design thinking definition in education

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What is Design Thinking in Education?

In a world where artificial intelligence, exemplified by tools like ChatGPT, is reshaping our world, the human touch of design thinking becomes even more crucial. You might already be familiar with design thinking and curious about how to harness it alongside AI, or perhaps you’re new to this method. Regardless of your experience level, I’m going to share why design thinking is your human advantage in an AI-world. We’ll explore its impact on students and educators, particularly when integrated into the curriculum to design learning experiences that are both innovative and empathetic.

Back in 2017, I spearheaded a two-year research study at Design39 Campus in San Diego, CA, focusing on how educators used design thinking to transcend traditional educational practices. This study was pivotal in understanding how to scale from pockets of innovation to a culture of innovation. It’s rare to see a public school integrate these practices, and I always wondered, “Why is this the exception and not the norm?” How might design thinking when combined with AI tools, complement standards-based curricula by prompting students to tackle real-world challenges. We investigated the methods educators used to learn about design thinking and how they crafted learning experiences at the nexus of knowledge, skills, and mindsets, aiming to foster creative problem-solving in an increasingly AI-integrated world. The results revealed it had nothing to do with the technology. It had to do with people.

Design thinking is both a method and a mindset.

What makes design thinking unique in comparison to other frameworks such as project based learning, is that in addition to skills there is an emphasis on developing mindsets such as empathy, creative confidence, learning from failure and optimism.

Seeing their students and themselves enhance and develop their skills and mindset of a design thinker demonstrated the value in using design thinking and fueled their motivation to continue. In addition, it strengthened their self-efficacy and helped them embrace, not fear change.

The results indicate strong agreement amongst the educators between developing in demand skills such as creativity, problem finding, collaboration and communication and practicing design thinking. 

As workplaces determine how to leverage new and emerging technologies in ways that serve humanity, the two critical skills expected will be the ability to solve unstructured problems and to engage in complex communication, two areas that allow workers to augment what machines can do (Levy & Murnane, 2013.) 

Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014) call this era, “The Second Machine Age,” characterized by advances in technology, such as the rise of big data, mobility, artificial intelligence, robotics and the internet of things. The World Economic Forum calls this era, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution.” 

Regardless of the name we give this era, Schwab warned, as did Brynjolfsson and McAfee, that failure by organizations to prepare and adapt could cause inequality and fragment societies. 

That era that we once talked about, is not here.

The rise of generative Ai.

As Erik Brynjolfsson shares, “There is no economic law that says as technology advances, so does equal opportunity.” The World Economic Forum reinforces this by sharing, that while the dynamics of today’s world have the potential to create enormous prosperity, the challenge to societies, particularly businesses, governments and education systems, will be to create access to opportunities that will allow everyone to share in the prosperity. 

Schwab, Brynjolfsson and McAfee advocate for schools being able to play a powerful role in shaping a future that is technology-driven and human-centered. Design thinking, a human-centered framework is one method that can provide educators with the skills and mindset to navigate away from the traditional model established during the industrial area. To a learner-centered vision where we design learning experiences at the intersection of knowledge, skills, and mindsets.

The Future of Work

Designing schools for today’s learner is not just about solving a workforce or technology challenge. It’s also about solving a human challenge, where every individual has the access and opportunity to reach their potential. 

Despite the changing expectations of the workplace brought forth by this era, today’s education systems largely remain unchanged. Leaving graduates without the knowledge, skills and mindsets to thrive in future workplaces and as citizens. Furthermore, the lack of equity has led to what Paul Attewell calls a growing digital use divide deepening the fragmentation of society. 

​​A decade ago, some of the most in-demand occupations or specialties today did not exist across many industries and countries. Furthermore, 60% of children in kindergarten will live in a world where the possible opportunities do not yet exist (World Economic Forum, 2017).

In Technology, Jobs and the Future of Work, McKinsey states that 60% of all occupations have at least 30% of activities that can be automated. 40% of employers say lack of skills is the main reason for entry level job vacancies. And 60% of new graduates said they were not prepared for the world of work in a knowledge economy, noting gaps in technical and soft skills. Before our experience with ChatGPT I’m reminded of Imaginable by Jane McGonigal where she shares, “Almost everything important that’s ever happened, was unimaginable shortly before it happened.”

With an influx of technology over the past decade, with iPads and Chromebooks, and now the acceleration of AI technology, particularly over the past year, we have to wonder what gaps exist that prevent us from accelerating and scaling the change we want to see in schools. 

One reason is that this challenge is complex and overwhelming. This is where design thinking practices are helpful in moving from idea to impact. Design thinking practices provide the structure and scaffolds needed to take a complex idea and simplify it.

The Design Thinking Process

Too often design thinking is seen as a series of hexagons to jump through. Check off one and move onto the next. Design thinking is a non-linear framework that nurtures your mindset toward navigating change. 

It can be used in three areas:

• Problem finding
• Problem solving
• Opportunity exploration

The design thinking model is nonlinear. Resulting in a back and forth between the stages of inspiration, ideation and implementation, in an effort to continuously improve upon their potential solution (Shively et al., 2018). These stages were expanded by the d.School into empathy, define, ideate, prototype and iterate. In fact, there are many exercises that can be used to apply each area of the process. 

Let’s walk through each phase. Then I’ll share examples of how it is being used. I also want to preface this by saying that simply going through these stages is where most people misunderstand design thinking and don’t see the results they hoped for. These phases are here to help you develop an action-oriented mindset. Moving from identifying a problem to designing and then testing a solution to quickly get feedback. Each of these phases have numerous exercises to also help facilitate experiences based on your scenario.

Phase 1: Empathy

When you begin with empathy, what you think is challenged by what you learn. This alone is what makes design thinking so unique and is the first phase. During the empathy stage, you observe, engage and immerse yourself in the experience of those you are designing for. Continuously asking, “why” to understand why things are the way they are. 

This phase is where we see the most challenges, yet this phase is the most critical. An empathy map is probably the most common exercise. Yet there are others such as, “Heard, Seen, Respected.” Another challenge in this area is not speaking directly to the user. For example, I’ve sat in many “design thinking” experiences where the group will speculate on behalf of the users. For example, educators speculating about parents, administrators speculating about teachers. 

The purpose behind an empathy exercise is that when we begin with empathy, what we think is challenged by what we learn. While you can practice with each other, ultimately you must speak directly to who you are designing for.

Phase 2: Define

During the define stage you unpack the empathy findings and create an actionable problem statement often starting with, “how might we…” This statement not only emphasizes an optimistic outlook, it invites the designer to think about how this can be a collaborative approach.

Phase 3: Ideate

During the ideate phase you generate a series of possibilities for design. The focus here is quantity not quality. As you want to generate as many possibilities to see how they may merge together. As Guy Kawasaki shares, “Don’t worry be crappy.” Feasibility is not important at this step. Rather the key is to not think about what is possible but what can be possible. At the end, one of the ideas, or the merging of many ideas, is chosen to expand upon in the next phase. 

This is another phase where we see challenges. It is not enough to simply tell someone to get a piece of paper and then come up with lots of ideas. As adults, this is incredibly challenging and is also a muscle that needs to be developed. In fact, one of my favorite exercises is 1-2-4-all. Another is walking questions, where the prompt begins with “What if…” and then after each person writes something it is handed to the person on their right.

Phase 4: Prototype

During the prototype phase, ideas that were narrowed down from ideation are created in a tangible form so that they can be tested. During this phase, the designer has an opportunity to test their prototype and gain feedback.

Phase 5: Iteration

By quickly testing the prototype, the user can refine the idea. And have a deeper understanding to go back and ask questions to the group they are designing for. The feedback received from the user allows the designer to engage in a deeper level of empathy to refine the questions asked and the problem being defined. This brings us back to phase 1. 

You can find more of these exercises to lead your group through each phase at sessionlab.com . 

As schools strive to create student learning experiences that prepare them for their future, design thinking can play a critical role in complementing students’ knowledge with the skills and mindsets to be creative problem solvers.

Examples of Design Thinking in K12

While new approaches tend to be viewed with skepticism, an increasing number of studies are coming forward reflecting the promise of transferability of skills and mindsets from the classroom to real-world problems when utilizing design thinking. As expectations are raised about what student skills and mindsets are needed, the level of support for educators must increase as well to experience success in new strategies and the outcomes they promise. 

When student learning experiences include design thinking, their skills continue to be enhanced and developed. This in turn allows them to apply these strategies to be problem finders and problem solvers. Helping them be more comfortable with change and empowering them to solve unstructured problems. And work with new information, gaining knowledge, skills and mindsets that cannot be found in the confines of a textbook.

In “The Second Machine Age,” the authors share:

Technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead. As we’ll demonstrate, there’s never been a better time to be a worker with special skills or the right education. Because these people can use technology to create and capture value. However, there’s never been a worse time to be a worker with only “ordinary” skills and abilities to offer, because computers, robots, and other digital technologies are acquiring these skills and abilities at an extraordinary rate. The Second Machine Age | Erik Brynjolfsson | Andrew McAffee

Design thinking strengthens the mindsets and skills that today’s world demands with the ability to become creative problem solvers. Through nurturing the skills and mindsets developed through engaging in design thinking, schools can create more equitable use environments for all learners that leverage technology to accelerate creative tasks that can bridge the digital use divide.

Case Study 1: Design Thinking in Grade 6

A recent study by the Stanford Graduate School of Education highlights that through instruction, students transfer design thinking strategies beyond the classroom. And that the biggest benefits were to low-achieving students (Chin et al., 2019). 

The study included 200 students from grade 6. The researchers worked with the educators during class time to coach half the group of students on two specific design thinking strategies. And then assigned them a project where they could apply these skills.

The two strategies included seeking out constructive feedback and identifying multiple possible outcomes to a challenge. Each of these strategies were designed to prevent what the researchers called, “early closure”. Identifying the potential solution before examining the problem. 

After class the students were presented with different challenges to see how they would approach them. The students who were taught about constructive criticism asked for feedback when presented with the new challenge and were more likely to go back and revise their work. 

This area was significant, as a pre-test revealed that low-achieving students were behind their high achieving peers when seeking out feedback, a gap that the researchers say disappeared after classroom instruction, highlighting the need for this to be taught to all students, not just advanced students in electives.

As Attewell shares, “Placing computers in the hands of every student is not a solution because the challenge lies in addressing the “ digital use divide – changing the tasks that students do when provided with computers.” 

He further highlights the students who gain the types of skills highlighted by the Future of Jobs Report are white and affluent students. These students are more likely to use technology to develop trending skills with greater levels of adult support. Whereas minority students are more likely to use it for rote learning tasks, with lower levels of adult support. 

While design thinking is often found in pockets, presented to students already interested in this area, or the students who are in certain electives, the study led by the Stanford Graduate School of Education demonstrates the advances that can be made when this is offered to all students.

Case Study 2: Design Thinking in Geography

Another study (Caroll et al., 2010) focused on the implementation of a design curriculum during a middle school geography class. And explored how students expressed their understanding of design thinking in classroom activities, how affective elements impacted design thinking in the classroom environment and how design thinking is connected to academic standards and content in the classroom. The students were a diverse group with 60% Latino, 30% African-American, 9% Pacific Islander and 1% White.

The task was for students to use the design process to learn about systems in geography. The study found that students increased their levels of creative confidence. And that design thinking fostered the ability to imagine without boundaries and constraints. A key element to success was that educators needed to see the value of design thinking. And it must be integrated into academic content.

A challenge often associated with design thinking in education is not integrating it into mainstream education as an equitable experience for all learners despite showing that lower achieving students benefit more (Chin et al, 2019). 

If students are to experience dynamic learning experiences, then organizations must raise the level of support for educators and give them the time and space to learn and integrate design thinking.

How Educators Use Design Thinking

Educators are facing a number of challenges in their professional practice. Many of the requirements today are tools and methods they did not grow up with. Furthermore, the profession is tasked with designing new methods often within traditional systems that have constraints that may serve as roadblocks to change (Robinson & Aronica, 2016). 

A 2018 study by PwC with the Business Higher Education Forum shared that an average of 10% of K-12 teachers feel confident incorporating higher-level technology that affords students the opportunity to use technology to design learning that is active, not passive. 

As a result, students do not spend much time in school actively practicing the higher-level trending skills expected by employers. Moreover, the report shows that more than 60% of classroom technology use is passive, while only 32% is active use. While the study suggests that many teachers do not have the skills to engage students in the active use of technology, 79% said they would like to have more professional development for how to leverage technology to design learning that is active.

