Re-Visiting Design Thinking for Learning and Practice: Critical Pedagogy, Conative Empathy

Abstract

This paper argues for the importance of design thinking as a creative, collaborative activity to equip students, instructors, and practitioners with important skills to address “wicked problems” that are transforming tourism and hospitality in a (post-)COVID-19 Anthropocene. Design Thinking (DT) and Design Thinking for Engaged Learning (DTEL) are becoming increasingly popular to incorporate in practice and in courses offered across various fields of study, including tourism and hospitality. The paper reviews some of their applications and uses, drawing on a range of cross-disciplinary literature. A small case study conducted over the Summer of 2020 in an undergraduate tourism course helps to reflect on existing weaknesses in DT and the original DTEL model, which the revisions reported here seek to address. Although the model engaged learners in developing innovative solutions to real problems, the incorporation of a critical, decolonizing pedagogy is needed to help learners break free of deeply entrenched assumptions, and intentionally develop pluralistic, relational solutions to address injustices and suffering. The previous emphasis on perspective taking through a dominantly cognitive (mind) empathy approach (in traditional DT models) is balanced with affective (heart) and conative (action) empathy, as aspects of care ethics that facilitate epistemic justice and praxis.

Investigating Possibilities of Developing Self-Directed Learning in Architecture Students Using Design Thinking

“…The inclusion of metacognition in design tasks is well supported by a myriad of authors [5,7,56,59,60], but as they have reported, several cognitive pitfalls can occur, especially for unwary designers, if internal thought processes are not well understood and used [60]. The shortcomings or failures have been seen as a result of top-down processing, which can lead to encoding failures, inattentional blindness, confirmation bias, cognitive fixation, among other things [60].…”

“…Employing different stakeholders or the content of different disciplines in design tasks can result in new knowledge and skills, especially creativity, innovativeness, digital skills, interpersonal skills, and creative self-efficacy and design flow experience [53,54]. Design thinking shows values such as practicality, ingenuity, empathy, and appropriateness as well as values rooted in humanity, e.g., subjectivity, imagination, commitment, and justice [55,56], as human-centred design is socially situated in values and sense making [56,57]. Moreover, it was argued by [7,56] that design thinking can make a change towards SDGs and sustainable architecture, and it may provoke the use of different strategies and methods as a part of self-directed learning to develop innovativeness, creativity and digital skills.…”

“…It seems that the main source of learning sustainable design could be learning through observation, rapid prototyping, and problem definition and hypothesis formulation, as also argued by [7,22,66]. An ability for problem reframing can also be crucial for countering new problems towards achieving SDGs [4,23], and inventive thinking which also includes adaptability, managing complexity, and self-direction [10], while an ability for empathy could be useful at design of user experience, needed for sustainable architecture [21,24,56]. An ability for experimentation or learning from mistakes or from failure, transdisciplinary collaboration and desire to make a difference can be useful for evaluation of performance in response to social, economic, and natural environments, for assessment of users and viability of designs [15,87], enabling breakthrough insights and solutions from diversity [62], and for developing the skills, structures, and processes to generate value from valuable insights [86].…”

“…Ability for risk taking is not yet well developed, which points to a lack of design subject matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and technological pedagogical content knowledge, as also argued by [14,62]. Moreover, it is very necessary for innovation learning, and it might be that translation of cognitive and affective empathy at design thinking into conative (inclination for action) had not been realised yet [56]. The second design thinking shortcoming is in ability for ambiguity and uncertainty tolerance.…”

“…In addition, it may be that some subscales are also at risk, namely Abductive thinking, Creative confidence, Human centeredness, Team working, Experimentation, or learn from mistake or from failure. It could be that students with less pronounced design thinking in the aforementioned subscales have difficulties in problem definition, user experience design, creative ideation, and prototyping as argued by [24,54,56,88]. Therefore, students might have difficulties in achieving the SDGs [9], especially in design for partnership, design for resilient communities, and design for rethinking resources, where a need for transdisciplinary learning and systems thinking is desired [51,89].…”