Report 03 / Deliberation systemActive

Career Design Lab

Six tools woven into one semester-long deliberation arc.

Deliberation System Dartmouth College 2024–present

Principal investigator: Seth Looper
My role: Founder, lead designer, and program instructor
Past collaborators: Lin Liu, Xiaoxi Tan, Tianyi Tan (2025)
Institution: Dartmouth College
Period: 2024–present

Cohort: Six tools across multiple design-iteration cycles, deployed within the lab's Dartmouth program each semester
Status: Active
Addresses: RQ 1 · RQ 3
Methods used: Card-sort triangulation, Narrative compression, Peer conversation

Claim and confidence

What this report argues, how far the evidence currently goes, and what would settle it. The lab states this up front so a reader can weigh the work honestly.

The claim

Reflection can be made systemic at the scale of a full undergraduate cohort, woven through a semester rather than confined to one-on-one advising, and individual reflection can improve group deliberation.

What we have seen

Multiple build cycles, with six tools each tested independently before integration, run as a live program where every term is also a research cycle. Moving Pattern Distillation from solo work to peer dyads is one design change this surfaced. These are design observations, not measured outcomes.

Confidence

Provisional. Whether the deliberative skills that grow from personal reflection carry into group settings is an open empirical line awaiting a consent and review process.

What would test it

Comparison of conversation quality with and without prior reflection, and qualitative coding of recorded peer-dyad sessions across a term.

The Problem

Career services at most schools run on a familiar model: one-on-one advising, resume workshops, job boards, alumni directories. That covers the transactional side of career development. It doesn't touch the developmental side, the slower work of figuring out who you are, what drives you, and how to make decisions that reflect your values instead of your anxiety.

At Dartmouth, the gap was visible. Students had access to strong advising and alumni networks, but there was no structured program for the harder stuff: identifying patterns across your own experiences, naming what actually matters to you, and learning to think clearly about your future with other people in the room.

The question was whether one program could support all of that, not as a fixed curriculum, but as something that changes every term based on what students actually need.

The System

The Career Design Lab is six tools woven into one arc. Each tool was built separately, tested with real students, and revised before being integrated into the sequence. Together they move from pulling apart your experiences, to finding patterns, to naming what matters, to deciding what comes next.

Jump to tool

Identity Mapping Studio Tile Sorting Pattern Distillation OneWord Launch Studio The Sequence

The Research Basis

The six tools each have their own pedagogical lineage, but the program's overall architecture comes from a small set of frames.

The six-tool deliberation arc draws directly on Burnett & Evans's Designing Your Life (2016), specifically the move from "what's the right answer for me?" to "what's a process I can run on any version of this question?" CDL ports DYL's classroom-tested sequence into a semester-long program with cohorts of 15 to 30 students.

OneWord (the final compression tool) is grounded in Dan McAdams's narrative identity framework (McAdams, 1993): identity as a story you keep editing. The compression sequence (paragraph → sentence → word) treats the act of compressing as the developmental work itself, not as a route to a "right" word. The lab's Compression as a method note traces this design move across multiple projects.

Tile Sorting and the values/strengths layer borrow from the Knowdell Career Values and CliftonStrengths card-sort traditions, ported into a physical-material format (cards, large-format paper, in-room sorting) rather than online assessment.

The program is structured as a research cycle in the Kolb experiential-learning sense (Kolb, 1984), and its workshop format draws on Donald Schön's reflective practitioner tradition (Schön, 1983), specifically Schön's account of how studios teach through repeated cycles of attempt, critique, and revision. The lab's Research cycles, not curricula note documents why this matters.

The developmental target throughout is Baxter Magolda's self-authorship (Baxter Magolda, 2001). The full bibliography is in the working paper.

1 / 6

Identity Mapping Studio

What it is

A facilitated workshop where participants take apart their experiences and sort them across four dimensions: values, strengths, interests, and skills. Groups of 15 to 30 work with physical materials, cards, markers, large-format paper, and build their identity maps in the same room, watching each other's narratives take shape in real time.

How it works

Participants start by listing experiences, jobs, classes, projects, volunteer work, anything that mattered. Each experience gets broken into components and placed on the map. The sorting forces choices: does this experience say more about what you value or what you're good at? Clusters emerge. Patterns appear that weren't visible when the experiences lived only in your head.

What we've learned

The physical format matters. Handling cards, moving things around, seeing other people build their maps a few feet away. All of it changes how people pay attention. You can't zone out the way you can on a screen. The most interesting moments come when someone has to place an experience that fits two categories. That's when people actually stop and think.