Case Study 3: Design39 Campus

As I shared earlier I led a two-year research study at Design39 Campus. The study examines how it helped teachers evolve their practice. At Design39 teachers are called “Learning Experience Designers” (LEDs). Borko and Putnam (1995) share that how educators think is related to their knowledge. To understand how LEDs are using design thinking to complement the standards-based curriculum, it was important to understand how they acquired and applied this knowledge.  

Despite design thinking having its roots outside of education, when asked, “What does design thinking mean to you?” The LEDs identified many commonalities amongst their own work as educators and design thinking. Moreover, they appreciated the alignment of their work with the vocabulary and structure of the design thinking framework. 

Over 50% of the LEDs interviewed identified design thinking as providing them with a common vocabulary and structure for what they already do. The LEDs identified educators as inherent design thinkers due to the shared human-centered focus of working with users. In this experience educators design challenges with cyclical learning tasks involving testing, feedback and iteration, and a design mindset to address the wide variety of complex problems within their individual classrooms and across education organizations.

One LED shared:

I just look at it as a process, a process in my mind that we kind of naturally go through as educators, and so with the design thinking process I feel that it is codifying what we do and so we start off always in empathy and empathy is the heart of design thinking and so we are problem solving, who are we problem solving for – people, our learners and so this entire process that we go through of brain dumping it, trying it, getting feedback and coming back to it again so that we can make sure we were really insightful about what the problem really was for the users and we continue around this process to fine tune a potential solution is the design thinking process. Learning Experience Designer | Design39 Campus

One of the ways mastery of knowledge is demonstrated is by teaching others. To assess their mastery of design thinking in education, learning experience designers were asked to describe their confidence in teaching someone else how to integrate design thinking into their curriculum.

Many LEDs acknowledged that although this is what it often looked like in the first year of the school opening, they have since had the time, space and collaborative opportunities to explore and create deeper integration. This was a point of reference mentioned by 78% of LEDs.

I think a lot of people see design thinking as one science activity, we design think everything from rules to problems that come up in the playground, it’s all through the day, they (the learners) are always looking for problems to solve. Learning Experience Designer | Design39 Campus

In another example, four LEDs made a note using the exact same language that “design thinking is not always cardboard and duct tape.” What allows them to design learning that is more meaningful  one LED highlighted:

Not every day is about using duct tape and cardboard, sometimes to do the design to solve the problems you have to hunker down and read and research and so some days, design thinking is highlighting and taking notes. Learning Experience Designer | Design39 Campus

Another LED elaborated on this idea by sharing that

Design thinking is a way of thinking, not always a product that is created at the end. Learning Experience Designer | Design39 Campus

LEDs in all focus groups shared how ultimately design thinking was an opportunity to design lessons that are “ bigger than we are .” 

This allowed for the LEDs to design learning experiences. With this, the end result was not to just design a potential solution to a challenge that was identified. Or to simply go from one standard to another, checking off boxes along the way, but that the solution, the work the learners were doing lived beyond the classroom for an authentic audience, where learners are working on real world problems and presenting their solutions to a real world audience.

Almost all of the LEDs shared that to them design thinking was a mindset. It is a process of inquiry that allowed for a more human centered environment where the learner was the focus. 

This highlighted a critical shift in the culture at Design39, an element Sarason (2004) discussed in saying no one ever asks:

“Why is school not a place where educators learn as well?” 

Bring a Design Thinking Workshop to Your School

We’ve invested in technology. Now it’s time to invest in people. Let’s discuss how design thinking practices can enhance the work you are doing in your school, giving everyone the mindset and skills to navigate change with enthusiasm and optimism. Use this calendar to schedule a time with Sabba to discuss bringing a workshop to your school. Workshops can be delivered both virtually and in-person.

Attewell, P. (2001). The first and second digital divides. Sociology of Education, 74(3), 252-259

Borko, H., & Putnam, R.T. (1995). Expanding a teacher’s knowledge base: A cognitive psychological perspective on professional development. In T. Gusky & M. Huberman (Eds), Professional development in education: New paradigms and practices (pp.35-65). Teachers College Press. 

Brown, T & Wyatt, J. (2010). Design thinking for social innovation.  Stanford Social Science Review, 8 (1), 30-35.

Brynjolfsson, E. (2014).  The second machine age: Work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies  (1st t ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Carroll, M., Goldman, S., Britos, L., Koh, J., Royalty, A., & Hornstein, M. (2010). Destination, imagination and the fires within: Design thinking in a middle school classroom. International Journal of Art and Design Education, (29)1, 37-53.

Chin, D. B., Doris, Blair, K.P., Wolf, R., & Conlin, L., Cutumisu, M., Pfaffman, J., Schwartz, D.L. (2019). Educating and measuring choice: A test of the transfer of design thinking in problem solving and learning. Journal of the Learning Sciences. 1-44. 

Levy, F., & Murnane, R. (2013). Dancing with Robots. NEXT Report.

McKinsey Global Institute (2017). Technology, Jobs and the Future of Work. McKinsey. 

PwC (2017). Technology in U.S. Schools: Are we preparing our students for the jobs of tomorrow . Pricewater House Coopers. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/about-us/corporate-responsibility/library/preparing-students-for-technology-jobs.html .

Robinson, K., & Aronica, L. (2016). Creative schools: the grassroots revolution that’s transforming education. Penguin Books.

Shively, K., Stith, K.M., & Rubenstein, L.D. (2018). Measuring what matters: Assessing creativity, critical thinking, and the design process. Gifted Child Today, 41(3) 149-158.

World Economic Forum. (2018). The future of jobs: Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution . World Economic Forum. 

I believe that the future should be designed. Not left to chance. Over the past decade, using design thinking practices I've helped schools and businesses create a culture of innovation where everyone is empowered to move from idea to impact, to address complex challenges and discover opportunities. 

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What is Design Thinking? A Handy Guide for Teachers

In this post, Mandi Dimitriadis, Director of Learning at Makers Empire, will help you understand more about Design Thinking. You’ll get to know what Design Thinking is, why Design Thinking is important, the phases of the Design Thinking process and how you might teach your students how to use Design Thinking to reframe problems and needs as actionable statements.

Designers use particular ways of thinking to create innovative new products and design solutions to challenging problems. As educators, we can learn a lot from the way designers think.

What is Design Thinking?

• A solutions-based approach to solving problems.
• An iterative, non-linear process.
• A way of thinking and working.
• Supported by a collection of strategies and methods.
• Develop empathy and understand the needs of the people we are designing solutions for.
• Define problems and opportunities for designing solutions.
• Generate and visualise creative ideas.
• Develop prototypes.
• Test solutions and seek feedback.

Why is Design Thinking important?

Consider the rapidly changing world we live in. To thrive in the future students will need to be adaptable and flexible. They will need to be prepared to face situations that they have never seen before. Design Thinking is one of the best tools we can give our students to ensure they:

• Have creative confidence in their abilities to adapt and respond to new challenges.
• Are able to identify and develop innovative, creative solutions to problems they and others encounter.
• Develop as optimistic, empathetic and active members of society who can contribute to solving the complex challenges the world faces.

How can students use Design Thinking?

So what does Design Thinking look like in action?

Watch these inspiring videos made by schools in Australia showing how students used Design Thinking and Makers Empire to solve common real-world problems in their classroom, school and communities.

Please note that the Makers Empire app depicted in this video is a much earlier version of the app.

How did the students in the videos use design thinking.

In the Forbes primary school bag tag video, for example, we saw our first graders:

• Developing and agreeing on criteria for their designs.
• Selecting tools and materials – in this case, Makers Empire and 3D printing.
• Supporting each other to learn how to use the new tools.
• Producing a working prototype.

The testing process for our first graders involved:

• Giving each other feedback
• Assessing their designs against the previous agreed criteria
• Making modifications and improvements to their designs
• Testing their designs in the context they would be used.
• Reflecting on their problem-solving processes and learning outcomes.

How can we teach Design Thinking with little time to plan?

Makers Empire teachers never cease to impress us with their innovative and creative ideas for using Makers Empire to help students achieve curriculum learning outcomes. However, we also know how busy teachers are and how difficult it can be to find time to plan engaging, curriculum-aligned units of work. So we created ready-made Challenge Courses . 

Each themed course is a complete design program comprising videos, quizzes, tutorials & design challenges.  Challenge Courses are aligned to curriculum outcomes and teach real world-problem solving using Design Thinking. Challenge courses take 4-10 weeks to complete so teachers might plan to have students do a course during one lesson/week over a term. During that term, students will address all aspects of the Design and Technologies curriculum without teachers needing to do any extra planning. 

How can we learn more about Design Thinking?

Makers Empire offers customisable Design Thinking and 3D design learning programs to school districts, education departments , and groups of schools .

Through our professional learning programs, teachers learn how to use Design Thinking and 3D design to transform the way they teach STEM subjects and help  equip students with the skills and attitudes they’ll need to thrive in the future.

We’ve delivered Design Thinking and 3D technology programs to groups of 200+ schools in Australia, America and the Middle East so we have the right experience, skills and team to help you.

How will you teach Design Thinking?

Now it’s your turn. Think about projects you can do with your students that will help enhance and deepen learning. How might you support your students to:

• Develop empathy , insights and understandings.
• Define a problem as an actionable question.
• Generate and visualise ideas.
• Develop prototypes; and
• Evaluate and test their designed solutions.

Makers Empire is an excellent way to teach Design Thinking to students. You can sign up for a free school trial at the top of this website. Don’t forget to download our free  Design Thinking posters and worksheets , too.

Mandi Dimitriadis

Mandi Dimitriadis, DipT. is a highly respected educator and speaker who works internationally with elementary, primary and middle schools to help teachers develop Design Thinking, embrace maker pedagogy and cover Design & Technology Curriculum. She is an experienced classroom teacher who recognises the power of technology to enhance teaching and improve educational outcomes. Mandi has extensive experience with curriculum development, having previously developed programs for the Australian Government’s Department of Education.

How to Enhance Design Thinking with ChatGPT

New technologies are always posing challenges in the educational sector.  It’s not the technology that’s the issue, but the people and processes.  Educators’ approaches to these digital advancements must not be to deny their existence but to understand how they can be used to transform assessment.  AI tools, such as ChatGPT, offer students access to a wealth of information and can be most useful as research and practice guides in active and applied problem-solving tasks such as those used in design thinking.

So how can teachers embrace ChatGPT and use it to enhance design thinking approaches? 

ChatGPT is capable of facilitating the generation of novel ideas, enhancing creativity and improving product development (Haleem, 2022).  It can reinforce the principles of design thinking through its ability to generate student centred solutions with its iterative problem solving approach (Enhold, 2022).  For each of the phases in design thinking, ChatGPT can be a useful tool.

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Design Thinking

What makes design thinking different.

Traditional courses progress the student learning from conceptual understanding towards demonstrations of skill and capacity in a linear, topically focused manner. Setting this scaffolding is set in place, fixes the problems, and the solutions are typically within a known range. But many course problems are research questions that defy simple explanations or right/wrong answers. For these courses, need a more dexterous approach. 

In Design Thinking, they are discovering knowledge through exploration. Students help define the problems, identify and develop potential solutions, and determine ways to assess the work. Instructors serve as facilitators and advisors to this learning. Embedded throughout the process is capacity-building through linked-learning experiences, collaborative exercises, and creative problem-solving [iii] . Learning often involves hands-on experiences focused on real-world challenges. By centering course activities around a problem and generating creative solutions, these courses support the development of essential competencies such as critical thinking, reflective learning, adaptability, effective collaboration, and systems thinking.

The Design Thinking Multi-Stage Model

Discovery (empathy, research, and problem definition), ideation (interpret, create, and make), experimentation (prototype, test and evaluate), evolution (re-think, re-make, repeat), deployment (socialize, pilot, and integrate).

The first stages are directed towards understanding and defining potential problems for solutions by asking, “What Is It?” The requisite foundation for all other design thinking stages is the ability to generate informed and empathetic work during this stage. How? Through literature reviews and consultations with experts along with the combined observations and engagements with people and physical environments relevant to the topic. Information gathered and documented during this stage can be aligned with course objectives and assessments. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the issues throughout the process.

Upon completing the information gathering, teams organize, interpret, and make sense of the data to define a problem scope. Doing so requires both analysis (i.e., breaking down complex concepts) and synthesis (i.e., creatively piecing information together to form whole ideas). A good problem statement should be human-centered, broad enough for creative freedom, but narrow enough to be manageable. As a general rule, consider using the Stanford d. school “Why-How Ladder” (a variation of the Sakichi Toyoda “5 Whys” technique) to refine the problem statement and to suggest how to move forwards with design problem-solving.

