Making Pedagogic Sense of Design Thinking in the Higher Education Context

3.2 Data collection and ethics
Smith (2011) identifies several criteria to produce a quality 
IPA research paper, and one of the stressed criteria is 
to collect a high-quality data set by conducting careful 
interviews. For this study, following the approval of the 
relevant ethics3, the first author undertook interviews with 
the participants. Interviews took place in person at the 
participants’ offices and lasted around sixty minutes. The 
semi-structured interview guide consisted of questions4 
exploring how the participants define design thinking 
personally; how they go about teaching design thinking; 
3 Ethical approval for this study was granted by QUT and participation 
in the interview was voluntary, anonymous, confidential, and based 
on written consent. The date, time and the location of the interviews 
were arranged at the participant’s convenience.
4 For example: First, by way of context, can you tell me a little about 
your history as an educator, and what is your current engagement with 
design thinking teaching? What does design thinking mean to you as 
an academic in Higher Education especially in your domain? Can you 
explain to me how you have structured design thinking courses you 
are doing? Can you give me a concrete example of something you 
have done to help students to learn design thinking? If you had a 
friend who had never done design thinking before and they asked 
you to tell them what the study of design thinking involves, what 
would you say? What is the purpose of teaching design thinking in 
higher education?
what they want to provide for their students; how they 
prepare their lessons and structure the teaching sessions. 
It also asked for concrete examples to illustrate accounts. 
The goal of the semi-structured interview is to gain a first-
person description of a specified domain of experience, 
where the participant mainly sets the course of dialogue 
(Kvale, 1996). The interview began with a broad question: 
“can you just tell me about your background with design 
thinking and teaching design thinking?”.