What Is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a framework that helps design teams develop new ideas, products, and services. It’s often used in engineering, but it can be applied to any field.
Design thinking is based on the idea that there are two types of people: those who see things as they are, and those who see things as they could be. Designers are the latter—they use their imaginations to see what might be possible and then make it happen.
Design thinking has three phases: Pretending (ideate), Playing (prototype), and Doing (test). In the first phase, you pretend that you already have a solution for a problem and start imagining what it would look like if it existed. In the second phase, you play around with your ideas by making prototypes of them. And finally, in the third phase, you test your prototypes out on people to see if your solution actually works!
How is Design Thinking used in classrooms?
Design Thinking has been used in classrooms to help students learn how to think creatively, solve problems, and collaborate on projects. Students are taught how to use Design Thinking as they work together on projects in groups. They're also encouraged to use their creativity as they work through problems, generating multiple potential solutions to problems from many different perspectives.
Once all the brainstorming is complete, students can work together on each idea to see how it could come to life. Then, the teacher and class can discuss the solution and think about ways that it would fall short of the goal, and how the student could improve upon the idea. This is the process of prototyping. It helps to engrain a growth mentality in the students, ensuring that there is no right or wrong solution, but just solutions that are more effective than others. The students are encouraged to be creative in their iterative testing, even if it is outside the norm or obviously incorrect to the teacher. By allowing the student to test and learn on their own, the student is more likely to accept the result and learn from it intrinsically.