Unlike the traditional project-based learning method, instructors do not define the problem in design thinking. They can, and should, define a scope, but defining the actual problem is part of the student responsibility. 

At this stage, students interpret their research into a range of creative ideas and potential solutions. This step starts the “What If?” phase of the work. Instructors should encourage enthusiasm and collaborative participation by incorporating active-learning methods, visualization techniques of “systems-thinking,” and other image-oriented methods to document brainstorming.

Expert guidance is required to maintain enthusiasm in the ideation process by guiding proposals and bringing focus to the expectations. Instructors suggest practices to enhance the solutions and temper expectations (e.g., “your solution won’t solve world hunger as you proposed, but it can make a difference in one stage of food production—let’s use that to refocus the design effort.” Eventually a more narrow range of possible solutions is identified, and the work of making/designing begins.

In this stage, ideas become manifest. Students are deciding how and what to produce is of central importance. Iteration is essential. Align activities with course objectives and professional practice models. As ideation moves into prototyping, the expectation is that student groups produce several scaled-down versions or features of the final solution. Doing so allows students to understand better the constraints and benefits inherent to the solutions they’ve designed. The introduction of new tools and skills can occur during this stage, along with emphasizing collaborative efforts. 

Experimentation is only complete when identifying problems by breaking the project down through evaluation.

This process looks for failures and revelations that emerge through testing; profound learning opportunities arise when solutions don’t meet their objectives. 

Learning how to define and evaluate the relative value and efficacy of the prototypes follows is an essential skill. Students often return to the Discovery stage to identify the proper standards for evaluating success (Who does it work for? Does it work in the way you intended? How would you know?). At this stage, instructors can show how practical conditions affect evaluation (industry standards, code requirements, etc.) and how exigent forces would affect the solution (e.g., broader economic, sociological, and cultural conditions).

This stage isn’t the end of the process; ultimately, testing is a generative process for redesign as it reveals opportunities for improvement. By trying to determine how and why specific solutions are rejected, improved, or accepted, students develop clarity of how real users would behave, think, and feel when interacting with the solution. At this stage, alterations and refinements are expected to be more mature and technically developed. Collaborations may be extended into communities to expand testing and assessment.

The multi-stage process implies a linear direction of progress, but designing and learning are inherently more unpredictable, so the model is flexible. Information learned from testing helps refine the problem definition and the overall design. There is a perpetual loop of feedback. Ultimately, solutions are evolved and improved through reiteration and repetition, as fewer factors are considered for each iteration.

The challenge of design thinking is often knowing when this evolutionary process of redesigning is “done.” Solving a problem, particularly a vexing one, is unlikely within the constraints of school. Academic calendars and restrictions are quite different from practice, so there are often situations in which a “good enough for now” scenario is the goal.

Ideally, of course, the process can spark an interest in students to continue a life-long engagement in these research projects. This process is ultimately about joining on-going conversations and searching for new knowledge through design solutions. It isn’t about resolution. The passion of the search is what is essential to teach and learn.

Specific projects may have the opportunity to develop into real-world solutions. This stage of deployment focuses on ways that solutions become tangible, actionable, and ready for use. In the socializing phase, the ideas develop to the degree that buy-in occurs and teams built around the solution. This phase relies on the ability to tell compelling stories about the solution. Because these stories have naturally developed through a rigorous Design Thinking process, it is relatively easy to build a narrative around a solution based on the process.

In the piloting phase, the solution is introduced to a predetermined group to gain real-world feedback and reviews. Depending on the solution’s stage and scope, this may occur at a smaller scale during prototyping. In this phase, the focus is on identifying barriers to implementation of use and integration. Depending on the solution, these barriers to production and method may be profound. This work takes in-depth expertise and cross-disciplinary collaborations to understand markets, supply-chains, production, delivery models, and how the solution will enhance or disrupt existing models.

What is the Difference between Project-Based Learning (PBL), Understanding by Design (UbD), and Design Thinking (DT)?

Project-based learning (PBL) is a broader category of educational activities in which curricular activities are all centered around sustained engagement with a problem or project. Using PBL, a potentially important study narrowed down into a series of discrete activities using student-directed learning. A PBL approach can closely align with curricular checkpoints by defining a path of inquiry and production through essential guiding questions and required deliverables.

The Understanding by Design (UbD) model, is similar to PBL in its use of creative problem solving as the central learning activity. It differs mostly in the way of evaluating success. In UbD, educators help define the problem and develop a process of design-learning with the final result. In some courses, particularly those with complex topics, there may not be a readily available answer. The problem itself may not be easily defined, which complicates the PBL and UbD model.

Design Thinking is intentionally more open-ended than these other options. Students help to define the problem based on a generative topic that opens an area of research. Students are encouraged to align what they produce with their broader research questions. Assessment is related to prototyping and rebuilding intended to promote creative risk-taking.

Design Thinking Resources for Educators

• Kelley, T. (2016). The Art Of Innovation . London: Profile Books.
• O’Donnell Wicklund Pigozzi Peterson, Architects Inc, VS Furniture, & Bruce Mau Design. (2010). The third teacher : 79 ways you can use design to transform teaching & learning / OWP/P Architects, VS Furniture, Bruce Mau Design . New York: Abrams.
• Weinschenk, S. (2015). 100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (1st ed.) . New Riders.

Manuals / Toolkits

• IDEO.org. (2015). T he Field Guide to Human-Centered Design (Community Engagement Manual) . Retrieved from https://www.designkit.org/
• Riverdale Country School & IDEO.org. (2019). Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit (2 nd Edition). Retrieved from https://www.ideo.com/post/design-thinking-for-educators/

Organizations

• Institute of Design at Stanford (d.School) website  (Hasso-Plattner)
• RED lab: Research in Education and Design website (Stanford School of Education)
• TD4Ed: Teachers Design for Education website (Business Innovation Factory)
• Edutopia, Design Thinking Video Collection
• Design Thinking For Educators”  context  /  profession  /  practice  /  mindse

[i] Tim Brown, “Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation,” Harper Business, 2009. https://designthinking.ideo.com

[ii] Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford, “Design Thinking Mix Tapes,” 2018. https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/chart-a-new-course-put-design-thinking-to-work

[iii] IDEO, “Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit” (2 nd Edition), IDEO + Riverdale Country School, 2019. https://www.ideo.com/post/design-thinking-for-educators

[iv] Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (3 rd Ed.), 1996

Design Thinking has been widely recognized as an alternative way of thinking and methodology for problem solving in Education institutions from K-12 to Grad Schools in educational institutions such as Stanford, MIT, Darden School of Business at Virginia University, Carnegie Mellon and many more. Read about their courses, programs, research and other involvement with design thinking on this page.

See our listing of courses and programs offered by all Universities and other institutions on the Education page .

This is a follow on article to our original article "5 Design Thinking Examples for Students" .

What are Design Thinking Tools? Design thinking is an approach to problem-solving that is centered around understanding the needs and experiences of end-users. It is a creative and innovative approach that is used by designers and organizations to develop effective solutions to complex problems. Design thinking tools are a set of methods and techniques that facilitate the design thinking process. In this article, we will discuss some of the most popular design thinking tools and their benefits.

1. Empathy Mapping

Design thinking training has become increasingly popular in recent years, with businesses and organizations around the world looking to develop their innovation and problem-solving capabilities. While design thinking can be a powerful tool for creativity and innovation, there are also some potential pitfalls and limitations to its use. In this article, we will critically examine design thinking training, looking at its strengths and weaknesses, and providing recommendations for how to make the most of this approach.

Design thinking has emerged as one of the most popular frameworks for creative problem-solving. It has been used by businesses, startups, and non-profits around the world to develop innovative solutions to complex challenges. As a result, the demand for design thinking certification has increased significantly. However, the question remains, is design thinking certification necessary, and does it truly add value to the process of design thinking?

Welcome to our educators page. We hope that we can support you on your journey to discover and use Design Thinking to help the next generation to become more confident in using creativity to solve problems.

Why is Design Thinking important for students?

21st Century Learning and Innovation Skills are the skills that will be essential for students to possess to thrive in the increasingly complex life and work environments in the 21st century. These include:

• Creativity and Innovation • Critical Thinking and Problem Solving • Communication • Collaboration

Applying Design Thinking internally, within a group, community or to ourselves. This is a new application of the Design Thinking Methodology.

An internal application in this sense can have two meanings. First, the internal application of design thinking tactics within a group, organization or community, and second, the internal application of design thinking to one’s own self and life.

Can Design Thinking help you solve your own problems?

Talk to any educator, parent, or policy maker and you will inevitably hear about the many problems that exist in education. It’s not for lack of trying—millions of people are working across the country to find new solutions for our schools. And yet we’re struggling to find new answers that make a real difference. 

Recently IDEO, the design and innovation firm where I work, collaborated with San Francisco Unified School District to develop a new vision for their food system.

This case study focuses on a Design Thinking Workshop for primary school learners. The aim of the workshops was to provide learners with a new set of skills which they can employ when problem solving for real world challenges.

Building resilience is essential for cities that face increasing uncertainty and new challenges that threaten the well-being of its citizens. This is especially important when looking at the diversity and complexity of potential shocks and stresses. 

This study shows that a short, 3-day intervention can make a positive impact on young female youths’ perceptions of STEM, pro-social attitudes, creative confidence, and career pathways. It does this by creating a “hook” or stimulating interest among youths to have a more favorable opinion about working in STEM.

The study’s second finding is that persistent gender norms are hard to overturn and require additional interventions.

This very informative article discusses design thinking as a process and mindset for collaboratively finding solutions for wicked problems in a variety of educational settings. Through a systematic literature review the article organizes case studies, reports, theoretical reflections, and other scholarly work to enhance our understanding of the purposes, contexts, benefits, limitations, affordances, constraints, effects and outcomes of design thinking in education.

Specifically, the review pursues four questions:

As children move from kindergarten, through middle school, and to high school, instruction shifts from stories to facts, from speculation to specifics, and imagination fades from focus. Design Thinking provides an alternative model to traditional ways of learning academic content by challenging students to find answers to complex, nuanced problems with multiple solutions and by fostering students’ ability to act as change agents.

In her doctoral paper Loraine Rossi de Campos explores the use of Design Thinking in a school district for a 4-5 grade school.

How to use design thinking to make great things actually happen by Tim Brown and Roger L. Martin. In this great HBR article, the authors look at design thinking in Finance with two case studies, one from MassMutual and the other from Intercorp. Group of Peru.

In this article highlighting the development of the acceptance of Design Thinking, they discuss how Design Thinking helps to create the artifact that creates the new solution as well as the intervention/s that brings the artifact to life.

Ever since it became clear that smart design led to the success of many products, companies have been employing it in other areas, from customer experiences, to strategy, to business ecosystems. But as design is used in increasingly complex contexts, a new hurdle has emerged: gaining acceptance (for the new solutions).

Read more...

Reham has been working at Mohammed bin Rashid school, a public school in Dubai, for the last five years as a Design & Technology Teacher. She teaches grades 3 to grade 8 students. Prior to working as a teacher, Reham was an architect and worked at an engineering consultancy where her duties included designing buildings using Autocad and 3d Max software. 

In an ever changing society of the 21st century, there is a demand to equip students with meta competences going beyond cognitive knowledge. Education, therefore, needs a transition from transferring knowledge to developing individual potentials with the help of constructivist learning. A Scheer, C Noweski,  C Meinel , University of Potsdam, Germany.

Design Thinking is the most effective method of teaching constructivist learning.

Developing environmental sustainability strategies, the Double Diamond method of LCA and design thinking: a case study from aged care. Journal of Cleaner Production, 85, 67-82. Stephen J. Clune*, Simon Lockrey.

The Stanford University d.school  -  Design Thinking Bootcamp Bootleg , Design Thinking tools and the  Resources page . have gone through a number of iterations to refine the exercises and tools. The Bootleg offers the latest version (as of May 2020) for people to download and use for free.

Watch this video from Nathan Shedroff on design strategy and the merging of business and design. In this video Nathan very clearly articulates the difference between design and design thinking and discusses how design needs to mesh with business and business with design. Well worth watching.

Watch Video...

Admissions needs to communicate consistently at each touchpoint. Prospective students and families want to assess whether this educational experience is the right fit for them. Current students and alumni are asking for Maize and Blue landmarks to build the Michigan Tradition across campus.

