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

Reducing Cognitive Bias: Liedtka (2015) discussed 
design thinking as a method to reduce cognitive bias. 
According to her analysis, design-thinking practices 
carry the potential for improving innovation outcomes by 
mitigating an established set of cognitive flaws: people 
often project their own world view onto others, limit the 
options considered, and ignore disconfirming data. While 
the author analyzed nine different types of cognitive bias 
in detail, she also offered three distinct general categories 
of cognitive bias. In the context of inclusiveness, Liedtka’s 
first category of biases that relate to decision-makers’ 
proclivity to become trapped in their own world view 
is specifically meaningful. It comprises the following 
tendencies:
– Projection bias: People have a tendency to project 
their past experiences and thus over-estimate the 
extent to which the future will resemble the present.
– Hot/cold gap: People’s emotional state, whether 
emotion-laden (hot) or not (cold), unduly influences 
their assessment of the potential value of an idea.
– Egocentric empathy gap: People consistently 
overestimate the similarity between what they value 
and what others value.
– Focusing illusion: People tend to overestimate 
the effect of one factor at the expense of others, 
overreacting to specific stimuli, and ignoring others.
According to Liedtka (2015), a remedy for category 1 biases 
is to improve decision-makers’ ability to imagine the 
experience of those other than themselves, even in the 
absence of first-hand data gathering. 
Promoting Playful Learning: The 2019 Innovating 
Pedagogy report (Ferguson et al., 2019) highlights playful 
learning as a trend, emphasizing the role of play beyond 
K12 environments, at universities and in continuing 
education. Play should remain a central component of 
teaching and learning throughout life. Playful learning 
flourishes in spaces that are safe, foster exploration and 
support productive failure, such as design thinking. 
Watson (2015) described student reactions to design 
thinking in terms of playfulness, creative expression and 
joy: “I hear them talking about using Design Thinking to 
make sense of ambiguity, to empathize with others, to think 
creatively, to communicate ideas, to collaborate, and to 
make people laugh” (Watson, 2015, p. 18).