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

Inducing Productive Failure / Increasing 
Resilience: Design thinking encourages participants 
to see constraints as opportunities. As such, design 
thinking can create resilience in the face of failure 
and uncertainty (Micheli, Wilner, Bhatti, Mura, & 
Beverland, 2018). As Leverenz (2014) stated: “We must 
find a way to turn students’ fear of failure into excitement 
at the chance to experiment” (Leverenz, 2014, p. 9). In 
the process of working out a solution design thinking 
allows for many trials and many errors: “Failures are 
prized as highly valuable resources: If only embraced 
and analyzed with an open mind, failures are expected 
to aid learning, ultimately in the service of even greater 
creative achievements” (von Thienen, Meinel, & 
Corazza, 2017, p. 5). Core mottos of design thinking 
such as fail fast, fail early, favor action over inaction 
and embrace experimentation reflect the emphasis on 
learning through trial-and-error (von Thienen et al., 
2014). Participants are encouraged to embrace failures, 
to learn from them and iterate based on the results. This 
translates into the habit of giving up ideas and readily 
changing approaches rather than defending the initial 
or existing structure when, for example, users give 
negative feedback (von Thienen, Meinel, & Corazza, 
2017). Participants in design thinking activities acquire 
transferable skills in dealing with uncertainty (Badwan, 
Bothara, Latijnhouwers, Smithies, & Sandars, 2018).
Producing Surprising and Delightful Solutions: 
According to Elsbach and Stigliani (2018) the use of 
design thinking tools can result in emotional responses 
of surprise and delight. Stakeholders are excited about 
design thinking because its results significantly differ 
from expected solutions: “Design is what it is because it 
surprises us; and good designs surprise us by their ingenuity 
and their handling of contingencies” (Louridas, 1999, p. 
534). Goldman, Kabayadondo, Royalty, Carroll, and Roth, 
(2014) described this as “the resolution of conflict between a 
sticky problem and an elegant solution”, as team members 
negotiate what is known and unknown, what end-users 
say and what they really mean, and what does and doesn’t 
work for users (Goldman et al., 2014, p. 33).