Is the impact of design thinking on student development overrated?
According to Singapore’s prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, good design thinking is critical for the country’s future transformation. He cited examples of how several national issues were solved through design thinking – or essentially the following process:
- Understand an issue
- Define a problem
- Come up with creative ideas and solutions
- Prototype the idea
- Test out innovations
- Constantly review solutions
As “design thinking” builds up into a buzzword in Singapore’s education scene, with an inaugural Design Education Summit (DES) having taken place early this month, one educator cautions about its over-use.
“I think we’ve got to be really careful about overpromising with a certain form of thinking because what it does is mask quality,” said Matthew Ward, head of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Sitting on a panel at DES, Ward and several local educators discussed how design thinking can impact teaching and learning in Singapore.
“We can design think but [ideas] can still lead us down the wrong track; can still exclude people; can still create massive inequalities,” he said. “If we just go ‘we just did a bit of design thinking so it’ll be alright’ – I think that’s deeply foolish. You need to use critical thought.”
However, he does believe there are merits of implementing the design process into any form of learning.
“Where design can start to help us is to articulate a world that we want to be living in,” Ward said. “[Design] is good at bringing people together and [help us] start to visualise and articulate [ideas] that are communicable to people.”
The positives of design thinking
While Ward took a more conservative approach towards including design thinking in school curriculums, other educators shared a more optimistic view. This included Cassandra Foo, head of department in Aesthetics at Cedar Girls’ Secondary School Singapore.
“Design thinking is not there to make you a designer,” she said. “It is to enable you to see whether the [thought] process has enabled a child to shift from who he/she is to who he/she will be.
“We are not here to set out our students to be designers. We want them to find the value in empathy – really understanding people because of the way they’ve interpreted the insights they receive and how that can enable them to be more ‘action bias’ towards a solution. [The solution] might not work but it’s a start.”
She then shared Cedar’s experience in implementing design thinking into students’ Values in Action (VIA) program. VIA is a secondary curriculum guideline from the Ministry of Education which involves non-academic projects or learning experiences.
They aim to support student development as socially responsible citizens who contribute meaningfully to the community through the learning and application of values, knowledge and skills.
Foo said there was a student who preferred to be herself rather than work in teams. Through the opportunities present in VIA projects and her teacher’s guidance on applying the design thinking framework, the student became more “open” to receiving feedback and now views feedback as a critical element to improve herself.
“To my fellow educators, start small, go through VIA as a platform, try [introducing design thinking frameworks to] smaller groups first and see how it can shape them,” she said. “At the heart of it is whether it shapes their character and [helps them] develop a different perspective.
“The others will fall into place, because students will then come to you and ask for the skillsets needed to implement an idea or solution.”