Universities face a critical crossroads, in need of swift, targeted, and efficient actions to address future challenges. This necessities a strategic approach to updating and assessing engineering design education. Efforts to improve teaching and learning require systematic change in many universities, yet research on structuring such change is scarce. Few studies have combined a systems perspective with a functional operational level. This research embeds design thinking to structure to isolated actions. Drawing from an extensive literature review of educational change frameworks and several illustrative cases, this article demonstrates the potential of design-driven change. It highlights how dynamic interrelations can facilitate educational transformations across diverse academic levels. By presenting an educational ecosystem as a framework for systematic educational change, design thinking functions as a catalyst for educational transformation. The article also presents case findings that strengthen supportive actions ingrained in existing change research frameworks connecting, them to a transparent approach for sustainable and careful decision-making.

The evolving needs of customers and stakeholders necessitate the collaboration of diverse system elements within a cyber-physical, socio-technical network. Socio-technical systems are characterized by numerous complex interdependencies as well as by endogenous and exogenous influences. A key issue that developers must address is the mitigation of data and information uncertainties. The authors introduce an approach that operationalizes Design Thinking as a supporting sufficient condition within the context of designing system models in the realm of Model-Based Systems Engineering.

Tourism entrepreneurs adapted to regulations during COVID-19 by introducing creative solutions. The crisis was said to be a unique opportunity for innovating sustainable businesses. This study investigates crisis as a driver for innovation and its relevance to service design. Interviews with entrepreneurs are the empirical base that highlights that finetuning existing services is an established approach instead of innovative service design. Few expressed lessons were learned from the creative solutions made during the pandemic, suggesting that strategies for innovation need to be developed.

This study delves into Industry 5.0's Human Centric Manufacturing and Systems (HCM and HCS), emphasizing worker welfare and sustainability. Industry 5.0 advocates a human-centric approach, built upon three foundational pillars safety, inclusivity, and empowerment. The paper highlights the successful integration of Design and Systems Thinking in HCM and proposes a workshop at MADE COMPETENCE CENTRE proving the effectiveness in raising awareness and promoting Human-Centric principles throughout the system life cycle and in achieving Human-Centric Systems (HCS).

This study conducts design-driven meaning innovation research based on an interpretation of new meaning through qualitative and quantitative research rooted in design practice and builds design-driven theories, methodology, and highly replicable methods. It presents a new design approach to design thinking called ‘design methodology and method of meaningful products’. The design process and framework integrate words, visuals, and functions to interpret and create new meanings. It highlights the importance of design semiotics in overcoming the limitations of traditional approaches.

This research explores the impact of Design Thinking (DT) on Organizational Behaviour, explicitly focusing on individual employees, the micro-level of the organization. The research runs a single-case study within an Italian bank adopting DT through its HR department. The study proposes a model illustrating how DT adoption influences specific individual behavioral constructs: motivations, attitudes, capabilities, and creative behaviors. The study finds that fostering confidence in the creative process enhances human engagement and proactivity.

Design Thinking (DT) is considered an innovative and effective pedagogical approach. To enhance the understanding of instructional strategies used by university DT facilitators, we developed the Design Thinking Facilitation Behaviour List, an instrument that matches strategies with observable behaviours in a DT course. We present the design process and validation of the instrument. Results show the instrument's effectiveness in capturing instructional strategies in a DT course, paving the way for future research and improved teaching practices.

Design engineering education is increasingly challenge-based, which requires educators to form cohesive student teams capable of delivering desired outcomes while fostering learning and collaboration. An example is an international network in which students from different global universities collaborate. Student teams work on researching the problem space, re-framing their challenge and producing multiple prototypes. The challenge for the teaching teams is to be able to form multiple cohesive teams out of a pre-selected group of highly motivated students. Because of the exclusive nature of this educational program, it is a suitable case study for exploring student design team formation practices. The aim is to identify the methods, tools, theoretical underpinnings, challenges and limitations of student team formation. We interviewed teachers from seven universities about their practices. The interviewees had several years of experience in team building. The interviews were analyzed to contrast practices across universities as well as to the team formation literature. Our findings show that mixed methods that combine self-assessments and observer-assessment methods are the preferred means of forming teams. Our findings also show that current practices have evolved over time through trial and error, and are only partially grounded in different literatures and not necessarily in team formation literature.

