Abstract
Abstract The 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: (1) What are the characteristics of design thinking that make it particularly fruitful for education? (2) How is design thinking applied in different educational settings? (3) What tools, techniques and methods are characteristic for design thinking? (4) What are the limitations or negative effects of design thinking? The goal of the article is to describe the current knowledge base to gain an improved understanding of the role of design thinking in education, to enhance research communication and discussion of best practice approaches and to chart immediate avenues for research and practice.
Highlights
Design thinking comprises a variety of creative strategies for stewarding projects with multiple stakeholders or fostering organizational innovation: “It helps deal with ambiguities and articulate the right questions, as well as identify and formulate possibilities and potentials”(Grots & Creuznacher, 2016, p. 191)
The results section provides an overview of what insights the body of literature included in the review yielded for the four main questions addressed in this article: (1) What are the characteristics of design thinking that make it fruitful for education? (2) How is design thinking applied in different educational settings? (3) What tools, techniques and methods are characteristic for design thinking? (4) What are the limitations or negative effects of design thinking?
The results indicate clearly that various characteristics of the design thinking process and mindset align with different educational goals
Summary
Design thinking comprises a variety of creative strategies for stewarding projects with multiple stakeholders or fostering organizational innovation: “It helps deal with ambiguities and articulate the right questions, as well as identify and formulate possibilities and potentials”(Grots & Creuznacher, 2016, p. 191). Design thinking comprises a variety of creative strategies for stewarding projects with multiple stakeholders or fostering organizational innovation: “It helps deal with ambiguities and articulate the right questions, as well as identify and formulate possibilities and potentials”. As a problemsolving approach that has been tried and tested with socially ambiguous problem settings, it deals with everyday-life problems, which are difficult to solve – “wicked problems” (Rauth, Köppen, Jobst, & Meinel, 2010). Wicked problems have no right or wrong solution and resist traditional scientific and engineering approaches, as “the information needed to understand the problem depends upon one’s idea for solving it” Wicked problems have a wide, unbound problem space and complexity, are open for interpretation, surrounded by competing or conflicting opinions for solutions, and unlikely to ever be completely solved (Hawryszkiewycz, Pradhan, & Agarwal, 2015)
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