Using Design Thinking in Higher Education — from educause.com b

 

Design thinking focuses on users and their needs, encourages brainstorming and prototyping, and rewards out-of-the-box thinking that takes “wild ideas” and transforms them into real-world solutions.

 

Excerpt:

Albert Einstein famously said, “No problem can be solved by the same kind of thinking that created it.” So, assuming we agree, what exactly are our alternatives? How can we go beyond our standard approach to problems in higher education and entertain new possibilities? One promising alternative is to engage in design thinking.

Design thinking offers a creative yet structured approach for addressing large-scale challenges. In September 2014, we conducted an EDUCAUSE webinar, Design Thinking: Education Edition, and offered examples from our Breakthrough Models Incubator (BMI).

Here, we offer a summary of that webinar, discussing design thinking principles and process, describing real-world examples of design thinking in action, and offering possibilities for how you might introduce the approach into your own organization.