
A researcher can release a dataset. That does not yet tell us whether another researcher has enough context to interpret or reuse it responsibly.
A coach can send an athlete video clips. That does not yet tell us what the athlete is being invited to notice or change.
Making something available addresses one part of the problem:
Can somebody get to it?
The Clyde Street cases raise another:
What can they do once they arrive?
Clyde Street does not tell us that every resource must be redesigned around its audience.
Nor does it tell us that a producer can anticipate every possible use.
Keith's own examples leave room for people to use material in ways that are not entirely prescribed.
The two positive cases also leave some of the next action open: the canoe-slalom resource leaves the commentary to the user, while the Shiny application gives readers choices about exploration.
But even then, we should keep the claims in proportion.
The design makes a possible action visible.
Whether somebody takes it up is another question.
Whether it helps them is another again.
From making to designing for use
Perhaps that is the most useful shift these Clyde Street posts make visible.
The question is not simply whether something is good.
Or public.
Or open.
Or clearly communicated.
It is whether the object has been shaped around another person's possible action.
In 2009, Keith left commentary out of a training video so somebody else could add it.
In 2016, he made a conference presentation available in several forms and hoped that doing so would change the possibilities around the live event.
In 2019, he gave readers an interactive application, code and data through which they could potentially explore and continue an analysis.
Those sources do not give us three stages of a method.
They do not demonstrate increasing sophistication.
And they do not tell us which approach was most effective.
They give us three cases through which to inspect a distinction.
Publishing something is not the end of the question if another person is meant to do something with it.
The next question is what action you are designing for.
And after that comes another question that the design itself cannot answer:
Did anybody actually use it?
That remains open in these sources.
So the judgement Clyde Street leaves with us is:
Question to carry
What do I want someone else to be able to do with this — and what have I changed to help make that possible?
Sources followed
Keith Lyons, “Judging Canoe Slalom: 2009 Gates” — 09/07/28
Keith Lyons, “Discussing open educational resources at AUSPIN 2016” — 16/09/20
Keith Lyons, “Goalkeepers at the FIFA Women's World Cup 2019” — 19/07/24