Design Thinking is a powerful approach to problem solving and supports schools in moving toward a more hands-and minds-on, challenge-based curriculum. We want kids to be engaged right? You won't believe how well Design Thinking engages kids.

Watch this video...

Design Thinking in daily life is about creating creative and collaborative workflows engineered to tackle big projects and prototyping to discover new solutions.

And although we have K-12 schools incorporating design thinking into their curriculum and instruction, as well as educators attending  design thinking workshops  at places like the d. School at Stanford, what does design thinking in daily life really look like in K-12 classrooms and schools?

If we want our students to think critically, consider the needs of others and then develop solutions to solve real problems, design thinking project ideas offer a useful framework to make that happen. Are you looking to give it a try this year? Here are 6 design thinking project ideas that take students through the 5 stages – empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test – and get them digging deeper.

This video showcases three projects during this year’s Design Thinking Club. Each group of students used the design thinking method to help improve a school experience or help a teacher in need.

David Lee walks us through three Design Thinking projects. It's a great example of how the process works and the type of results that it produced.

Watch the kids go through the process and produce really great solutions. It is inspiring.

Watch here...

In this presentation from the Hathaway Brown School in Ohio, teachers will learn about the design thinking process, how it ties to the 21st century skills and how to conduct workshops for different grades. It provides a good overview for teachers who want to try Design Thinking in their classroom.

There are not that many Design Thinking project examples for students on the web. Most design thinking project examples are aimed at working professionals i.e. engineers, marketing, business people, and are not really great project examples for K-12 and college students to grasp how the process works. Nor is it easy to understand how they apply to your particular problem or passion.

The Stanford d.school's Design Thinking Workshop is a powerful tool for developing innovative solutions to complex problems. The workshop combines empathy, creativity, and critical thinking to develop unique and effective solutions to a wide range of problems. This article will explore the how long the workshop should take, and some tips and tools to ensure a successful Design Thinking Workshop.

How Long Should the Workshop Take?

The way we are educating students is not the way that they will have to work to succeed in the world. When last did you see students working together in teams and collaborating on problem solving? Education is an individual pursuit in a world that needs team thinking and collaborative skills.

Listen to her TED Talk...

Too often, we hear students say they want to leave West Virginia because there are limited opportunities and few things to do. Simulated Workplace Entrepreneurship Education Pathway (SWEEP) turns that notion on its head and empowers students to generate and create those opportunities

Design Thinking is a creative process that helps you design meaningful solutions to problems in the classroom, at your school, and in your community. This Design Thinking toolkit and Designer's Workbook provides you with instructions to explore Design Thinking with your students. Using the Design Thinking toolkit will help you to get your students engaged in the classroom in ways that are hard to achieve through other exercises.

Design thinking offers a creative yet structured approach for addressing large-scale challenges. 

We offer a summary of the webinar,   Design Thinking: Education Edition , which discusses design thinking principles and process, describes real-world examples of design thinking in action, and offeres possibilities for how you might introduce the approach into your own organization.

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Design Thinking (DT)

What is design thinking (dt).

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. It is most useful to tackle ill-defined or unknown problems and involves five phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

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Why Is Design Thinking so Important?

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

— Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

Design thinking fosters innovation . Companies must innovate to survive and remain competitive in a rapidly changing environment. In design thinking, cross-functional teams work together to understand user needs and create solutions that address those needs. Moreover, the design thinking process helps unearth creative solutions.

Design teams use design thinking to tackle ill-defined/unknown problems (aka wicked problems ). Alan Dix, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, explains what wicked problems are in this video.

Wicked problems demand teams to think outside the box, take action immediately, and constantly iterate—all hallmarks of design thinking.

Don Norman, a pioneer of user experience design, explains why the designer’s way of thinking is so powerful when it comes to such complex problems.

Design thinking offers practical methods and tools that major companies like Google, Apple and Airbnb use to drive innovation. From architecture and engineering to technology and services, companies across industries have embraced the methodology to drive innovation and address complex problems. 

The End Goal of Design Thinking: Be Desirable, Feasible and Viable

The design thinking process aims to satisfy three criteria: desirability (what do people desire?), feasibility (is it technically possible to build the solution?) and viability (can the company profit from the solution?). Teams begin with desirability and then bring in the other two lenses.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Desirability: Meet People’s Needs

The design thinking process starts by looking at the needs, dreams and behaviors of people—the end users. The team listens with empathy to understand what people want, not what the organization thinks they want or need. The team then thinks about solutions to satisfy these needs from the end user’s point of view.

Feasibility: Be Technologically Possible

Once the team identifies one or more solutions, they determine whether the organization can implement them. In theory, any solution is feasible if the organization has infinite resources and time to develop the solution. However, given the team’s current (or future resources), the team evaluates if the solution is worth pursuing. The team may iterate on the solution to make it more feasible or plan to increase its resources (say, hire more people or acquire specialized machinery).

At the beginning of the design thinking process, teams should not get too caught up in the technical implementation. If teams begin with technical constraints, they might restrict innovation.

Viability: Generate Profits

A desirable and technically feasible product isn’t enough. The organization must be able to generate revenues and profits from the solution. The viability lens is essential not only for commercial organizations but also for non-profits. 

Traditionally, companies begin with feasibility or viability and then try to find a problem to fit the solution and push it to the market. Design thinking reverses this process and advocates that teams begin with desirability and bring in the other two lenses later.

The Five Stages of Design Thinking

Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, commonly known as the d.school, is renowned for its pioneering approach to design thinking. Their design process has five phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. These stages are not always sequential. Teams often run them in parallel, out of order, and repeat them as needed.

Stage 1: Empathize —Research Users' Needs

The team aims to understand the problem, typically through user research. Empathy is crucial to design thinking because it allows designers to set aside your assumptions about the world and gain insight into users and their needs.

Stage 2: Define—State Users' Needs and Problems

Once the team accumulates the information, they analyze the observations and synthesize them to define the core problems. These definitions are called problem statements . The team may create personas to help keep efforts human-centered.

Stage 3: Ideate—Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas

With the foundation ready, teams gear up to “think outside the box.” They brainstorm alternative ways to view the problem and identify innovative solutions to the problem statement.

Stage 4: Prototype—Start to Create Solutions

This is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem. The team produces inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the ideas. This may be as simple as paper prototypes .

Stage 5: Test—Try the Solutions Out

The team tests these prototypes with real users to evaluate if they solve the problem. The test might throw up new insights, based on which the team might refine the prototype or even go back to the Define stage to revisit the problem.

These stages are different modes that contribute to the entire design project rather than sequential steps. The goal is to gain a deep understanding of the users and their ideal solution/product.

Design Thinking Frameworks

There is no single definition or process for design thinking. The five-stage design thinking methodology described above is just one of several frameworks.

Hasso-Platner Institute Panorama

Ludwig Wilhelm Wall, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Innovation doesn’t follow a linear path or have a clear-cut formula. Global design leaders and consultants have interpreted the abstract design process in different ways and have proposed other frameworks of design thinking.

Head, Heart and Hand by the American Institution of Graphic Arts (AIGA)

The Head, Heart, and Hand approach by AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) is a holistic perspective on design. It integrates the intellectual, emotional, and practical aspects of the creative process.

More than a process, the Head, Heart and Hand framework outlines the different roles that designers must perform to create great results.

© American Institute of Graphic Arts, Fair Use

“ Head ” symbolizes the intellectual component. The team focuses on strategic thinking, problem-solving and the cognitive aspects of design. It involves research and analytical thinking to ensure that design decisions are purposeful.

“ Heart ” represents the emotional dimension. It emphasizes empathy, passion, and human-centeredness. This aspect is crucial in understanding the users’ needs, desires, and experiences to ensure that designs resonate on a deeper, more personal level.

“ Hand ” signifies the practical execution of ideas, the craftsmanship, and the skills necessary to turn concepts into tangible solutions. This includes the mastery of tools, techniques, and materials, as well as the ability to implement and execute design ideas effectively.

Inspire, Ideate, Implement by IDEO

IDEO is a leading design consultancy and has developed its own version of the design thinking framework.

IDEO’s design thinking process is a cyclical three-step process that involves Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation.

© IDEO, Public License

In the “ Inspire ” phase, the team focuses on understanding users’ needs, behaviors, and motivations. The team empathizes with people through observation and user interviews to gather deep insights.

In the “ Ideate ” phase, the team synthesizes the insights gained to brainstorm a wide array of creative solutions. This stage encourages divergent thinking, where teams focus on quantity and variety of ideas over immediate practicality. The goal is to explore as many possibilities as possible without constraints.

In the “ Implement ” phase, the team brings these ideas to life through prototypes. The team tests, iterates and refines these ideas based on user feedback. This stage is crucial for translating abstract concepts into tangible, viable products, services, or experiences.

The methodology emphasizes collaboration and a multidisciplinary approach throughout each phase to ensure solutions are innovative and deeply rooted in real human needs and contexts.

The Double Diamond by the Design Council

In the book Designing Social Systems in a Changing World , Béla Heinrich Bánáthy, Professor at San Jose State University and UC Berkeley, created a “divergence-convergence model” diagram. The British Design Council interpreted this diagram to create the Double Diamond design process model.

As the name suggests, the double diamond model consists of two diamonds—one for the problem space and the other for the solution space. The model uses diamonds to represent the alternating diverging and converging activities.

© Design Council, CC BY 4.0

In the diverging “ Discover ” phase, designers gather insights and empathize with users’ needs. The team then converges in the “ Define ” phase to identify the problem.

The second, solution-related diamond, begins with “ Develop ,” where the team brainstorms ideas. The final stage is “ Deliver ,” where the team tests the concepts and implements the most viable solution.

This model balances expansive thinking with focused execution to ensure that design solutions are both creative and practical. It underscores the importance of understanding the problem thoroughly and carefully crafting the solution, making it a staple in many design and innovation processes.

With the widespread adoption of the double diamond framework, Design Council’s simple visual evolved.

In this expanded and annotated version, the framework emphasizes four design principles:

Be people-centered.

Communicate (visually and inclusively).

Collaborate and co-create.

Iterate, iterate, iterate!

The updated version also highlights the importance of leadership (to create an environment that allows innovation) and engagement (to connect with different stakeholders and involve them in the design process).

Common Elements of Design Thinking Frameworks

On the surface, design thinking frameworks look very different—they use alternative names and have different numbers of steps. However, at a fundamental level, they share several common traits.

Start with empathy . Focus on the people to come up with solutions that work best for individuals, business, and society.

Reframe the problem or challenge at hand . Don’t rush into a solution. Explore the problem space and look at the issue through multiple perspectives to gain a more holistic, nuanced understanding.

Initially, employ a divergent style of thinking (analyze) . In the problem space, gather as many insights as possible. In the solution space, encourage team members to generate and explore as many solutions as possible in an open, judgment-free ideation space.

Later, employ a convergent style of thinking (synthesize) . In the problem space, synthesize all data points to define the problem. In the solution space, whittle down all the ideas—isolate, combine and refine potential solutions to create more mature ideas.

Create and test prototypes . Solutions that make it through the previous stages get tested further to remove potential issues.

Iterate . As the team progresses through the various stages, they revisit different stages and may redefine the challenge based on new insights.

Design thinking is a non-linear process. For example, teams may jump from the test stage to the define stage if the tests reveal insights that redefine the problem. Or, a prototype might spark a new idea, prompting the team to step back into the ideate stage. Tests may also create new ideas for projects or reveal insights about users.

Design Thinking Mindsets: More than a Process

A mindset is a characteristic mental attitude that determines how one interprets and responds to situations . Design thinking mindsets are how individuals think , feel and express themselves during design thinking activities. It includes people’s expectations and orientations during a design project.

Without the right mindset, it can be very challenging to change how we work and think.

The key mindsets that ensure a team can successfully implement design thinking are.

Be empathetic: Empathy is the ability to place yourself, your thinking and feelings in another person’s shoes. Design thinking begins from a deep understanding of the needs and motivations of people—the parents, neighbors, children, colleagues, and strangers who make up a community. 

Be collaborative: No one person is responsible for the outcome when you work in a team. Several great minds are always stronger than just one. Design thinking benefits from the views of multiple perspectives and lets others’ creativity bolster your own.

Be optimistic: Be confident about achieving favorable outcomes. Design thinking is the fundamental belief that we can all create change—no matter how big a problem, how little time, or how small a budget. Designing can be a powerful process no matter what constraints exist around you.

