Building on Design Thinking to Work Creatively With Knowledge: A tale of two paradigms

We began to explore design thinking initially as a means of creating a common language between design and business students. Subsequent studies using randomized control trials involving several hundred students working in multidisciplinary teams confirmed that teams following a design thinking pedagogy do indeed generate more innovative design concepts relative to teams that do not. Observations allowed us to suggest how and why this is the case. However, these innovations are generally incremental in nature. Observations made on the most effective teams in terms of radical innovative concept development revealed they applied an effective knowledge acquisition, communication and idea development strategy and this aligns with the principles of a knowledge building pedagogy. Our challenge as educators then became to explore how, what a small number of teams do intuitively, maybe made explicit for all student teams. We integrated knowledge building principles with the design thinking process to develop a combined approach which capitalizes on the advantages of both pedagogies. Subsequent studies suggest that teams using this combined approach are encouraged to close knowledge gaps and engage in sustained idea development resulting in a multiplier effect where subsequent knowledge acquisition encourages teams to be creative with knowledge. This paper reports on one such study and the pedagogical methods employed to achieve this. This combined approach is relevant to education because capacities for creative knowledge work are in high demand by the industries we serve and while, in our experience, creativity comes naturally to most students, the sustained development of ideas does not and requires support.