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

particularly fruitful in charting their own design thinking 
journey. I purposefully chose a different classification 
of tools than Micheli et al. (2018), because I wanted to 
provide a more granular account of the diversity of design 
thinking practices. An expert survey among educators who 
use design thinking presents itself as an ideal follow-up 
project that can provide clarity and generate systematic 
descriptions of different design thinking exercises and 
their applicability for specific purposes. The systematic 
organization should include digital prototyping tools 
such as visual programming languages, and physical 
engineering tools, that are typically found in makerspaces. 
Getting a better handle on what it is that people 
actually do, when they engage in design thinking activities 
deserves further research. This is particularly interesting 
in light of the findings by Primus and Sonnenburg (2018), 
that stated that while overall design thinking creates flow 
on the individual and group level, the flow experience 
may differ between sets of exercises. More case studies 
should report the details of their “design thinking design” 
to allow for best practices to emerge. This includes a 
description of the spaces and places of design thinking 
to explore the role of innovative furniture and flexible 
learning spaces. 
The article covers novel ground in seeking to shed 
light on the limitations of design thinking. While there 
are plenty of critics that see design thinking as a fad (cf. 
Hernández-Ramírez, 2018), more articles that include 
nuanced weighing of costs and benefits, intended and 
unintended outcomes, affordances and limitations will be 
necessary for enhancing design thinking practices as well 
as scholarly reflections among its proponents.
From a theoretical perspective, the article builds 
bridges between design thinking and related innovative 
pedagogies. Von Thienen, Clancey, Corazza, and Meinel 
(2017) pointed out that investigations into the history of 
design thinking hold the promise of adding systematically 
to our comprehension of its basic principles. According 
to Leifer and Meinel (2016), it is the combination of 
engineering (especially IT), economics, anthropology, 
psychology, neuroscience and design-research that makes 
design thinking foundational. Similarly, this articles 
stresses that we cannot understand design thinking 
in isolation from related disciplines with intersecting 
scholarly communities and core concepts, in particular