Embrace ambiguity: Get comfortable with ambiguous and complex situations. If you expect perfection, it is difficult to take risks, which limits your ability to create radical change. Design thinking is all about experimenting and learning by doing. It gives you the confidence to believe that new, better things are possible and that you can help make them a reality. 

Be curious: Be open to different ideas. Recognize that you are not the user.

Reframe: Challenge and reframe assumptions associated with a given situation or problem. Don’t take problems at face value. Humans are primed to look for patterns. The unfortunate side effect of these patterns is that we form (often false and sometimes dangerous) stereotypes and assumptions. Design thinking aims to help you break through any preconceived notions and biases and reframe challenges.

Embrace diversity: Work with and engage people with different cultural backgrounds, experiences, and ways of thinking and working. Everyone brings a unique perspective to the team. When you include diverse voices in a team, you learn from each other’s experiences, further helping you break through your assumptions.

Make tangible: When you make ideas tangible, it is faster and easier for everyone on the team to be on the same page. For example, sketching an idea or enacting a scenario is far more convenient and easy to interpret than an elaborate presentation or document.

Take action: Run experiments and learn from them.

Design Thinking vs Agile Methodology

Teams often use design thinking and agile methodologies in project management, product development, and software development. These methodologies have distinct approaches but share some common principles.

Similarities between Design Thinking and Agile

Iterative process.

Both methodologies emphasize iterative development. In design thinking, teams may jump from one phase to another, not necessarily in a set cyclical or linear order. For example, on testing a prototype, teams may discover something new about their users and realize that they must redefine the problem. Agile teams iterate through development sprints.

User-Centered

The agile and design thinking methodologies focus on the end user. All design thinking activities—from empathizing to prototyping and testing—keep the end users front and center. Agile teams continually integrate user feedback into development cycles.

Collaboration and Teamwork

Both methodologies rely heavily on collaboration among cross-functional teams and encourage diverse perspectives and expertise.

Flexibility and Adaptability

With its focus on user research, prototyping and testing, design thinking ensures teams remain in touch with users and get continuous feedback. Similarly, agile teams monitor user feedback and refine the product in a reasonably quick time.

In this video, Laura Klein, author of Build Better Products , describes a typical challenge designers face on agile teams. She encourages designers to get comfortable with the idea of a design not being perfect. Notice the many parallels between Laura’s advice for designers on agile teams and the mindsets of design thinking.

Differences between Design Thinking and Agile

While design thinking and agile teams share principles like iteration, user focus, and collaboration, they are neither interchangeable nor mutually exclusive. A team can apply both methodologies without any conflict.

From a user experience design perspective, design thinking applies to the more abstract elements of strategy and scope. At the same time, agile is more relevant to the more concrete elements of UX: structure, skeleton and surface. For quick reference, here’s an overview of the five elements of user experience.

Design thinking is more about exploring and defining the right problem and solution, whereas agile is about efficiently executing and delivering a product.

Here are the key differences between design thinking and agile.

Design Sprint: A Condensed Version of Design Thinking

A design sprint is a 5-day intensive workshop where cross-functional teams aim to develop innovative solutions.

The design sprint is a very structured version of design thinking that fits into the timeline of a sprint (a sprint is a short timeframe in which agile teams work to produce deliverables). Developed by Google Ventures, the design sprint seeks to fast-track innovation.

In this video, user researcher Ditte Hvas Mortensen explains the design sprint in detail.

Learn More about Design Thinking

Design consultancy IDEO’s designkit is an excellent repository of design thinking tools and case studies.

To keep up with recent developments in design thinking, read IDEO CEO Tim Brown’s blog .

Enroll in our course Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide —an excellent guide to get you started on your design thinking projects.

Questions related to Design Thinking

You don’t need any certification to practice design thinking. However, learning about the nuances of the methodology can help you:

Pick the appropriate methods and tailor the process to suit the unique needs of your project.

Avoid common pitfalls when you apply the methods.

Better lead a team and facilitate workshops.

Increase the chances of coming up with innovative solutions.

IxDF has a comprehensive course to help you gain the most from the methodology: Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide .

Anyone can apply design thinking to solve problems. Despite what the name suggests, non-designers can use the methodology in non-design-related scenarios. The methodology helps you think about problems from the end user’s perspective. Some areas where you can apply this process:

Develop new products with greater chances of success.

Address community-related issues (such as education, healthcare and environment) to improve society and living standards.

Innovate/enhance existing products to gain an advantage over the competition.

Achieve greater efficiencies in operations and reduce costs.

Use the Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide course to apply design thinking to your context today.

A framework is the basic structure underlying a system, concept, or text. There are several design thinking frameworks with slight differences. However, all the frameworks share some traits. Each framework: 

Begins with empathy.

Reframes the problem or challenge at hand.

Initially employs divergent styles of thinking to generate ideas.

Later, it employs convergent styles of thinking to narrow down the best ideas,

Creates and tests prototypes.

Iterates based on the tests.

Some of the design thinking frameworks are:

5-stage design process by d.school

7-step early traditional design process by Herbert Simon

The 5-Stage DeepDive™ by IDEO

The “Double Diamond” Design Process Model by the Design Council

Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) by Frog Design

The LUMA System of Innovation by LUMA Institute

For details about each of these frameworks, see 10 Insightful Design Thinking Frameworks: A Quick Overview .

IDEO’s 3-Stage Design Thinking Process consists of inspiration, ideation and implementation:

Inspire : The problem or opportunity inspires and motivates the search for a solution.

Ideate : A process of synthesis distills insights which can lead to solutions or opportunities for change.

Implement : The best ideas are turned into a concrete, fully conceived action plan.

IDEO is a leader in applying design thinking and has developed many frameworks. Find out more in 10 Insightful Design Thinking Frameworks: A Quick Overview .

Design Council's Double Diamond diagram depicts the divergent and convergent stages of the design process.

Béla H. Bánáthy, founder of the White Stag Leadership Development Program, created the “divergence-convergence” model in 1996. In the mid-2000s, the British Design Council made this famous as the Double Diamond model.

The Double Diamond diagram graphically represents a design thinking process. It highlights the divergent and convergent styles of thinking in the design process. It has four distinct phases:

Discover: Initial idea or inspiration based on user needs.

Define: Interpret user needs and align them with business objectives.

Develop: Develop, iterate and test design-led solutions.

Deliver: Finalize and launch the end product into the market.

Double Diamond is one of several design thinking frameworks. Find out more in 10 Insightful Design Thinking Frameworks: A Quick Overview .

There are several design thinking methods that you can choose from, depending on what stage of the process you’re in. Here are a few common design thinking methods:

User Interviews: to understand user needs, pain points, attitudes and behaviors.

5 Whys Method: to dig deeper into problems to diagnose the root cause.

User Observations: to understand how users behave in real life (as opposed to what they say they do).

Affinity Diagramming: to organize research findings.

Empathy Mapping: to empathize with users based on research insights.

Journey Mapping: to visualize a user’s experience as they solve a problem.

6 Thinking Hats: to encourage a group to think about a problem or solution from multiple perspectives.

Brainstorming: to generate ideas.

Prototyping: to make abstract ideas more tangible and test them.

Dot Voting: to select ideas.

Start applying these methods to your work today with the Design Thinking template bundle .

For most of the design thinking process, you will need basic office stationery:

Pen and paper

Sticky notes

Whiteboard and markers

Print-outs of templates and canvases as needed (such as empathy maps, journey maps, feedback capture grid etc.) You can also draw these out manually.

Prototyping materials such as UI stencils, string, clay, Lego bricks, sticky tapes, scissors and glue.

A space to work in.

You can conduct design thinking workshops remotely by:

Using collaborative software to simulate the whiteboard and sticky notes.

Using digital templates instead of printed canvases.

Download print-ready templates you can share with your team to practice design thinking today.

Design thinking is a problem-solving methodology that helps teams better identify, understand, and solve business and customer problems.

When businesses prioritize and empathize with customers, they can create solutions catering to their needs. Happier customers are more likely to be loyal and organically advocate for the product.

Design thinking helps businesses develop innovative solutions that give them a competitive advantage.

Gain a competitive advantage in your business with Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide .

The evolution of Design Thinking can be summarised in 8 key events from the 1960s to 2004.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Herbert Simon’s 1969 book, "The Sciences of the Artificial," has one of the earliest references to design thinking. David Kelley, founder of the design consultancy IDEO, coined the term “design thinking” and helped make it popular.

For a more comprehensive discussion on the origins of design thinking, see The History of Design Thinking .

Some organizations that have employed design thinking successfully are:

Airbnb: Airbnb used design thinking to create a platform for people to rent out their homes to travelers. The company focused on the needs of both hosts and guests . The result was a user-friendly platform to help people find and book accommodations.

PillPack: PillPack is a prescription home-delivery system. The company focused on the needs of people who take multiple medications and created a system that organizes pills by date and time. Amazon bought PillPack in 2018 for $1 billion .

Google Creative Lab: Google Creative Lab collaborated with IDEO to discover how kids physically play and learn. The team used design thinking to create Project Bloks . The project helps children develop foundational problem-solving skills "through coding experiences that are playful, tactile and collaborative.”

See more examples of design thinking and learn practical methods in Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide .

Innovation essentially means a new idea. Design thinking is a problem-solving methodology that helps teams develop new ideas. In other words, design thinking can lead to innovation.

Human-Centered Design is a newer term for User-Centered Design

“Human-centred design is an approach to interactive systems development that aims to make systems usable and useful by focusing on the users, their needs and requirements, and by applying human factors/ergonomics, and usability knowledge and techniques. This approach enhances effectiveness and efficiency, improves human well-being, user satisfaction, accessibility and sustainability; and counteracts possible adverse effects of use on human health, safety and performance.”

— ISO 9241-210:2019(en), ISO (the International Organization for Standardization)  

User experience expert Don Norman describes human-centered design (HCD) as a more evolved form of user-centered design (UCD). The word "users" removes their importance and treats them more like objects than people. By replacing “user” with “human,” designers can empathize better with the people for whom they are designing. Don Norman takes HCD a step further and prefers the term People-Centered Design.

Design thinking has a broader scope and takes HCD beyond the design discipline to drive innovation.

People sometimes use design thinking and human-centered design to mean the same thing. However, they are not the same. HCD is a formal discipline with a specific process used only by designers and usability engineers to design products. Design thinking borrows the design methods and applies them to problems in general.

Design Sprint condenses design thinking into a 1-week structured workshop

Google Ventures condensed the design thinking framework into a time-constrained 5-day workshop format called the Design Sprint. The sprint follows one step per day of the week:

Monday: Unpack

Tuesday: Sketch

Wednesday: Decide

Thursday: Prototype

Friday: Test

Learn more about the design sprint in Make Your UX Design Process Agile Using Google’s Methodology .

Systems Thinking is a distinct discipline with a broader approach to problem-solving

“Systems thinking is a way of exploring and developing effective action by looking at connected wholes rather than separate parts.”

— Introduction to Systems thinking, Report of GSE and GORS seminar, Civil Service Live

Both HCD and Systems Thinking are formal disciplines. Designers and usability engineers primarily use HCD. Systems thinking has applications in various fields, such as medical, environmental, political, economic, human resources, and educational systems.

HCD has a much narrower focus and aims to create and improve products. Systems thinking looks at the larger picture and aims to change entire systems.

Don Norman encourages designers to incorporate systems thinking in their work. Instead of looking at people and problems in isolation, designers must look at them from a systems point of view.

In summary, UCD and HCD refer to the same field, with the latter being a preferred phrase.

Design thinking is a broader framework that borrows methods from human-centered design to approach problems beyond the design discipline. It encourages people with different backgrounds and expertise to work together and apply the designer’s way of thinking to generate innovative solutions to problems.

Systems thinking is another approach to problem-solving that looks at the big picture instead of specific problems in isolation.

The design sprint is Google Ventures’ version of the design thinking process, structured to fit the design process in 1 week.

There are multiple design thinking frameworks, each with a different number of steps and phase names. One of the most popular frameworks is the Stanford d.School 5-stage process.

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process. It contains five phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test. It is important to note the five stages of design thinking are not always sequential. They do not have to follow a specific order, and they can often occur in parallel or be repeated iteratively. The stages should be understood as different modes which contribute to the entire design project, rather than sequential steps.

For more details, see The 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process .

IDEO is a leading design consultancy and has developed its own version of the design thinking framework and adds the dimension of implementation in the process.

IDEO’s framework uses slightly different terms than d.school’s design thinking process and adds an extra dimension of implementation. The steps in the DeepDive™ Methodology are: Understand, Observe, Visualize, Evaluate and Implement.

