Learning Design (Training Design? eTech Design?)

Recently while catching up on my blogreader, I came across Tony Karrer's post on Training Design: eLearning Technology writing about how his training design has been changing over the years. It got me thinking about this Masters project and how I have been trying to come up with a instructional design process that made sense to me. Design to me is like a tag cloud, intially more of an intuitive process that gets refined over time.

Maybe you start with learners, topic, technology (the design challenge) and each of those words has metadata assoicated with it: tags. These tags bring up other concepts/words -- yes just like using del.ic.io.us. From this it is a winnowing/refining process... anyways...i was quite fuzzy in my post on his blog (actually am still fuzzy.) As you move through the metadata you make a path, a schema. From there emerges your personal design process -- maybe you can abstract into a model at this point. I've since refined my thinking a little and came up with this picture -- that currently makes sense to me. See below:


All I'm really trying to communicate is that perhaps we think too linearly about a process that is essentially non-linear -- given all the new web 2.0 technologies that are out there -- we scan, skim, and pop! through data, and sometimes we dive. Are our design processes any different?