Learning Design in Daily Life: Making meaning through coincidence and vision

Noticing, Curating and Making Meaning in Coincidences

We often think of learning design as something technical—linked to course modules, learning outcomes or UX flows. But what if we viewed it as something simpler, deeper and more human?

At its core, learning design is a way of living with awareness -
A practice of noticing, curating and making meaning from the world around us.
A way of asking:

• What is this moment teaching me?
• How do I shape my environment for growth?
• What do I need to understand here —emotionally, intellectually or spiritually?

In this sense, simply living our daily lives with awareness is the curriculum—and we are all both learner and designer.

Coincidence as Curriculum

Coincidences—those flickers of unexpected alignment—can often feel random or even eerie. But, if we look at them through a learning design lens, they provide us with opportunities.

“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.”
— John Dewey, educational reformer and pragmatist

A missed train or flight. A friend calling just as you think of them. A book falling open to exactly the line you needed.
These moments may not be intentionally or technically designed, but they offer invitations to stop, reflect and make sense of what we are seeing or experiencing. 

Coincidences then become curriculum when:

• We allow them to disrupt our autopilot
• We use them as an entry point to new ideas
• We see them as a message

Coincidences are therefore unplanned connections and learning design is the art of making the connections visible.

Vision as the Designer’s Compass

Where coincidences are the unexpected, unplanned moments, Vision is the overarching long arc.

We can think of vision as a compass that helps us know what to notice and pay attention to when the future arrives.

A strong compass in life includes the ability to:

• Hold a sense of purpose beyond our to-do lists
• Trust in slow emergence and unfolding
• See beyond what is immediately in front of us

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust

With a strong compass, even chaos can begin to cohere. Coincidences start to feel less like randomness and more like resonance. Design, then, becomes a collaboration with what arises as opposed to an act of top-down control.

Put Together

Daily life becomes a kind of living syllabus, where coincidence provides the unexpected learning moments and vision helps us to recognise what matters.
Learning design is then how we put it all together - where we notice and pay attention to what we are experiencing, think about what it means and then decide how to respond. 

In our daily life, the lessons are not always clear or easy to access, and the connections may not always be immediate. Yet, if and when we choose to actively live as learner-designers—open, curious and reflective—we can begin to notice meaning blooming in our life's cracks.

A Final Image

Earlier today, I noticed light and shadows dancing across my kitchen ceiling, reflecting a plant on our windowsill (see below), along with hearing the sound of the trees blowing outside and a train passing behind our flat. This was not planned but it did feel like a reminder:

Learning is not always scheduled, but sometimes it simply arrives in beautiful forms - if we create space for it and pay attention.