Design Thinking: What Is It?

“In life, the question is not if you will have problems, but how you are going to deal with your problems.” – John Maxwell

When we have the opportunity to fail, we have the chance to reflect and learn from our mistakes. Design thinking is about students realizing that they can create their own future by designing both the classroom they are in and their learning experience. It is another way to see and embrace the world. Like society, education often takes a problem-oriented approach as opposed to a solution-oriented approach. For example, a problem is posed and then, working within the constraints, problem solvers work through possible solutions and create workable models for critique, testing, retesting and redesign until a breakthrough is made.

Design thinking is an optimistic, proactive approach to learning. It is generally considered the ability to combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions into context. It is a repetitious process with constant improvement as its central principle. This repetitive process helps students to develop a totally different attitude toward failure. When students see that failure isn’t always a bad thing, and that it can actually provide them with important information about whatever project they are working on, they don’t give up. Instead, they take their new found knowledge and incorporate the information to find the best solution. It’s the beauty of “fail forward,” where mistakes pave the way for achievement.