Christine Noweski’s research while affiliated with Hasso Plattner Institute and other places

In an ever changing society of the 21st century, there is a demand to equip students with meta competences going beyond cognitive knowledge. Education, therefore, needs a transition from transferring knowledge to developing individual potentials with the help of constructivist learning. Advantages of constructivist learning, and criteria for its realisation have been well-determined through theoretical findings in pedagogy (Reich 2008, de Corte, OECD 2010). However, the practical implementation leaves a lot to be desired (Gardner 2010, Wagner 2011). Knowledge acquisition is still fragmented into isolated subjects. Lesson layouts are not efficiently designed to help teachers execute a holistic and interdisciplinary learning. As is shown in this paper, teachers are having negative classroom experience with project work or interdisciplinary teaching, due to a constant feeling of uncertainty and chaos, as well as lack of a process to follow. We therefore conclude: there is a missing link between theoretical findings and demands by pedagogy science and its practical implementation. We claim that, Design Thinking as a team-based learning process offers teachers support towards practice-oriented and holistic modes of constructivist learning in projects. Our case study confirms an improvement of classroom experience for teacher and student alike when using Design Thinking. This leads to a positive attitude towards constructivist learning and an increase of its implementation in education. The ultimate goal of this paper is to prove that Design Thinking gets teachers empowered to facilitate constructivist learning in order to foster 21st century skills.

Some widely-used approaches in Behavior Group Therapy bear a striking resemblance to Design Thinking. They invoke almost identical process models and share central maxims like “defer judgement” or “go for quantity”. Heuristics for composing groups (mix!) and preferred group sizes (4-6) are very much alike as well. Also, the roles ascribed to therapists are quite similar to that of Design Thinking coaches. Given these obvious analogies, it is most natural to ask what the two traditions can learn from one another – and why it is that they are so strikingly alike. This article ultimately hopes to inspire further investigations by giving examples of how Design Thinking may profit from taking a look at Behavior Group Therapy. We will discuss (a) new techniques for coaches to detect and treat personal dissonances that impede project work, (b) new methods for teams to upgrade empathy, find crucial needs or test prototypes and (c) theoretical insights regarding what happens in the process.

Science, business and social organizations alike describe a strong need for a set of skills and competencies, often referred to as twenty-first century skills and competencies (e.g. Pink, Wagner, Gardner). For many young people, schools are the only place where such competencies and skills can be learned. Therefore, educational systems are coming more and more under pressure to provide students with the social values and attitudes as well as with the constructive experiences they need, to benefit from the opportunities and contribute actively to the new spaces of social life and work. Contrary to this demand, the American as well as the German school system has a strong focus on cognitive skills, acknowledging the new need, but not supporting it in practice. Why is this so? True, we are talking about a complex challenge, but when one makes the effort to take a closer look, it quickly becomes apparent that most states have not even bothered to properly identify and conceptualize the set of skills and competencies they require. Neither have they incorporated them into their educational standards.

As we manoeuvre through life we often try to predict other people’s behaviours and feelings; sometimes even our own. A classical take on the matter is to refer to character traits. But there is another source of information we may tap for our predictions – highly relevant and still often overlooked: Knowledge of where the person is. At what place? In which context? The article invites you on a journey of thinking about and exploring the marvellous impacts of places. We will start by visiting personality psychology, attending the quest of its professionals for ever-better behaviour predictions. Subsequently, we will witness an experiment on the importance of places – seeing how a place setup may propel forcefully, almost mercilessly towards innovations. We will then browse personality psychology and other fields in search of fast and easy ways to make sense of places: How are they going to affect us? Who are we going to be there? Finally, we will draw together what we have found and construct a scheme to analyse or design places – which, of course, needs to be put to the test...

In Design Thinking, theory and practice are closely interconnected. The theory serves as a blueprint, guiding companies in general and design teams in particular through the design process. Given such a close interrelation of theory and practice, we argue that Design Thinking research needs to be set up in a particular way too. This setup ties in with Design Thinking process models: To attain ever more befitting design solutions, prototypes are supposed to be tested and refined. Correspondingly, Design Thinking research should help to test and refine theory elements of Design Thinking. Researchers may serve as “dialogue facilitators,” aiding the community of Design Thinkers to intensify their “dialogue” with empirical reality. To provide reliable data on issues of central concern, we have tested experimentally two widely held convictions in the field of Design Thinking: (1) Multidisciplinary teams produce more innovate design solutions than monodisciplinary teams. (2) Teams trained in Design Thinking (by the D-School) produce more innovative solutions than untrained teams. In addition, degrees of communication problems were assessed. While both “multidisciplinarity” and “D-School training” have been associated with more unusual design solutions, with respect to utility a different picture emerged. Thus, hotspots have been identified that may stimulate some productive refinements of Design Thinking theory.

Originating within research on design cognition, the term design thinking has been growing in popularity over the past three decades, and has become a matter in a variety of discourses, assuming diverse and not necessarily congruent notions. In this article we suggest how to differentiate those discourses on design thinking and discuss its evolution into a meta-disciplinary concept.

In this paper we address principles of the design thinking methodology and their value to design projects. We do this by describing the challenge, progress and results of a use case project for a major retail group. Specific emphasis is put on the user-centered approach, defined methods of innovation and on low-fidelity prototypes, as the retail group's innovation department insufficiently applied those in their prior attempts to address the challenge. The focus of the paper is on the teams performance to innovate by applying design principles to a grazed over context.

„Oberflächen untersichten!“ Dem auffordernden Charakter dieses Rufes sind die Autoren, die in der ersten Ausgabe versammelt sind, mit dankenswerter Gründlichkeit gefolgt. Die so entstandenen Beiträge haben wir in inhaltliche Gruppen gegliedert und das Thema dadurch nochmals strukturiert. Nach einer notwendigen Herkunftsbestimmung der Oberflächen werden im Kapitel “Design untersichten” die, der Disziplin immanenten Oberflächenangelegenheiten verhandelt, eingeleitet durch ein Interview mit Gert Selle. Die Beiträge in “Oberflächliche Prägungen” setzen sich kritisch mit dem Konditionierungscharakter des Stylings auseinander und zeigen dies in verschiedenen gesellschaftlichen Szenarien auf. Inwieweit Material die Tiefenstruktur von Design determiniert und welche Ressourcenprobleme unter der Oberfläche warten, ist die leitende Frage in der Sektion “Material und Tiefenstruktur”. Dem veränderten Charakter der Dinge als Reduktion auf ihre Oberflächenperformanz wird in “Von der Textur zum Interface Rechnung getragen”. Wie heilsam ein hoher Gegenstandsbezug im Design sein kann, zeigen wir in “Vor und hinter der sozialen Oberfläche”; sind doch alle dort versammelten Beiträge Designforschungen, die sich am konkreten Design-Fall abarbeiten. Diese Ausgabe ist ausverkauft.