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

Elsbach and Stigliani (2018) conducted a systematic 
review that focused on empirical research providing 
insight into how design thinking relates to organizational 
culture. Their literature base comprised 86 empirical 
articles (i.e., including data in the form of case studies, 
surveys, interviews, and archival documents) that related 
design thinking and culture. Their review revealed three 
insights about the relationship between design thinking 
tools and organizational cultures. First, they found that 
the effective use of design thinking tools in organizations 
had a profound effect on organizational culture. Second, 
they found that organizational cultures influenced (both 
positively and negatively) the use of design thinking 
tools. Third, they found that using design thinking 
tools produced both physical artifacts (e.g., prototypes, 
drawings, design spaces) and emotional experiences (e.g., 
the experience of empathy or surprise/delight).
Micheli, Wilner, Bhatti, Mura and Beverland (2018) 
conducted a systematic review of 104 articles that were 
identified based on search of four databases (ProQuest, 
Business Source Premier, Science Direct and Emerald) for 
the years 1985 to 2017. This review concentrated on design 
thinking in management discourse. Therefore, articles 
where design thinking had been applied to other fields 
of inquiry were not included. The authors identified ten 
principal attributes of design thinking in the management 
context: (1) User-centeredness and involvement, (2) 
Problem solving, (3) Iteration and experimentation, (4) 
Interdisciplinary collaboration, (5) Ability to visualize, 
(6) Gestalt view, (7) Abductive reasoning, (8) Blending 
analysis and intuition, (9) Tolerance of ambiguity and 
failure, (10) Creativity and Innovation. Finally, the authors 
deployed a cluster analysis to identify avenues for future 
research. Themes they discovered within the literature 
were “interdisciplinary collaboration”, “reclaiming 
design thinking as designers’ domain”, “resilience in 
problem solving”, “seeing and reflecting upon the whole”, 
“learning to think like a designer”.