2 / 6

Tile Sorting

What it is

A hands-on exercise that treats experience as physical material. Printed tiles represent moments, skills, and commitments from a person's life. You sort them, group them, and arrange them on a table to find patterns you can't see in a list.

How it works

Each participant receives a set of pre-printed tiles plus blank ones they fill in themselves. The tiles go on a table. You move them around, grouping, separating, stacking. There's no correct arrangement. The point is to see what clusters together and what doesn't fit anywhere. That misfit tile often turns out to be the most interesting one.

What we've learned

The physicality changes how people think. Picking up a tile, holding it, deciding where it goes, that's different from dragging something on a screen. People slow down. They reconsider. And by the end, the layout on the table is basically a picture of how that person sees their own life. Moving tiles around starts to feel like rethinking things.

3 / 6

Pattern Distillation

What it is

A compression exercise. You take a paragraph about who you are and cut it to a sentence. Then cut the sentence to a single word. Each cut forces a choice. What you keep and what you drop says a lot about what actually matters to you.

How it works

Done in pairs. You start by writing a paragraph about who you are and what drives you. Then you cut it to a sentence. Then a word. At each stage, you explain your choices to your partner. The conversation is the point, the compression is just a way to force it. The design intentionally surfaces themes the program is organized around (mentoring, communication, creativity, systems thinking) across the cohort.

What we've learned

The design hypothesis is that solo compression produces vaguer results than dyadic compression, that the peer conversation is the mechanism rather than a nice-to-have. This hypothesis shaped subsequent tools across the lab, all of which now include a peer-conversation component. The side-by-side comparison of solo vs. paired compression is an open empirical question; see the Compression as a method field note for the working argument.

4 / 6

OneWord

What it is

A digital tool that gives you one word to describe yourself, based on six either/or questions about your values, strengths, and skills. The word isn't a label. It's a conversation starter. Something to argue with, push back on, and explain to someone else.

How it works

Six screens, six choices. Each one is a binary, you pick the option that feels more like you. At the end, you get one word. It takes under two minutes. The speed is deliberate: you're forced to go with your gut rather than overthinking. What happens next, the conversation about why that word is right, wrong, or almost right, is where the real work begins. Try it.

What we've learned

The first prototype used 12 dimensions and produced a phrase. It was too specific to be useful and too long to remember. Cutting to six decisions and a single word changed everything. People argue with their result. They say "that's almost right, but..." and then explain who they actually are. That friction is the point. A result that's close but not exact creates better reflection than one that nails it.

5 / 6

Launch Studio

What it is

A 120-minute experience that connects the individual tools into a single arc. Instead of doing activities in isolation, students move through a guided sequence where each exercise builds on the one before it.

How it works

Students walk in and move through the lab's tools in order. Between activities, a facilitator pauses the room and asks people to say what they just learned and how it connects to what came before. Those pauses are what make it work. They turn a series of exercises into something that actually builds. Multiple time formats were iterated across cycles (90 / 120 / 180 min); the team's instructor field notes settled on the current format as the working choice.

What we've learned

The first version was basically a playlist, exercises run back to back with no connective tissue. It didn't work. Students got tired and couldn't see how the pieces related. What fixed it was adding pauses between activities: short moments where people stop, say what they learned, and carry it into the next thing. The design intent is for the session to feel like one connected experience rather than six separate tools; instructor field notes suggest the connective pauses are what produce this effect.

6 / 6

The Sequence

What it is

The design-iteration cycle that holds the whole lab together. Every academic term is a design cycle: deploy the current version, observe how students use it through instructor and design-team review, document what is and isn't working in the program lead's field notes, and rebuild for next term.

How it works

The team watches sessions, talks to students informally, and keeps instructor field notes on the exercises and conversations. At the end of each term, we sit down with the field notes and student-facing deliverables and figure out what to change. This has led to big changes: the order of activities, how much peer conversation to include, how structured vs. open-ended things should be, and whether certain tools belong in the program at all.

What we've learned

Order matters more than anyone expected. Tools that work well on their own sometimes fail in the wrong position within a sequence. The program now looks very different from its first version, and it will look different again next year. That's the point. The lab is a living prototype, not a finished product.

Working Paper

Looper, S. (2025). The Deliberation Cohort: Six Tools, One Arc. Lo/Be Lab Working Reports, 2025-02. [pdf]

See the full abstract on the publications page.

Use & citation

Material on this site may be cited and reused freely, provided that it is duly credited as a project of Lo/Be Lab and that a copy of any publication referencing the work is sent to seth.looper@gmail.com.

For citation requests, collaborations, or pushback on a published claim, seth.looper@gmail.com. Site licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.