IDEO’s DeepDive™ Methodology includes the following steps:

Understand: Conduct research and identify what the client needs and the market landscape

Observe: Similar to the Empathize step, teams observe people in live scenarios and conduct user research to identify their needs and pain points.

Visualize: In this step, the team visualizes new concepts. Similar to the Ideate phase, teams focus on creative, out-of-the-box and novel ideas.

Evaluate: The team prototypes ideas and evaluates them. After refining the prototypes, the team picks the most suitable one.

Implement: The team then sets about to develop the new concept for commercial use.

IDEO’s DeepDive™ is one of several design thinking frameworks. Find out more in 10 Insightful Design Thinking Frameworks: A Quick Overview .

Literature on Design Thinking (DT)

Here’s the entire UX literature on Design Thinking (DT) by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Design Thinking (DT)

Take a deep dive into Design Thinking (DT) with our course Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide .

Some of the world’s leading brands, such as Apple, Google, Samsung, and General Electric, have rapidly adopted the design thinking approach, and design thinking is being taught at leading universities around the world, including Stanford d.school, Harvard, and MIT. What is design thinking, and why is it so popular and effective?

Design Thinking is not exclusive to designers —all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? Well, that’s because design work processes help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply human-centered techniques to solve problems in a creative and innovative way—in our designs, businesses, countries and lives. And that’s what makes it so special.

The overall goal of this design thinking course is to help you design better products, services, processes, strategies, spaces, architecture, and experiences. Design thinking helps you and your team develop practical and innovative solutions for your problems. It is a human-focused , prototype-driven , innovative design process . Through this course, you will develop a solid understanding of the fundamental phases and methods in design thinking, and you will learn how to implement your newfound knowledge in your professional work life. We will give you lots of examples; we will go into case studies, videos, and other useful material, all of which will help you dive further into design thinking. In fact, this course also includes exclusive video content that we've produced in partnership with design leaders like Alan Dix, William Hudson and Frank Spillers!

This course contains a series of practical exercises that build on one another to create a complete design thinking project. The exercises are optional, but you’ll get invaluable hands-on experience with the methods you encounter in this course if you complete them, because they will teach you to take your first steps as a design thinking practitioner. What’s equally important is you can use your work as a case study for your portfolio to showcase your abilities to future employers! A portfolio is essential if you want to step into or move ahead in a career in the world of human-centered design.

Design thinking methods and strategies belong at every level of the design process . However, design thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. What’s special about design thinking is that designers and designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn, and apply these human-centered techniques in solving problems in a creative and innovative way—in our designs, in our businesses, in our countries, and in our lives.

That means that design thinking is not only for designers but also for creative employees , freelancers , and business leaders . It’s for anyone who seeks to infuse an approach to innovation that is powerful, effective and broadly accessible, one that can be integrated into every level of an organization, product, or service so as to drive new alternatives for businesses and society.

You earn a verifiable and industry-trusted Course Certificate once you complete the course. You can highlight them on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or your website .

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• Our Mission

Design Thinking in Education: Empathy, Challenge, Discovery, and Sharing

As a model for reframing methods and outcomes, design thinking reconnects educators to their creativity and aspirations for helping students develop as deep thinkers and doers.

"Design thinking gave me a process to weave through all of the project–based learning experiences I create with my kiddos."

"As a leader of a #NextGen school, design thinking is our continuous innovation process."

"Design thinking reminds me all the time why I became an educator; it all starts with empathy."

An Oasis for Educators

The quotes above -- full of insight and affirmation -- are just some of the many that I've heard from educators taken by the power of design thinking and moved to bring it into their practice. When we started the @K12lab at Stanford's d.school back in 2007 we began with a hunch that design thinking would be a great tool for educators to deploy in their classrooms and schools, and that ultimately, it would be a useful process for kids working through interdisciplinary challenges. What we found in our initial prototypes -- launching an innovation lab space, creating a design thinking professional development experience, and running student-facing design challenges for middle- and high-school classes -- was that the design thinking process functioned as a kind of oasis for educators, reconnecting them to their creativity and aspirations for helping students develop as deep thinkers and doers, not just as test takers.

In the last few years, the field has witnessed an explosion of interest in design thinking, nationally and internationally. You can literally see its growth mapped on the Design Thinking in Schools map and in the internationally booming Design for Change student challenge platform. The spread of design thinking also shows up in new national efforts like IDEO’s Teacher’s Guild platform and the very active Twitter chat community built around #DTK12chat . Educators are also supporting each other as design thinkers in regional collaborations like Atlanta’s #AK12DC, a collection of 30 public and independent schools working to accelerate design challenges, and Henry Ford Learning Institute 's work in Michigan to gather regional enthusiasts and design thinking leaders.

As the movement for design thinking in education broadens and deepens, many practitioners are flexibly customizing the design thinking process in their own contexts. Coming from the d.school, I particularly love seeing the teachers and leaders with whom we work sharing how they moved from the process we taught them (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test) to language that works in their own context. For example, check out Mary Cantwell’s DEEPdt or Urban Montessori's incorporation of design thinking in their core values .

4 Modes for Developing Your Practice

If you're considering how to embrace design thinking in your school culture, I believe you should focus on four critical modes underlying the process:

1. Lead with empathy.

Empathy is, of course, the root of human-centered design. Leading with empathy builds on the classic definition of "walking in someone else's shoes" to get us out of our own heads and into the lived reality of others so that we can understand the implicit needs and root causes of the situations in which we work. Leading with empathy means pushing yourself to get closer to people, and to do so consistently, publicly, and with conviction.

How do you do it? Listen more; talk less. Immerse yourself in how others experience your school or program. Adopt a beginner's mind and use all of your senses to notice what's happening around you. At the d.school, we believe in these practices so much that we're issuing a Shadow a Student challenge from our School Retool project to illuminate the power of leading with empathy. If you want to step into empathy, it will be a great way to get started.

2. Challenge assumptions.

This is the opposite of "keep calm and carry on." Challenging assumptions means that when confronted with a problem, you seize the opportunity to do better than you've done before. Useful phrases to build into your lexicon are "What if. . . ?" and "How might we. . . ?" Just the simple act of introducing the language of possibility can start the shift from how we've always done things to the potential for a reframe. Reframing is critical for innovation, but it's also a way of moving from a deficit point of view to an asset focus. Challenging assumptions lets us see what both children and adults are truly capable of doing. Harnessed for good, challenging assumptions steers you in the direction of more effective policies and practices because you're willing to see things differently.

3. Make experiments happen.

Here's the rub. "Just do it" is more than a pitch for selling sports gear. It means try something and learn from it. We can tangle ourselves in all kinds of knots about "embracing failure," but what really matters is trying something, letting people know that you're trying it, and generating opportunities for feedback. You'll learn the most from what doesn't work.

When you find yourself sitting in one more meeting to make a plan for a plan, just stop and say, "What could we try in order to figure this out?" This sets you on the path to experiment with quick hacks and low-resolution prototypes. Whatever you try will point you in the direction of what's next. At the d.school, we call it a bias toward action : Don't talk -- do. And when you do, then you observe, reflect, and try again to get it right.

4. Share your process.

Design cannot thrive in isolation. As you share your empathy work or your experiments, share what's hard, not just what's shiny and new. You can share those things as well, but we'll all learn more when you share your process, warts and all.

I invite you to investigate how leading with empathy, challenging assumptions, and making experiments happen can deepen your teaching or leadership practices. And as you do, please share what you've learned -- you may have discovered what we've yet to imagine.

The power of design thinking in education

Design thinking is not just an educational buzzword having its moment in history; it is a transformative approach that equips students with the skills and mindset needed to solve complex, interdisciplinary problems.

As a Master Teacher in Residence for Technologies at the Victorian Academy of Teacher and Leadership, I’ve been fortunate to work with STEM and Technologies teachers from across the state. In my experience, many have not engaged with design thinking in any capacity, due to a lack of easily accessible and clear information geared towards classroom teachers, both on the process, and its interdisciplinary applications.

Understanding design thinking

As captured by Tim Brown (2009), design thinking is not just a strategy; it is a journey to ‘inspire innovation’ and champion transformative change.

It is a problem-solving approach that focuses on human-centred solutions. It emphasises empathy, collaboration, and iteration to solve complex problems in innovative ways. The design thinking process is iterative rather than linear, meaning that designers might loop back to earlier stages as they gather more information and refine their solutions. (Razzouk & Shute, 2012). The core revolves around the user – understanding their needs, desires, and challenges.

The process can be succinctly described through the 5 stages put forth by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school, n.d.).

• Empathise: Dive deep into understanding the user's needs and experiences.
• Define: Articulate the problem that needs addressing.
• Ideate: Engage in a brainstorming frenzy, unleashing creativity.
• Prototype: Create tangible or conceptual representations of solutions.
• Test: Trial and fine-tune the solutions.

Bringing design thinking to life in classrooms

Design thinking offers a fresh approach to teaching and learning, emphasising empathy, creativity, and continuous improvement. Given the ever-evolving challenges and dynamics of today's educational landscape, the strategies and mindsets derived from design thinking are invaluable assets for educators and students alike.

Ignite with empathy: As Kees Dorst (2011) compellingly argues, the crux of design thinking is recognising and addressing genuine user needs through a human-centred design approach. It is more than mere observation; it demands engagement. For example, if the task for your students is to design tools for farmers, a visit to local farms or interviews with farmers can provide invaluable insights, and hence becomes an essential part of your planning.

Champion big ideas: The classroom should pulsate with creativity, where no idea is too 'out there'. As Wagner (2012) elucidates, nurturing young minds to become innovators is paramount. This is where leaning into the general capability of critical and creative thinking comes into play, with educators being able to lean into the design thinking model to create those opportunities for creative thinking and play in a structured environment.

The power of prototyping: As Scheer, Noweski, & Meinel (2012) aptly express, it is essential to transform abstract ideas into tangible action. Whether it is crafting a rudimentary model using craft supplies or employing digital tools for a simulation, prototyping crystallises ideas.

Iterate with community feedback: Design thinking thrives on feedback. Involving the wider Australian community, from Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander elders to urban planners, can provide varied perspectives that refine student prototypes. Through prototyping and testing, students come to understand that their initial ideas may need refinement. This iterative approach teaches them to embrace change and persevere when faced with setbacks.

Learning across disciplines: Design thinking does not belong to any one discipline. It can be used across the curriculum. This comprehensive approach promotes interdisciplinary learning, teaching students to see connections across different areas of knowledge. The answer lies in its adaptability and potential for cross-curricular integration. Let us explore this through 2 illustrative examples:

Problem statement 1: ‘ Design a sustainable city for future generations.’

• Mathematics: Students engage in calculations concerning population projections, infrastructure budgets, and resource allocations.
• Science: Delving into sustainable energy, eco-friendly materials, and balancing ecosystems introduces a scientific perspective.
• Social Studies: Here, the focus shifts to migration patterns, governance models, and historical examples of city planning.
• Arts: Visualisation is crucial. Students can create models, sketches, and digital designs to bring their city to life.

Problem Statement 2: ‘How can communities develop sustainable farming practices in changing climate conditions?’

• Biology: Understand plant species, growth conditions, and the impact of pests and diseases.
• Economics: Analyse the market demand for crops, pricing strategies, and the economic viability of organic farming.
• Environmental Science : Explore soil conservation, water management, and organic farming's ecological benefits.
• Civics and Citizenship: Dive into policies supporting sustainable agriculture and the role of community cooperatives.

Myths – what design thinking isn’t

Design thinking’s exponential rise in popularity across various sectors and industries as a problem-solving approach, has also led to some misconceptions emerging:

It's only about design: Because of the term ‘design’, some believe design thinking is only relevant for designers or is solely about aesthetics. In reality, design thinking is a problem-solving framework that can be applied in various fields beyond design, from business strategy to education and healthcare.

It's just brainstorming: Some reduce design thinking to just its ideation phase. While brainstorming is an essential part of the process, design thinking encompasses much more, from understanding user needs to prototyping and testing.

It always leads to innovation: While design thinking can foster innovative solutions, it does not guarantee innovation. The process is about finding the right solution for the problem, which might sometimes be a simple or previously known solution.

Anyone can do it without guidance: Just because the principles of design thinking are widely accessible, does not mean everyone can apply them effectively without guidance or experience. Proper training and practice can help in harnessing the full potential of the approach. Design thinking is a sophisticated tool that reaches its full potential when enacted appropriately.

