Abstract

With the rise of ‘high experience’ products and services, businesses are striving to improve the ‘look and feel’ of products. There is increased recognition that new approaches are necessary for resolving tensions between aesthetic, economic and technological constraints for marketing, advertising or the packaging of services and products. In an effort to capitalize on this demand for innovation, businesses are embracing ‘design thinking’ as a strategy to harness and manage creativity; in response, programs that embrace this multi-epistemic mode are emerging at business schools. This paper explores the pedagogical models used to teach design thinking in business programs. To date, few such approaches have been evaluated. We ask, how can design thinking skills be effectively taught? We consider the design thinking process, which draws on cognition, emotion, sensation, intuition, interrogation and other processes and skills to deal with problems that have incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements. We present an approach to design thinking in teaching and learning based on multi-epistemic, Jungian and ecological models. Finally, we suggest that design thinking, rather than being taught as a course, can be embedded in curriculum and mainstreamed throughout institutions.