Challenges in teaching design thinking skills to novice design students

There is a general assumption that teaching prescriptive "design methods" to novice design students will result in effective analysis of a problem that will result in an innovative solution. However, in reality, most students use "design methods" as a tool to present their resolved solution rather than use it to arrive at that solution. In other words, students mostly use traditional design methods taught as an effective persuasion tool to secure better grade. For this reason, we argue that we should encourage students to pick up appropriate design behaviour early in their course. By stressing practicing designers seldom apply design methods as described in the textbooks. In this paper we share our action research over a period of two semesters to investigate effective approaches to achieve this goal. Overall, initially students found it difficult to move away from traditional prescriptive design methods they were exposed to in their high school studies. Students' feedback showed that they preferred a more structured and incremental treatment of the subject. Based on this feedback and students' assessments outcome we have developed a pedagogical framework based on nudge theory to address their expectations and learning objectives.