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

Nurturing Creative Confidence: Creative confidence 
is nurtured when people have the opportunity to think 
like a designer (Bowler, 2014). Design thinking offers non-
designers the chance to act with creative confidence, and 
perceive themselves as part of creating a more desirable 
future, with the ability to take action when faced with a 
difficult challenge (Munyai, 2016). As Carroll et al. (2010) 
observed: “design thinking fosters the ability to imagine 
without boundaries and constraints. This is critical, as the 
development of creative confidence is an essential part 
of learning” (Carroll et al., 2010, p. 52). Design thinking 
allows students to acquire and experience creative mastery 
by providing a creative problem solving process, creative 
work-spaces and collaboration in multi-perspective teams 
(von Thienen, Royalty, & Meinel, 2017). 
Summary: Tacit experiences, increased empathy, 
reduced cognitive bias, playful learning, flow, 
collaboration, productive failure, surprising solutions and 
creative confidence: The potential motives for integrating 
design thinking in educational experiences are manifold. 
The multifaceted goals and outcomes associated with 
design thinking are a key factor in the attractiveness: “It 
is this capacity of design thinking to complement existing 
pedagogies and provide inspiration for change and 
innovation” (Melles, Anderson, Barrett, & Thompson-
Whiteside, 2015, p. 192).
For a field that is chiefly driven by case study research, 
it will enhance clarity if the intended purposes as well as 
unintended outcomes are documented and discussed in 
context. Design thinking outcomes can be measured along 
the different dimensions identified in this review: Did 
learners experience flow? Did they recognize play as part 
of learning? Were they able to overcome cognitive bias? 
The answers will likely vary based on the methods, tools 
and techniques, as well as the participants and settings. 
The themes identified in this review offer a systematic 
template for describing the goals and evaluating the 
outcomes of design thinking.