Design Thinking: Defination, Elements, and How to Teach Design Thinking in Schools

The dawn of the 2000s brought about a modern problem-solving approach, called Design Thinking, interwoven with the education system. This approach sets out the students to be creative thinkers by boosting their creative confidence and endowing them with a vision to analyze the challenges and become problem solvers. This article attempts to shed light on the importance of implementing Design Thinking in schools. Let’s first grasp the process itself.

Understanding Design Thinking

Design thinking illustration. Image source: Adobe blog

Design Thinking essentially is a process of harnessing creativity to find solutions to the problems surfacing in the real world. Integrating creative problem-solving skills with the school curriculum indubitably poses an effective and essential process that fosters a holistic teaching-learning experience. 

This also encourages the learners to expand their horizons and explore innovating and designing their own solutions. Delving into the world of Design Thinking, we must first unravel the elements of Design Thinking. These elements encompass- empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing the design thinking and its applications at each stage. 

Elements of Design Thinking

1. Empathize

To design a solution that caters to the emerging needs of the end-users, design thinkers must develop empathy for the interests of their users. In this manner, the designer can gauge a holistic picture of the problem they are dealing with. 

2. Define

The next step in the process is to set out a definitive statement to define the problem based on the learners’ understanding of the analysis to the issues faced by the end-users.

Challenge: Defining the problem requires the design thinkers to analyze, synthesize, and then condense the issue at hand into one defined problem that they will eventually work on. This process can thus pose a problem in elementary classes with the students as they try to comprehend and sum up the problem observed. 

3. Ideation

The further process requires the design thinkers to ponder over the defined question and come up with creative solutions to satiate the end-users and solve the problem at hand. Brainstorming practices among the design thinkers are thus promoted in this step of design thinking as the learners ideate and collectively arrive at the solutions. 

4. Prototyping

Creating a prototype in SelfCAD software

Prototyping becomes the byproduct of the brainstorming session carried out in innovative ideating solutions to the problem at hand. This step requires the design thinkers to put on their work clothes and start building on their ideas. This process involves the design thinkers going back to their ideas and designing the prototype solutions. The prototypes are usually smaller versions of the solutions or the design models that are to be rendered by the designers.

5. Testing

The final process includes the learners testing their prototypes. This step in designing solutions requires the users to realize that the designing process always comes with a scope to redefine and innovate the existing prototype into something new. The designers can test their prototypes and look into the surfacing errors, if any.This step can thus provide a scope of further increasing their creative design thinking skills to provide remedies for their ideas into full-proof models that can be executed.

Why should you teach Design Thinking at schools in 2021?

Instructor teaching design thinking. Image source:Euro pass Academy

The students are increasingly being subjected to methods where the employment of design thinking is actively encouraged in the classrooms to enable the young designers to chalk out their creative solutions. However, before teaching design thinking, it is essential to realize the end goal to have a clear picture of ‘why’ incorporating methods that stimulate design thinking skills in the curriculum and pedagogy practices is important in modern classrooms. 

1. Design thinking is emerging as a vital skill to be endowed within your students as it enhances their creative thinking and prepares them to devise and design solutions in the modern world of digitalization and technology. 
2. The students are not only able to develop problem-solving skills, but also they are ready to face and encounter the challenges that come their way and deal with them in a very constructive manner.
3. Teaching design skills to students goes a long way to build an overall capacity to understand the situations in-depth and develop a 360 degree perspective on things before reaching any inferences.

Design thinking is thus more than just a subject matter in the classroom that goes beyond the stipulated course period duration and renders as an integral life skill development in the lives of the learners.

Which are the effective Practices for Teaching Design Thinking?

Now you know the significance of Design Thinking in classroom teaching practices. Therefore, it becomes crucial to focus on facilitating teaching design thinking in classrooms and employing the best methods. Thus, we have come to the most significant part of the article, and it is time to answer the burning question you are waiting for.

Here are some of the best practices that can prove to be substantial methods of teaching design thinking to the students at the schools:

1. Enrich the quality of performance of the design thinkers through effective tools.

The design thinking curriculum requires the students to be active learners and engaged participants in exploring the situations and empathizing with the surfacing problems. The teachers can enrich this problem-solving endeavor by setting up the standards for the learning outcomes in the ways students understand, observe and design the solutions in design thinking classrooms. The standardized learning outcomes can be achieved by employing effective edtech tools that are easy to use and enable the students to express their outlooks efficiently.

The tools thus selected must also facilitate an adequate assessment of the teachers’ set standards to evaluate the status of performance and further growth of the learners.

SelfCAD is one such SaaS platform that provides curious learners the tools to endow design thinking skills that their educators can easily evaluate on the set parameters. This encourages students to excel and to attain their full potential in design thinking and execution. SelfCAD will help the students explore their creativity by learning how to create 3D models.

The improved quality standards can thus be ensured through the provision of adequate and easy-to-use design tools. The assessment for the same is another essential aspect of honing the design thinking skills among young designers and designers at all levels. Methods of evaluation for the design thinking subject matter should thus be moved from rigid rubric systems to a little flexible and subjective grading systems that provide the students with the feedback that help them construct solutions.

2. Encouraging the students to accept the setbacks in the process of design thinking.

Rejection and failure are undoubtedly some of the hardest parts of our lives. However, it is vital to keep an optimistic perspective and march ahead by looking into the setbacks as fundamental life lessons to learn from and further design better. Learning and developing a broader perspective has always been a nonlinear process involving the learner going back and forth, unlearning, and creating new learnings all along. Design Thinking is no different. Even if the designers have learned to master the design tools and built the solutions to the identified problems, there is no harm in looking into and learning from the design tutorials to up their design game one level. Learning and becoming better should thus be the goals of the learners in the design thinking subject matter. 

The teachers should thus use resources that facilitate interactive learning, such as interactive tutorials that have tools that are both easy to comprehend and easy to use, to result in the most optimum performance by the designers at all levels.

3. Using affordable platforms that foster the design thinking skills among learners at all levels

It is imperative to keep in mind that the courses and the tools used in rendering design thinking knowledge at the school are accessible to all the learners and are not exclusive to only some strata of privileged students. This provision of design courses that are engaging and affordable should not come at the cost of quality compromisation. 

Therefore, the tools and resources must be judiciously designed and incorporated into the school curriculum, keeping in mind the objective of developing design thinking among the students, irrespective of their grade level.

SelfCAD is one such intuitive and easy-to-use design software that can be a great tool to promote and foster design thinking at schools across grades. The platform renders its students the capabilities to devise design solutions by sketching, modeling, and creating their 3D solutions at their disposal at very affordable prices. The schools can therefore enroll their students at a discounted rat upon your request. The learners at home looking for a free-of-cost design learning platform can avail the platform at zero costs. SelfCAD also provides affordable plans for professionals starting at only $14.99 per month or paying annually at $11.99 per month.  

---

Enjoy powerful modeling, rendering, and 3D printing tools without the steep learning curve.

Need to learn 3D modeling? Get started with interactive tutorials.