Review Article Stefanie Panke* Design Thinking in Education: Perspectives, Opportunities and Challenges

Encouraging Tacit Experiences: Jacobs (2016) 
discussed how constructing of physical analogues can 
be productive for strategy work by turning issues into 
Figure 2: Voyant Visualization, interactive display at http://bit.ly/designthinkingineducationvoyant .

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Design Thinking in Education: Perspectives, Opportunities and Challenges
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“embodied metaphors”. These concrete artifacts can 
then spark debate from a variety of perspectives. Design 
thinking encourages participants to think with their 
hands and bodies. As Jacobs (2016) put it: “if the hand is a 
window on to the mind, how can we better involve manual 
practice in the development of strategy?” (Jacobs 2016, p. 
133). As Groth (2017) pointed out, design processes include 
embodied knowledge even in the planning stage, since 
designers need to create mental images of the physical 
objects they intend to create. Making may be seen as a 
way of negotiating meaning through interaction between 
the embodied mind and the material environment, 
thus affecting intrapersonal growth in educational 
settings. Having a tangible representation allows teams 
to interact with it and exchange views on it (Camacho, 
2018). The shared stories and metaphors triggered by 
models and artifacts facilitate the development of a 
shared vocabulary and memorable learning experiences 
(Jacobs, 2016). 
Increasing Empathy: Design thinking allows 
developers to embrace “the blurred space of social 
ambiguity” with the purpose of making outcomes more 
innovative (Lindberg, Meinel, & Wagner, 2011). Bross, 
Acar, Schilf, and Meinel (2009) describe design thinking 
as “a human-centered systems thinking approach that 
creates experiences for stakeholders by matching human 
factors with technological feasibility and business viability” 
(p. 904). The interview study by Carlgren et al. (2016) 
revealed that empathy is key to the user-focus of design 
thinking: “Empathy was stressed as important and, in order 
to empathize, different principles/mindsets were seen as 
crucial: being open, avoiding being judgmental and being 
comfortable around people with different backgrounds and 
opinions” (Carlgren et al., 2016, p. 46).