What an Ice Cream Company Taught Me About the Biggest Missed Opportunity in EdTech
I was listening to The Best One Yet, a business podcast, and they were talking about Salt and Straw, the Portland-based ice cream chain currently valued at $200 million. What caught my attention wasn’t the valuation. It was how they’ve created nearly 1,000 flavors across 15 years.
They don’t drop new flavors randomly. They release exactly five new flavors every month, each batch tied to a seasonal theme anchored to the calendar. May was flowers. October is bugs. Back to school month gets literary flavors. The content is unpredictable. The timing is locked in.
The podcast hosts called it “predictable unpredictability.” I’d call it something else: designing with time as a medium. And I think EdTech is almost entirely missing it.
There Are Two Kinds of Time, and EdTech Only Knows One
Here’s a distinction worth pausing on. The ancient Greeks had two separate words for time.
Chronos is clock time: linear, measurable, quantifiable. Cut a 10-minute task to 5, and you’ve optimized for Chronos. Most EdTech lives here: completion rates, time-on-task, adaptive pacing algorithms, learning velocity dashboards.
Kairos is felt time: qualitative, contextual, opportune. It’s the difference between content that lands and content that sits. Between a lesson that feels urgent and one that feels archived. Between learning that connects to the world a student is actually living in, and learning that exists only in its own logical sequence.
Jod Kaftan, Head of Design at Launch by NTT DATA and a writer on temporal intelligence in AI, frames it this way: AI is excellent at optimizing Chronos, but the deeper opportunity is designing for Kairos — those moments when an intervention doesn’t just work, it lands.
A 2025 paper in the Journal of Philosophy of Education puts it even more directly: learning itself happens in Kairos time, and creating those opportune moments in classrooms is one of the most underappreciated tasks in education. The authors argue that Kairos has been almost entirely displaced by preoccupations with time management, productivity, and coverage. We optimized for Chronos and quietly lost the other thing.
EdTech has barely started thinking in Kairos terms. And it shows.
We Lost Something When Education Got Formal
In early childhood and elementary education, Kairos-aware design is practically instinctive. Teachers build units around seasons, harvest time, cultural moments, the first snow. Learning feels alive because it’s tethered to the world outside the classroom.
Then somewhere around middle school, it starts to fade. By higher ed, it’s largely gone.
The curriculum becomes self-referential. Content exists because it logically follows the previous content, not because it connects to anything happening in a learner’s lived experience of time. The assumption is that older learners are intrinsically motivated and don’t need that scaffolding. The calendar becomes a constraint to manage, not a canvas to design on.
This isn’t entirely accidental. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s foundational work on situated learning (1991) made a related critique decades ago: most classroom learning abstracts knowledge out of context, stripping it of the social and environmental conditions that make it meaningful. Their argument was primarily about social context. Learning works best when it’s embedded in the practices and community where it will actually be used.
What nobody quite extended that argument to is temporal context. Not just where learning is situated, but when — and whether the timing itself is designed to create meaning or simply to cover material.
Research consistently describes dropout not as a sudden decision but as the endpoint of a long, gradual process of disengagement that often goes undetected until it’s too late. Students don’t announce they’re checking out. The withdrawal is quiet, and by the time an institution notices, the window for intervention has typically passed.
Timeless Design vs. Timeful Design
Dr. Jabe Bloom, who completed his PhD in design studies at Carnegie Mellon, offers a framework that sharpens this further. He distinguishes between timeless design — creating something meant to be universally valid regardless of context, like a museum artifact — and timeful design, which embraces the dynamic nature of context and treats a design as an ongoing proposition that must be re-evaluated as the world changes around it.
Most EdTech builds for timelessness. The assumption is that a well-designed course unit should work the same way in October as in February, for a student living through an election as for one who isn’t, for a learner who just read a relevant news story as for one who hasn’t. Content is treated like an apple on a table: static, complete, evaluable at any moment.
Bloom argues something more provocative though. A learning experience isn’t like an apple on a table. It’s like a song. It only becomes what it is as it unfolds through time. Its meaning is inseparable from the moment in which it’s experienced.
This connects directly to Larissa Pschetz and Michelle Bastian’s peer-reviewed work on Temporal Design, published in Design Studies in 2018 out of the University of Edinburgh. They argue that dominant design practice treats time as uniform and external to human practice, a neutral container, when in reality time is something that emerges from cultural, social, and economic forces. Their proposal: designers should stop treating time as a backdrop and start treating it as a medium. Not just asking “what should this look like?” but “when should this exist, and what forces will be at play when it does?”
That question has barely been asked in instructional design. And it’s overdue.
The Gap Nobody Has Named Yet
Here’s what’s striking after pulling all these threads together: the academic pieces exist, but they’ve never been connected into a product design argument for EdTech.