It's a trend or fad: While design thinking has gained significant attention in recent years, it is rooted in practices that have been developed over decades, such as ‘agile’ and ‘lean’ methodologies, and implemented by design behemoths like Apple and Boeing. It is a tested approach that will continue to be relevant for problem-solving across all disciplines and industries.

Ripple effects beyond the classroom

When classrooms become hotbeds of inquiry and innovation, the implications are profound. Students emerge as:

• Empathetic observers – they learn to listen, observe, and understand, forming the foundation of empathy.
• Critical thinkers – Questioning the status quo becomes second nature. They evaluate, analyse, and synthesise information from multiple sources.
• Collaborative problem solvers – Design thinking thrives via meaningful teamwork opportunities. Students collaborate across interests, personal strengths, and subjects, extracting share insights and crafting holistic solutions.

When design thinking is authentically integrated into our teaching practices, classrooms become crucibles where real-world challenges meet innovative solutions, all woven through a rich tapestry of subjects. And as students navigate this journey, they are not just learning; they are preparing to shape the world of tomorrow.

Anam Javed is a Master Teacher in Residence at the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership. The picture accompanying this article was taken at the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership Design Thinking Space.

Related reading: Teacher Awards 2023: Curriculum Design and Implementation

Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organisations and inspires innovation. Harper Business.

Razzouk, R., & Shute, V. (2012). What is design thinking and why is it important? Review of Educational Research, 82( 3), 330-348. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654312457429

Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school). (n.d.). An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE.

Dorst, K. (2011). The core of ‘design thinking’ and its application. Design Studies, 32 (6), 521-532.

Wagner, T. (2012). Creating innovators: The making of young people who will change the world. Scribner.

Scheer, A., Noweski, C., & Meinel, C. (2012). Transforming constructivist learning into action: Design thinking in education. Design and Technology Education , 17 (3), 8-19.

Are you using design thinking in your own curriculum planning? If not, what are some of the barriers to you using it? Do you have any worries or misconceptions? What resources and professional support would you need to introduce design thinking into your own school?

Related articles

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Ideas Made to Matter

Design thinking, explained

Rebecca Linke

Sep 14, 2017

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an innovative problem-solving process rooted in a set of skills.The approach has been around for decades, but it only started gaining traction outside of the design community after the 2008 Harvard Business Review article [subscription required] titled “Design Thinking” by Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO.

Since then, the design thinking process has been applied to developing new products and services, and to a whole range of problems, from creating a business model for selling solar panels in Africa to the operation of Airbnb .

At a high level, the steps involved in the design thinking process are simple: first, fully understand the problem; second, explore a wide range of possible solutions; third, iterate extensively through prototyping and testing; and finally, implement through the customary deployment mechanisms. 

The skills associated with these steps help people apply creativity to effectively solve real-world problems better than they otherwise would. They can be readily learned, but take effort. For instance, when trying to understand a problem, setting aside your own preconceptions is vital, but it’s hard.

Creative brainstorming is necessary for developing possible solutions, but many people don’t do it particularly well. And throughout the process it is critical to engage in modeling, analysis, prototyping, and testing, and to really learn from these many iterations.

Once you master the skills central to the design thinking approach, they can be applied to solve problems in daily life and any industry.

Here’s what you need to know to get started.

Understand the problem 

The first step in design thinking is to understand the problem you are trying to solve before searching for solutions. Sometimes, the problem you need to address is not the one you originally set out to tackle.

“Most people don’t make much of an effort to explore the problem space before exploring the solution space,” said MIT Sloan professor Steve Eppinger. The mistake they make is to try and empathize, connecting the stated problem only to their own experiences. This falsely leads to the belief that you completely understand the situation. But the actual problem is always broader, more nuanced, or different than people originally assume.

Take the example of a meal delivery service in Holstebro, Denmark. When a team first began looking at the problem of poor nutrition and malnourishment among the elderly in the city, many of whom received meals from the service, it thought that simply updating the menu options would be a sufficient solution. But after closer observation, the team realized the scope of the problem was much larger , and that they would need to redesign the entire experience, not only for those receiving the meals, but for those preparing the meals as well. While the company changed almost everything about itself, including rebranding as The Good Kitchen, the most important change the company made when rethinking its business model was shifting how employees viewed themselves and their work. That, in turn, helped them create better meals (which were also drastically changed), yielding happier, better nourished customers.

Involve users

Imagine you are designing a new walker for rehabilitation patients and the elderly, but you have never used one. Could you fully understand what customers need? Certainly not, if you haven’t extensively observed and spoken with real customers. There is a reason that design thinking is often referred to as human-centered design.

“You have to immerse yourself in the problem,” Eppinger said.

How do you start to understand how to build a better walker? When a team from MIT’s Integrated Design and Management program together with the design firm Altitude took on that task, they met with walker users to interview them, observe them, and understand their experiences.  

“We center the design process on human beings by understanding their needs at the beginning, and then include them throughout the development and testing process,” Eppinger said.

Central to the design thinking process is prototyping and testing (more on that later) which allows designers to try, to fail, and to learn what works. Testing also involves customers, and that continued involvement provides essential user feedback on potential designs and use cases. If the MIT-Altitude team studying walkers had ended user involvement after its initial interviews, it would likely have ended up with a walker that didn’t work very well for customers. 

It is also important to interview and understand other stakeholders, like people selling the product, or those who are supporting the users throughout the product life cycle.

The second phase of design thinking is developing solutions to the problem (which you now fully understand). This begins with what most people know as brainstorming.

Hold nothing back during brainstorming sessions — except criticism. Infeasible ideas can generate useful solutions, but you’d never get there if you shoot down every impractical idea from the start.

“One of the key principles of brainstorming is to suspend judgment,” Eppinger said. “When we're exploring the solution space, we first broaden the search and generate lots of possibilities, including the wild and crazy ideas. Of course, the only way we're going to build on the wild and crazy ideas is if we consider them in the first place.”

That doesn’t mean you never judge the ideas, Eppinger said. That part comes later, in downselection. “But if we want 100 ideas to choose from, we can’t be very critical.”

In the case of The Good Kitchen, the kitchen employees were given new uniforms. Why? Uniforms don’t directly affect the competence of the cooks or the taste of the food.

But during interviews conducted with kitchen employees, designers realized that morale was low, in part because employees were bored preparing the same dishes over and over again, in part because they felt that others had a poor perception of them. The new, chef-style uniforms gave the cooks a greater sense of pride. It was only part of the solution, but if the idea had been rejected outright, or perhaps not even suggested, the company would have missed an important aspect of the solution.

Prototype and test. Repeat.

You’ve defined the problem. You’ve spoken to customers. You’ve brainstormed, come up with all sorts of ideas, and worked with your team to boil those ideas down to the ones you think may actually solve the problem you’ve defined.

“We don’t develop a good solution just by thinking about a list of ideas, bullet points and rough sketches,” Eppinger said. “We explore potential solutions through modeling and prototyping. We design, we build, we test, and repeat — this design iteration process is absolutely critical to effective design thinking.”

Repeating this loop of prototyping, testing, and gathering user feedback is crucial for making sure the design is right — that is, it works for customers, you can build it, and you can support it.

“After several iterations, we might get something that works, we validate it with real customers, and we often find that what we thought was a great solution is actually only just OK. But then we can make it a lot better through even just a few more iterations,” Eppinger said.

Implementation

The goal of all the steps that come before this is to have the best possible solution before you move into implementing the design. Your team will spend most of its time, its money, and its energy on this stage.

“Implementation involves detailed design, training, tooling, and ramping up. It is a huge amount of effort, so get it right before you expend that effort,” said Eppinger.

Design thinking isn’t just for “things.” If you are only applying the approach to physical products, you aren’t getting the most out of it. Design thinking can be applied to any problem that needs a creative solution. When Eppinger ran into a primary school educator who told him design thinking was big in his school, Eppinger thought he meant that they were teaching students the tenets of design thinking.

“It turns out they meant they were using design thinking in running their operations and improving the school programs. It’s being applied everywhere these days,” Eppinger said.

In another example from the education field, Peruvian entrepreneur Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor hired design consulting firm IDEO to redesign every aspect of the learning experience in a network of schools in Peru. The ultimate goal? To elevate Peru’s middle class.

As you’d expect, many large corporations have also adopted design thinking. IBM has adopted it at a company-wide level, training many of its nearly 400,000 employees in design thinking principles .

What can design thinking do for your business?

The impact of all the buzz around design thinking today is that people are realizing that “anybody who has a challenge that needs creative problem solving could benefit from this approach,” Eppinger said. That means that managers can use it, not only to design a new product or service, “but anytime they’ve got a challenge, a problem to solve.”

Applying design thinking techniques to business problems can help executives across industries rethink their product offerings, grow their markets, offer greater value to customers, or innovate and stay relevant. “I don’t know industries that can’t use design thinking,” said Eppinger.

Ready to go deeper?

Read “ The Designful Company ” by Marty Neumeier, a book that focuses on how businesses can benefit from design thinking, and “ Product Design and Development ,” co-authored by Eppinger, to better understand the detailed methods.

Register for an MIT Sloan Executive Education course:

Systematic Innovation of Products, Processes, and Services , a five-day course taught by Eppinger and other MIT professors.

• Leadership by Design: Innovation Process and Culture , a two-day course taught by MIT Integrated Design and Management director Matthew Kressy.
• Managing Complex Technical Projects , a two-day course taught by Eppinger.
• Apply for M astering Design Thinking , a 3-month online certificate course taught by Eppinger and MIT Sloan senior lecturers Renée Richardson Gosline and David Robertson.

Steve Eppinger is a professor of management science and innovation at MIT Sloan. He holds the General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair and has a PhD from MIT in engineering. He is the faculty co-director of MIT's System Design and Management program and Integrated Design and Management program, both master’s degrees joint between the MIT Sloan and Engineering schools. His research focuses on product development and technical project management, and has been applied to improving complex engineering processes in many industries.

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Design Thinking 101

July 31, 2016 2016-07-31

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In This Article:

Definition of design thinking, why — the advantage, flexibility — adapt to fit your needs, scalability — think bigger, history of design thinking.

Design thinking is an ideology supported by an accompanying process . A complete definition requires an understanding of both.

Definition: The design thinking ideology asserts that a hands-on, user-centric approach to problem solving can lead to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage. This hands-on, user-centric approach is defined by the design thinking process and comprises 6 distinct phases, as defined and illustrated below.

The design-thinking framework follows an overall flow of 1) understand, 2) explore, and 3) materialize. Within these larger buckets fall the 6 phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement.

Conduct research in order to develop knowledge about what your users do, say, think, and feel .

Imagine your goal is to improve an onboarding experience for new users. In this phase, you talk to a range of actual users.  Directly observe what they do, how they think, and what they want, asking yourself things like ‘what motivates or discourages users?’ or ‘where do they experience frustration?’ The goal is to gather enough observations that you can truly begin to empathize with your users and their perspectives.

Combine all your research and observe where your users’ problems exist. While pinpointing your users’ needs , begin to highlight opportunities for innovation.

Consider the onboarding example again. In the define phase, use the data gathered in the empathize phase to glean insights. Organize all your observations and draw parallels across your users’ current experiences. Is there a common pain point across many different users? Identify unmet user needs.

Brainstorm a range of crazy, creative ideas that address the unmet user needs identified in the define phase. Give yourself and your team total freedom; no idea is too farfetched and quantity supersedes quality.

At this phase, bring your team members together and sketch out many different ideas. Then, have them share ideas with one another, mixing and remixing, building on others' ideas.

Build real, tactile representations for a subset of your ideas. The goal of this phase is to understand what components of your ideas work, and which do not. In this phase you begin to weigh the impact vs. feasibility of your ideas through feedback on your prototypes.

Make your ideas tactile. If it is a new landing page, draw out a wireframe and get feedback internally.  Change it based on feedback, then prototype it again in quick and dirty code. Then, share it with another group of people.

Return to your users for feedback. Ask yourself ‘Does this solution meet users’ needs?’ and ‘Has it improved how they feel, think, or do their tasks?’

Put your prototype in front of real customers and verify that it achieves your goals. Has the users’ perspective during onboarding improved? Does the new landing page increase time or money spent on your site? As you are executing your vision, continue to test along the way.

Put the vision into effect. Ensure that your solution is materialized and touches the lives of your end users.

This is the most important part of design thinking, but it is the one most often forgotten. As Don Norman preaches, “we need more design doing.” Design thinking does not free you from the actual design doing. It’s not magic.

