Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Design Thinking (DT) is a human-centric approach to designing product, process, system, and services. This paper showa how DT methodology and principles can assist curriculum developers empathise and gain deep understanding of their students. Insights on students’ deep needs and learning behaviours can inspire curriculum development and teaching approaches that better engage students in active learning. Our curriculum development approach involves four themes, namely Mapping, Enhancing, Innovating, and Sustaining. For mapping the focus is on ensuring the continuous relevance of the curriculum. This involves conducting environmental scanning to better understand what are the emerging trends and the arising opportunities and challenges. Insights on the forces driving the changes for future of work help to determine and define the future skills expected of graduates. For enhancing, it is set in the context of supporting students to acquire relevant skills that will enable them to stay relevant in real-world working environment. The emphasis is on enhancing students learning experience in a multi-disciplinary environment where students learn to work and collaborate with peers from different disciplines to develop a project. The third theme on innovating teaching and learning approaches as well as learning space design explores how pedagogy and space design could be integrated to create conducive learning environment that supports learning. Lastly, the sustaining phase describes how to determine the requisite resources and capabilities to consistently deliver quality teaching programmes.