Situated learning theory points to context but stops short of time. Philosophy of education invokes Kairos but stays at the level of individual teacher practice. Temporal Design theory (Pschetz and Bastian) builds a rigorous framework but aims it at interaction designers and product creators, not curriculum builders or EdTech founders. Learning analytics research has found that temporality is “a defining factor of how students regulate their learning” but treats it as a measurement problem, not a design opportunity.
The major instructional design frameworks — ADDIE, backward design, Understanding by Design — have no explicit step that asks: when should this content land, and what will be happening in the world when it does?
I’d call this temporal relevance as a design variable, and I think it’s the most undernamed, underbuilt dimension in the entire EdTech stack.
Salt and Straw operationalized it almost by accident. Each month has a theme that gives new flavors a reason to exist right now, not just in the abstract. The calendar creates urgency. It makes the thing feel alive. And it keeps people coming back — not through streak mechanics or gamification guilt, but because the experience has a genuine relationship with time.
The question for EdTech is: what would it look like to build that intentionally?
This Is Where AI Comes In, and Not in the Way Most People Mean It
When EdTech talks about AI, the conversation almost always goes to personalization. Adaptive learning paths. Content that adjusts to individual pace and performance. That’s real and valuable.
But there’s a different kind of personalization that I don’t hear discussed nearly enough: temporal personalization. Not just adjusting content to who the learner is, but adjusting it to when they are.
Think about what AI actually makes possible here:
Mapping curriculum to the real-world calendar at scale. An AI layer that looks at a course’s learning objectives and surfaces moments where content has a natural hook to something happening in the world right now: a news cycle, a cultural moment, a seasonal pattern, an industry event. Not replacing the curriculum, just illuminating the Kairos moments that most instructors never have time to find manually. This is the Salt and Straw editorial calendar, operationalized for education.
Generating timely context on demand. A teacher covering supply chain economics in October can get AI-surfaced examples from what’s actually happening in holiday logistics right now, rather than relying on a case study from 2015. The concept stays fixed. The context updates. Chronos stays the same; Kairos improves. This is situated learning at scale: the thing Lave and Wenger described as ideal, finally made practically achievable.
Designing release cadences that mirror the rhythm of the learner’s world. Rather than releasing all content at once, which research increasingly links to dropout, EdTech platforms could use AI to architect content delivery that builds anticipation, responds to the calendar, and makes each new release feel like it belongs to this moment. Pschetz and Bastian call this treating time as a social coordination mechanism. In product terms, it’s the difference between a library and a living thing.
Building temporal objects, not static artifacts. Bloom’s concept of temporal objects — things that only fully exist as they unfold through time, like a song rather than an apple — has a direct product design implication. A course module designed as a temporal object asks: how does this evolve? How does it respond to the context in which it’s experienced? How does it create meaning that accumulates rather than depleting on first contact?
The deeper insight is that AI doesn’t just help personalize content to the individual. It can help personalize content to the moment. And moments are what make learning feel alive rather than archived.
The Question Worth Asking
Salt and Straw’s strategic question isn’t “what flavors do we have?” It’s “what is our rhythmic, calendar-anchored promise to our learners that gives them a reason to come back?”
The equivalent question for EdTech founders is worth sitting with: What is your product’s relationship to time?
Not just learning pace. Not just adaptive sequencing. But the actual felt experience of time. Are you building something timeless, or something timeful? Are you designing a course that could have been taught in any year, or one that asks what this concept means right now, to this learner, in this moment?
There is genuine white space here. The academic foundation exists across philosophy of education, interaction design theory, and learning analytics, but nobody has synthesized it into a practical product lens for EdTech. The tools to operationalize it, particularly through AI, are arriving right now. And the retention and engagement problems that temporal relevance could address are as urgent as they’ve ever been.
Most EdTech products are built as if time is neutral. Salt and Straw built a $200 million company by treating the calendar as a competitive advantage.
There’s something in that for us.
A note on how this came together: I’m not much of a writer, but I do have ideas I think are worth sharing. This article was developed with the help of Claude (Anthropic’s AI) as a thinking and writing partner. The line of reasoning started from an episode of The Best One Yet podcast, went through a rabbit hole of academic research, and landed here. I think that process is worth being transparent about. If the idea resonates, the source of the prose shouldn’t matter. And if it doesn’t, that’s on the idea, not the tool.
The threads that informed this thinking: Jod Kaftan on temporal intelligence in AI-driven experiences; Dr. Jabe Bloom’s dissertation work on timeful design and temporal objects from Carnegie Mellon; Larissa Pschetz and Michelle Bastian’s 2018 paper “Temporal Design: Rethinking Time in Design” in Design Studies; and the broader situated learning tradition from Lave and Wenger. Curious what resonates, and whether anyone is already building in this direction.
