Design Thinking

Sharing an office with Steve Mouldey a massive advocate for Design Thinking, I was always bound to pick up a few more things about it (read more about Steve's thoughts around Design Thinking on his blog). However, from the many conversations and book recommendations (Creative Confidence and How To Come Up With Great Ideas and Actually Make Them Happen), I am increasingly seeing reasons for more teachers to explore the use of design thinking.

"“leading into the future” involves abandoning the idea that there are “right answers” out there. Rather, problem definition, data collection, and experimentation all need to be carried out together, alongside each other, in a continually repeating cycle in which the aim isn’t to “solve” whatever has been identified as “the problem”, but to understand the system, to learn, and to have one’s thinking changed, along the way. As they put it: The key lever in a complex system is learning. The key methods are conversation, discovery, and experimentation." - see references below.

The above paragraph surprisingly does not describe design thinking, but rather comes from a reading describing what our students will need to be able to do in the future. Yet, if you know anything about Design Thinking, you might recognise just how well it sits with the needs identified above. In other words, Design Thinking gives one an explicit process to teach complex problem solving. Not only that, but it teaches tools and processes for empathising with different people and situations. It teaches skills like incorporating feedback, and that creativity is a process, not a light bulb moment that only some people have.

Perhaps I will use the E post to elaborate some more tomorrow...