We live in a world that is rapidly evolving. The scale of change we have witnessed in the last few decades is mind-boggling. Schools today have not been able to keep pace with this change and are bringing up students to experience a world they are not yet fully ready for. This makes many of us wonder if schools are even relevant anymore. However, what is reassuring for most educators is systems scientist Peter Senge’s words, “Children will always need safe places for learning. They always need a launching pad to follow their curiosity into the larger world.”
Today, educators worldwide are consistently looking for ways to drive innovation in a school environment. Even as they constantly pursue to understand what the future holds for their young learners, schools continue to battle with a one-size-fits-all approach that promotes rote learning and standardised testing. Therefore, for schools to retain their pride of place in the years ahead, it is evident that they will have to transform their approach into one that will spark curiosity and nurture learners with the necessary skills to navigate through the challenges of an unpredictable tomorrow.
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In this context, design thinking emerges as a powerful and transformative tool that can re-energise our schools and empower every learner by fostering 21st-century skills, or the 6Cs as it is popularly referred to. At its core, design thinking is powered by a human-centred, empathy-driven approach that lays the foundation for innovation, where user-centricity, creativity, collaboration, and iterative problem-solving skills are exercised.
Design thinking is a mindset as much as a process. This encourages individuals to understand the needs and perspectives of others, empathise, ideate, create a prototype, and test solutions to address complex challenges. This nurtures citizenship and humaneness as much as entrepreneurship in the youth who identify unmet needs and envision new possibilities, turning challenges into opportunities.
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Today’s students must learn to adapt to change with agility scaffolded with hope and optimism. This is possible if the design thinking process is embedded early.
The active involvement of all stakeholders within the school community, including teachers, parents, administrators, and the wider community is of prime importance for the success of this process.
Teachers are designers themselves and must realise that education is not just about solving
Math problems or knowing the parts of an organ. It is more about facing challenges with equanimity, armed with a process to exercise creativity and critical thinking ability to offer workable solutions. Teachers could help students approach real-world problems they experience and/or relate to, such as bullying, finding ways to share limited common spaces, and analysing the overuse of resources such as water, paper, and electricity to embed the transformative design thinking process.
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These hands-on projects nurture curiosity, creative thinking, and environmental awareness, where students interview their peers and/or community members and empathise with their feelings, define the problem collectively, brainstorm ideas, create prototypes, test, and review. This iterative, human-centred process brings the designer and the user to collaborate, coexist and thrive as a community of problem solvers, which is the need of the hour in this strife-ridden world!
Parents play a significant role in their children’s lives and can help support the school by reinforcing the design thinking process through conversations and providing them with opportunities to explore, experiment, and think critically. Parents must remember that if we are to keep the interest in education alive, then learning must be student-driven, where their voices and choices are respected. This process could help build in them the necessary confidence to view their challenges through the lens of design thinking.
As designer, builder and educator Emily Pilloton-Lam said, “We as a community must acknowledge that the youth is the biggest asset and an untapped resource while we imagine a new future”. Administrators and the wider community can support initiatives that promote design thinking. Students can be part of real-world issues such as creating a bus shelter or clean beaches and water bodies. Learning to design and build using their hands, heads, and hearts opens new opportunities for young minds, giving them a sense of empowerment toward bringing an idea to fruition and finding inclusive, nurturing, and pragmatic solutions.
To conclude, Design thinking helps harness the capabilities to face the unknown with poise, embrace change, work in diverse teams, and celebrate the collective wisdom over the individual with an iterative and experimental mindset. Design thinking, to me, is a way of seeing the world with fresh eyes and an open heart! – a potent combination that is bound to create solutions that are sustainable, inclusive, and adaptable.
(Author Padmini Sambasivam is Principal, Shiv Nadar School, Chennai. Views expressed here are personal.)