Assistive technology (AT) is any artefact that enables participation in activities usually limited by disability. Frequently, AT suffers from poor design engagement and utilisation. Moreover, up to 30% of all AT is abandoned within a year, negatively impacting users. This presents an ongoing challenge for occupational therapists (OTs) who work with assistive technologies. A literature review was conducted using a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis protocol to understand this issue and its implications for the design community. This study explores current themes of AT abandonment and the role of OT within the lens of design thinking. Studies, including design intervention in AT, were subsequently highlighted. This led to comparing this literature with more traditional health literature, exploring the potential enablers and barriers for design in engaging with AT. This evidenced the benefits of collaboration between design and OT disciplines to improve the product and reduce abandonment issues.

Although it's human centered focus, design thinking has proven to be effective also in technology-driven projects, both in education and business. Yet, scant research has investigated whether and how design thinking might be leveraged to find new opportunities based on emerging technologies and design new innovation concepts accordingly. To address this gap, we employed an Action Innovation Management Research framework and co-designed a program called Tech to Market with Oper.Space, the design factory for Open Innovation of the University of Bologna. We ran 5 iterations of the program from October 2018 to December 2022, in which we conducted 52 interviews, observed 10 presentations, and held 10 meetings with the main stakeholders involved. Our results show how to apply design thinking to find and design a suitable application for a given technology, contributing to the ongoing conversation about the implementation of design thinking in technology-driven projects.

The MedTech product development is experiencing a growing complexity of the design process. The design challenge is to keep the medical device simple and user-friendly while maintaining its interconnectivity with the other systems and products. The additional layer of complexity comes from the need to satisfy both - direct customers (pharma companies), and indirect ones (patients, health care practitioners, and pharmacists). Solving those design challenges must not compromise the safety of the end-user and must follow the regulatory requirements.

This research proposes the systematic design process for MedTech combination product development with the emphasis on product strategy and concept development operationalized by design thinking participative toolkit. The proposed approach serves the purpose of increasing the traceability between the early made business decisions on a product strategy level of MedTech company, and the engineering decisions made on product concept level. The ultimate goal of the research is to support the decision-makers with methods and tools which would allow them to make informed decisions on investment in a new MedTech combination product by Pharma and MedTech companies.

Previous research on design thinking (DT) has focused mainly on describing and explaining observed phenomena rather than manipulating variables within the boundaries of its principles to assess the impact of these changes. DT, as a human-centric problem-solving and innovation method, has varying baseline exposure levels of nondesigners and novices when codesigning. This qualitative research shows how DT can be redesigned to accommodate the inclusion and engagement of novices and nondesigners in the codesign process with enhanced DT method applicability. DT novices and nondesigners are challenged in codesign engagements with others and need an intuitive method that leads them to the same or better design results as a classic DT method. A redesign towards an intuitive DT method for nondesigners puts special consideration on method language, efficiency and cycle time. A case study validates its qualification under real-life circumstances when codesigning with DT novices and nondesigners. Overall, the research demonstrates that DT with regard to nondesigners can be simplified and redesigned for efficiency and effectiveness.

The goal of this paper is to develop and test a gamified design thinking framework, including its pedagogical elements, for supporting various learning objectives for school students. By synthesizing the elements and principles of design, learning and games, the authors propose a framework for a learning tool for school students to fulfil a number of learning objectives; the framework includes a design thinking process called “IISC Design Thinking” and its gamified version called “IISC DBox”. The effectiveness of the framework as a learning tool has been evaluated by conducting workshops that involved 77 school students. The results suggest that the gamification used had a positive effect on the design outcomes, fulfilment of learning objectives, and learners' achievements, indicating the potential of the framework for offering an effective, gamified tool for promoting design thinking in school education. In addition to presenting results from empirical studies for fulfilment of the objectives, this paper also proposes an approach that can be used for identifying appropriate learning objectives, selecting appropriate game elements to fulfil these objectives, and integrating appropriate game elements with design and learning elements. The paper also proposes a general approach for assessing the effectiveness of a gamified version for attaining a given set of learning objectives. The methodology used in this paper thus can be used as a reference for developing and evaluating a gamified version of design thinking course suitable not only for school education but also for other domains (e.g., engineering, management) with minimal changes.

This study aims to investigate the good way to generate insight through empathy with users. The fifteen experiment participants drew thinking processes of understanding users and defining insight statements while generating insight statements based on a given interview transcript. The thinking processes were assessed by qualitative coding, and the insight statements were evaluated. The results identified the types of thinking that should be avoided when gaining insights. This paper proposes a framework to categorise designers’ process of gaining insight.