Journal Critique 2 Final

JOURNAL CRITIQUE
Charlyn Richard D. Salvador
Common 201 – Design, System and Future Thinking
Prof. Amorsolo F. Espiritu
Panke, Stephanie, 2019, “Design Thinking in Education: Perspectives, Opportunities

and Challenges”
The article “Design Thinking in Education: Perspectives, Opportunities and

Challenges” written by Stephanie Panke in 2019 is a systematic literature review that
aims to gain an improved understanding of the role of design thinking in education,
specifically answering four questions: (1) What are the characteristics of design thinking
that make it particularly fruitful for education? (2) How is design thinking applied in
different educational settings? (3) What tools, techniques and methods are
characteristic for design thinking? (4) What are the limitations or negative effects of
design thinking? The design thinking approach has been around for decades, although
it was more within the context of architecture and engineering (Dam & Shiang, 2022).
Since then, it increasingly gained the interest of practitioners and educators in a range
of fields, such as leadership, management, education, among others.
The articles for review were selected based on a combination of protocol-driven
methodology with a defined search strategy and a snowballing technique. They were
from online resources ERIC, LearnTechLib, SCOPUS, Web of Science and Google
Scholar. The search queried for articles that have ‘Design Thinking’ in the title and only
those published from 2009- 2019 (November) were included. Since some relevant
sources might not include the ‘Design Thinking’ phrase in their titles, the author used
snowball strategy on cited sources as well as additional content knowledge of the field.
The articles are focused on learning, teaching and education and majority of the
selected articles for review are journal articles (131), followed by conference
proceedings (30), and book chapters (7). Most applications of design thinking were
situated in higher education (81), followed by K12 (34) and informal learning /
professional development (20).
The approach of the author is a qualitative analysis, with a goal of consolidating
themes and conceptual ideas rather than statistical data. She used Zotero 5.0 as a
bibliographic management tool, online tool Voyant to generate an initial descriptive
analytics and concept maps, specifically map, for topic reduction.
The author highlighted the criticism that design thinking is undertheorized and
understudied. However, there are proven advances in the theoretical discourse and
empirical descriptions of design thinking. In this regard, the article tried to give a
snapshot of the current research body for design thinking in the education system
context. Additionally, the themes and ideas generated by the literature review can
provide practitioners and researchers areas to expand on in their research and practice.
The author follows the theoretical viewpoint that design thinking is a process and
a mindset, specifically used to address wicked problems, adhering to the description:
“Design thinking offers ample help to solve wicked problems of a liberal type where you
may fail and experiment first to become all the more successful later on. It does so by
establishing mindsets and offering tools which save you from the impossible task of
finding ‘the correct problem view’ or ‘the optimal solution’. Instead, attention is drawn to
needs which await their fulfillment. New interpretations of the problem are advanced
which take into account the perspectives of different stakeholders and which help to
look at the matter from a new angle – since the old problem views turned out to be blind
alleys. Finally, a lot of tools are provided to propel the process of problem solving in a
productive direction – making sure the process remains flexible, jaunty and unrestrained
by arbitrary formalizations.” (von Thienen et al. 2014, p. 105).
Across the literature that were studied, the author noted a shared, positive
narrative about design thinking. She documented meaningful characteristics or themes
of this approach in education, these are: Design thinking encourages learning through
personal experience or Tacit experiences. It also encourages increased empathy in
students since empathy is key to the user-focus of design thinking. Additionally, it is a
method to reduce cognitive bias such as projection bias, hot/cold gap (people’s
emotional state unduly influences their assessment of the potential value of an idea),
egocentric empathy gap (overestimating the similarity between what they value and
what others value), and focusing illusion (overestimating the effect of one factor at the
expense of others). Design thinking likewise promotes playful learning and flow.
Students experience design thinking verve when they are excited about their projects,
work fast-paced, leave their comfort zones, allow for productive failure, trust the
process, and share amazement (von Thienen, Royalty, and Meinel, 2017).
The author also investigated what activities does design thinking comprise. She
listed different tools and techniques on how design thinking is actualized in education
setting. Some examples are card sorting, crazy eights, empathy maps, IDEO method
cards, among others. Despite showing myriad of benefits, some case studies reported
negative outcomes related to design thinking. These potential negative outcomes are
(1) lack of creative confidence, (2) teamwork conflicts, (3) anxiety and frustration
induced on the students, (3) shallow ideas, (4) idea creation over evaluation, (5) lack of
long-term impact, (6) overconfidence, (7) misalignment between learning content and
design thinking process.
The study attempted to give a map of design thinking practices in education. I
found the themes that were generated from the literature review as insightful especially
in terms of the benefits and limitations of design thinking in schools and other learning
settings. It shows to have huge positive impact to students as individuals and learners,
while it is also important to understand its potential negative outcomes. Design thinking
also uses a large variety of methods, models, techniques, and tools. It is interesting to
see that there are many creative ways on doing design thinking projects and fostering
design thinking mindset. As suggested by the author, a systematic handbook on design
thinking methods and tools could help educators make the most out of its potential.
One of the key takeaways of the author is to move beyond answering “What is
design thinking” in education into how this approach can be utilized and “designed”
better. I agree that making more research and building measures for effectiveness of
design thinking can further solidify the benefits of design thinking in education.

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JOURNAL CRITIQUE

Charlyn Richard D. Salvador

Common 201 – Design, System and Future Thinking

Prof. Amorsolo F. Espiritu

Panke, Stephanie, 2019, “Design Thinking in Education: Perspectives, Opportunities

The article “Design Thinking in Education: Perspectives, Opportunities and

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