“There’s no such thing as a creative type. As if creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work.”  - Milton Glaser

As impactful as design thinking can be for an organization, it only leads to true innovation if the vision is executed. The success of design thinking lies in its ability to transform an aspect of the end user’s life. This sixth step — implement — is crucial.

Why should we introduce a new way to think about product development? There are numerous reasons to engage in design thinking, enough to merit a standalone article, but in summary, design thinking achieves all these advantages at the same time.

Design thinking:

• Is a user-centered process that starts with user data, creates design artifacts that address real and not imaginary user needs, and then tests those artifacts with real users
• Leverages collective expertise and establishes a shared language, as well as buy-in amongst your team
• Encourages innovation by exploring multiple avenues for the same problem

Jakob Nielsen says “ a wonderful interface solving the wrong problem will fail ." Design thinking unfetters creative energies and focuses them on the right problem. 

The above process will feel abstruse at first. Don’t think of it as if it were a prescribed step-by-step recipe for success. Instead, use it as scaffolding to support you when and where you need it. Be a master chef, not a line cook: take the recipe as a framework, then tweak as needed.

Each phase is meant to be iterative and cyclical as opposed to a strictly linear process, as depicted below. It is common to return to the two understanding phases, empathize and define, after an initial prototype is built and tested. This is because it is not until wireframes are prototyped and your ideas come to life that you are able to get a true representation of your design. For the first time, you can accurately assess if your solution really works. At this point, looping back to your user research is immensely helpful. What else do you need to know about the user in order to make decisions or to prioritize development order? What new use cases have arisen from the prototype that you didn’t previously research?

You can also repeat phases. It’s often necessary to do an exercise within a phase multiple times in order to arrive at the outcome needed to move forward. For example, in the define phase, different team members will have different backgrounds and expertise, and thus different approaches to problem identification. It’s common to spend an extended amount of time in the define phase, aligning a team to the same focus. Repetition is necessary if there are obstacles in establishing buy-in. The outcome of each phase should be sound enough to serve as a guiding principle throughout the rest of the process and to ensure that you never stray too far from your focus.

The packaged and accessible nature of design thinking makes it scalable. Organizations previously unable to shift their way of thinking now have a guide that can be comprehended regardless of expertise, mitigating the range of design talent while increasing the probability of success. This doesn’t just apply to traditional “designery” topics such as product design, but to a variety of societal, environmental, and economical issues. Design thinking is simple enough to be practiced at a range of scopes; even tough, undefined problems that might otherwise be overwhelming. While it can be applied over time to improve small functions like search, it can also be applied to design disruptive and transformative solutions, such as restructuring the career ladder for teachers in order to retain more talent. 

It is a common misconception that design thinking is new. Design has been practiced for ages : monuments, bridges, automobiles, subway systems are all end-products of design processes. Throughout history, good designers have applied a human-centric creative process to build meaningful and effective solutions.

In the early 1900's husband and wife designers Charles and Ray Eames practiced “learning by doing,” exploring a range of needs and constraints before designing their Eames chairs, which continue to be in production even now, seventy years later. 1960's dressmaker Jean Muir was well known for her “common sense” approach to clothing design, placing as much emphasis on how her clothes felt to wear as they looked to others. These designers were innovators of their time. Their approaches can be viewed as early examples of design thinking — as they each developed a deep understanding of their users’ lives and unmet needs. Milton Glaser, the designer behind the famous I ♥ NY logo, describes this notion well: “We’re always looking, but we never really see…it’s the act of attention that allows you to really grasp something, to become fully conscious of it.”

Despite these (and other) early examples of human-centric products, design has historically been an afterthought in the business world, applied only to touch up a product’s aesthetics. This topical design application has resulted in corporations creating solutions which fail to meet their customers’ real needs. Consequently, some of these companies moved their designers from the end of the product-development process, where their contribution is limited, to the beginning. Their human-centric design approach proved to be a differentiator: those companies that used it have reaped the financial benefits of creating products shaped by human needs.

In order for this approach to be adopted across large organizations, it needed to be standardized. Cue design thinking, a formalized framework of applying the creative design process to traditional business problems.

The specific term "design thinking" was coined in the 1990's by David Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO, with Roger Martin, and encapsulated methods and ideas that have been brewing for years into a single unified concept.

We live in an era of experiences , be they services or products, and we’ve come to have high expectations for these experiences. They are becoming more complex in nature as information and technology continues to evolve. With each evolution comes a new set of unmet needs. While design thinking is simply an approach to problem solving, it increases the probability of success and breakthrough innovation.

Learn more about design thinking in the full-day course Generating Big Ideas with Design Thinking .

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What Is Design Thinking & Why Is It Important?

• 18 Jan 2022

In an age when innovation is key to business success and growth, you’ve likely come across the term “design thinking.” Perhaps you’ve heard it mentioned by a senior leader as something that needs to be utilized more, or maybe you’ve seen it on a prospective employee's resume.

While design thinking is an ideology based on designers’ workflows for mapping out stages of design, its purpose is to provide all professionals with a standardized innovation process to develop creative solutions to problems—design-related or not.

Why is design thinking needed? Innovation is defined as a product, process, service, or business model featuring two critical characteristics: novel and useful. Yet, there’s no use in creating something new and novel if people won’t use it. Design thinking offers innovation the upgrade it needs to inspire meaningful and impactful solutions.

But what is design thinking, and how does it benefit working professionals?

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a mindset and approach to problem-solving and innovation anchored around human-centered design . While it can be traced back centuries—and perhaps even longer—it gained traction in the modern business world after Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO, published an article about it in the Harvard Business Review .

Design thinking is different from other innovation and ideation processes in that it’s solution-based and user-centric rather than problem-based. This means it focuses on the solution to a problem instead of the problem itself.

For example, if a team is struggling with transitioning to remote work, the design thinking methodology encourages them to consider how to increase employee engagement rather than focus on the problem (decreasing productivity).

The essence of design thinking is human-centric and user-specific. It’s about the person behind the problem and solution, and requires asking questions such as “Who will be using this product?” and “How will this solution impact the user?”

The first, and arguably most important, step of design thinking is building empathy with users. By understanding the person affected by a problem, you can find a more impactful solution. On top of empathy, design thinking is centered on observing product interaction, drawing conclusions based on research, and ensuring the user remains the focus of the final implementation.

The Four Phases of Innovation

So, what does design thinking entail? There are many models of design thinking that range from three to seven steps.

In the online course Design Thinking and Innovation , Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar leverages a four-phase innovation framework. The phases venture from concrete to abstract thinking and back again as the process loops, reverses, and repeats. This is an important balance because abstract thinking increases the likelihood that an idea will be novel. It’s essential, however, to anchor abstract ideas in concrete thinking to ensure the solution is valid and useful.

Here are the four phases for effective innovation and, by extension, design thinking.

The first phase is about narrowing down the focus of the design thinking process. It involves identifying the problem statement to come up with the best outcome. This is done through observation and taking the time to determine the problem and the roadblocks that prevented a solution in the past.

Various tools and frameworks are available—and often needed—to make concrete observations about users and facts gathered through research. Regardless of which tools are implemented, the key is to observe without assumptions or biased expectations.

Once findings from your observations are collected, the next step is to shape insights by framing those observations. This is where you can venture into the abstract by reframing the problem in the form of a statement or question.

Once the problem statement or question has been solidified—not finalized—the next step is ideation. You can use a tool such as systematic inventive thinking (SIT) in this stage, which is useful for creating an innovative process that can be replicated in the future.

The goal is to ultimately overcome cognitive fixedness and devise new and innovative ideas that solve the problems you identified. Continue to actively avoid assumptions and keep the user at the forefront of your mind during ideation sessions.

The third phase involves developing concepts by critiquing a range of possible solutions. This includes multiple rounds of prototyping, testing, and experimenting to answer critical questions about a concept’s viability.

Remember: This step isn’t about perfection, but rather, experimenting with different ideas and seeing which parts work and which don’t.

4. Implement

The fourth and final phase, implementation, is when the entire process comes together. As an extension of the develop phase, implementation starts with testing, reflecting on results, reiterating, and testing again. This may require going back to a prior phase to iterate and refine until you find a successful solution. Such an approach is recommended because design thinking is often a nonlinear, iterative process.

In this phase, don’t forget to share results with stakeholders and reflect on the innovation management strategies implemented during the design thinking process. Learning from experience is an innovation process and design thinking project all its own.

Check out the video about the design thinking process below, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!

Why Design Thinking Skills Matter

The main value of design thinking is that it offers a defined process for innovation. While trial and error is a good way to test and experiment what works and what doesn’t, it’s often time-consuming, expensive, and ultimately ineffective. On the other hand, following the concrete steps of design thinking is an efficient way to develop new, innovative solutions.

On top of a clear, defined process that enables strategic innovation, design thinking can have immensely positive outcomes for your career—in terms of both advancement and salary.

As of December 2021, the most common occupations requiring design thinking skills were:

• Marketing managers
• Industrial engineers
• Graphic designers
• Software developers
• General and operations managers
• Management analysts
• Personal service managers
• Architectural and engineering managers
• Computer and information systems managers

In addition, jobs that require design thinking statistically have higher salaries. Take a marketing manager position, for example. The median annual salary is $107,900. Marketing manager job postings that require design thinking skills, however, have a median annual salary of $133,900—a 24 percent increase.

Overall, businesses are looking for talent with design thinking skills. As of November 2021, there were 29,648 job postings in the United States advertising design thinking as a necessary skill—a 153 percent increase from November 2020, and a 637 percent increase from November 2017.

As businesses continue to recognize the need for design thinking and innovation, they’ll likely create more demand for employees with those skills.

Learning Design Thinking

Design thinking is an extension of innovation that allows you to design solutions for end users with a single problem statement in mind. It not only imparts valuable skills but can help advance your career.

It’s also a collaborative endeavor that can only be mastered through practice with peers. As Datar says in the introduction to Design Thinking and Innovation : “Just as with learning how to swim, the best way to practice is to jump in and try.”

If you want to learn design thinking, take an active role in your education. Start polls, problem-solving exercises, and debates with peers to get a taste of the process. It’s also important to seek out diverse viewpoints to prepare yourself for the business world.

In addition, if you’re considering adding design thinking to your skill set, think about your goals and why you want to learn about it. What else might you need to be successful?

You might consider developing your communication, innovation, leadership, research, and management skills, as those are often listed alongside design thinking in job postings and professional profiles.

You may also notice skills like agile methodology, user experience, and prototyping in job postings, along with non-design skills, such as product management, strategic planning, and new product development.

Is Design Thinking Right for You?

There are many ways to approach problem-solving and innovation. Design thinking is just one of them. While it’s beneficial to learn how others have approached problems and evaluate if you have the same tools at your disposal, it can be more important to chart your own course to deliver what users and customers truly need.

You can also pursue an online course or workshop that dives deeper into design thinking methodology. This can be a practical path if you want to improve your design thinking skills or require a more collaborative environment.

Are you ready to develop your design thinking skills? Explore our online course Design Thinking and Innovation to discover how to leverage fundamental design thinking principles and innovative problem-solving tools to address business challenges.

About the Author

The effect of a STEM integrated curriculum on design thinking dispositions in middle school students

• Published: 13 April 2024

Cite this article

• Dina Thomason   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4275-7912 1 &
• Pei-Ling Hsu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1870-5717 1  

STEM, the integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics subjects is a popular topic as schools grapple with how to best prepare students for an ever-evolving society. As societal and technological challenges emerge, design thinking has been lauded as a method to enable people to help tackle those challenges. The steps of the design thinking process, empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test align with engineering design and can be used as a problem-solving method in classrooms to help promote creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration. The purpose of this explanatory sequential mixed methods study was to better understand if a STEM integrated curriculum helps promote design thinking in middle schoolers. The study compared two middle school groups, one that uses an integrated STEM curriculum and one that does not. Quantitative data was collected using the design thinking disposition survey through pre and post testing. Qualitative data was collected through free response questions and student and teacher interviews. There was no difference found in the change of design thinking dispositions between students at the two schools, however both groups scored lowest on the design thinking disposition of prototype. Free response questions showed that students at the STEM integrated school perceived an increased ability to design solutions to problems. Student and teacher interviews highlighted benefits of using a STEM integrated curriculum including providing collaborative opportunities to solve hands-on, open-ended problems. How a STEM integrated curriculum can develop design thinking should continue to be examined.

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Thomason, D., Hsu, PL. The effect of a STEM integrated curriculum on design thinking dispositions in middle school students. Int J Technol Des Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-024-09894-6

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