The Human-Centered Design Framework as a Means of Bridging the Research-Practice Gap

Design-based research is a genre of research in which the development of theoretical understanding and the design of practical solutions to real-world problems are pursued at the same time. With this approach comes the aspiration to contribute to everyday educational practice in a meaningful way. Therefore, questions of adoption, implementation and scaling have been on the design-based research agenda since the beginning. However, there is little specific guidance within the Physics Education Research (PER) community available on how to maximize the probability of adoption by practitioners systematically. In contrast, Human-centered design (HCD), rooted in industry practices, offers a promising avenue for bridging this gap, owing to its inherent emphasis on adoption rates and scalability within the commercial sphere. To what extend insights and optimization strategies derived from Human-centered design can enhance the adoption of educational innovations is currently being explored in a research project on the usability of modern physics experiments at the Goethe University Frankfurt, where two Michelson interferometers a subjected to comparative usability tests.