Written by Jeff Freels & Kathleen Krysher

D is these days. Primarily used as an innovation strategy for designing objects and services for business, its use has expanded in recent years to encompass planning and design for diverse types of organizations, including higher education. Advocates argue that design thinking is ideal for tackling complex problems such as climate change, obesity, and crime. Critics allege that it is a “failed experiment.”

From its origins in traditional design fields — art, architecture, and engineering— design thinking emerged as a business innovation strategy in the 1990s, achieved widespread acceptance in the 2000s, and has been increasingly applied to the creation of objects, delivery of services, and structure of organizations more recently. Despite increased use outside of business contexts, most design thinking definitions, scholarship, and models remain firmly rooted in its business-oriented past.

Frequently characterized as a process, a common set of tools, and/or “designerly” ways of knowing, design thinking does not have a single, widely agreed-upon definition. In general, most agree that design thinking is characterized by empathy and user-centeredness, iteration and experimentation, systems thinking, tolerance for ambiguity and failure, and the formation of insights from both reason and intuition. More fundamentally, Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon argued that design aims to change “existing situations into preferred ones” (1996, p. 114). In our view, this concentration on transforming existing states into preferred ones is the essence of design thinking.

Therefore, despite its complexity and resistance to reduction, we design thinking broadly as:

an end-user focused methodology for solving complex problems using systemic reasoning and intuition to explore ideal future states

Design thinking and higher education

Even before COVID-19, contemporary higher education faced numerous challenges that threatened to overwhelm leaders. “Technology, capitalism, the culture of the United States, federal and state laws, politics, and money are all converging to change the higher education paradigm” (p. 13). Recent events have only accelerated the pace of change and brought new urgency to the need for transformation.

Higher education needs “new approaches to change in order to survive” (p. 30), “a greater commitment to supporting innovations” (p. 23), and “organizational designs that are flexible and amenable to change” (p. 174). One proposed approach offering that flexibility is design thinking. Beyond arguments in favor of its use in “any area of human experience” (p. 16) and general calls for deploying it as an innovation strategy in higher education, literature supporting the contextualized application of design thinking in higher education is sparse.

As numerous scholars have pointed out, higher education institutions have unique cultures and distinct organizational features that inhibit blanket application of theories and frameworks from other contexts. “Many representations of [design thinking] in the literature are general, vague and sometimes ambiguous,” (p. 41) and none have been calibrated specifically for higher education institutions.

Critics contend that design thinking is a “boondoggle” and an “odd fit” for higher education. It has been accused of being a management fad that executives can use to further corporatize higher education. These suspicions are perhaps justified, however, in light of the fact that no discernible efforts have been made to adjust the methodology to the unique organizational characteristics of colleges and universities, as recommended by Kezar & Eckel (2002).

Kezar & Eckel further argue that unmodified business innovation strategies may be harmful to higher education institutions and note that failure to adjust business-oriented practices for higher education can contribute to organizational dysfunction. This suggests that design thinking needs modification to work as an effective higher education innovation strategy.

Case study context

We are advocates for design thinking in higher education because of our experience using it as a change framework in a two-year student learning outcomes assessment system redesign project at a large public research university in the southern United States. However, the inadequacy of current design thinking models for facilitating change in higher education organizations became clear to us at the beginning of the project. To meet our needs, we borrowed from existing design thinking models and integrated ideas from other fields. The result was a hybrid design thinking model that is more uniquely suited to higher education.

Our design thinking model began to form in 2018 as we pondered strategies for strongly finishing an assessment cycle scheduled to end in 2019–2020 and constructing an innovative and sustainable system for a cycle scheduled to begin in 2020–2021. We needed to account for the needs of diverse constituencies, align with the evolving national outcomes assessment environment, and meaningfully advance the campus assessment culture. We had to consider problems of communication, coordination, training, and reporting and how information technology systems facilitate our work. In other words, we had a classic “wicked problem” on our hands.

Borrowing from existing models

We set out to develop a contextually appropriate design thinking framework early in the project. To assemble it, we synthesized literature on design thinking and higher education organizations and borrowed ideas and components from existing design thinking models. Some of those most important ideas and components include:

International design firm IDEO’s framework of intersecting constraints centers on questions of desirability, feasibility, and viability. We retained the focus on what users want (desirability) and what can be done (feasibility), but modified the focus on what can be done profitably (viability). Given that most higher education institutions are non-profit organizations, we instead adopted sustainability — what can be maintained and institutionalized over the long-term — as our third constraint.

Global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company utilizes a braided design model that views design, strategy, and technology as distinct strands of a unified design effort. We viewed technology as relevant to our project, but integrated it with strands for organizational culture and structure in our braided model (more on that below).

University of Virginia management Professor Jeanne Liedtka’s structured approach to design thinking was also influential.

A modified design framework for higher education

In adapting elements of these models for our project, we expanded the design thinking focus on end-users to encompass a more diverse range of constituencies. In many cases, business design projects only consider how customers experience a single product or service and insufficiently account for people indirectly impacted by them. Applying this narrow view to a design project in higher education outcomes assessment, for example, might confine our analysis to only those faculty and staff members who participate directly in assessment procedures. Left out entirely is any consideration for the impact of outcomes assessment procedures on those indirectly affected by it — i.e., students (who often may not even be aware they are being “assessed”), faculty uninvolved in official assessment activities, institutional leaders, and regulatory agencies. Focusing on “constituencies,” then, allows for a broader consideration of the people and groups impacted by a proposed change initiative.

An under-explored organizational change variable in design thinking literature involves culture. Design thinking scholars consistently acknowledge the importance of situating design in context, but offer little guidance for cultural adaptation beyond suggestions to empathize with and understand end-users or immerse oneself in the user experience. Yet, culture is “a critical factor in the success of any organization” (p. 67) that can encourage or impede innovation. Higher education scholars maintain that change initiatives should involve an assessment of existing culture to “identify discrepancies between the old way of doing things and the perspectives that are necessary for success in a changed environment” (p. 375). As a result of these considerations, we made organizational culture a central feature of our emergent framework.

A further under-explored area in design thinking literature is related to organizational structure. In a general piece that advocates for design thinking in higher education, Gilbert, Crow, and Anderson (2018) note that “a design perspective suggests that there are architectural choices to be made about what the organization seeks to accomplish and how it is organized to achieve those ends” (p. 36). Higher education scholars have speculated on the possibility of creating “ideal” structures that align with an organization’s environment and culture and suggested that successful change requires careful attention to organizational structure. The simultaneous lack of attention to structure in design thinking literature and its emphasis in higher education literature suggest that adjustments are needed to current design thinking models.

The model

The result for us, then, is a constituent-centric change model that integrates considerations for organizational culture, structure, and technology along lines of desirability, feasibility, and sustainability. In other words:

What is the ideal state of our institution’s assessment culture, structure, and technology systems from the standpoint of our diverse constituencies?

Which aspects of those ideal states can we feasibly implement?

How does the institution sustain those changes over time?

Those questions fueled the project.

In the future, we will describe more fully how the model worked in action, including specific activities that flowed from it, our use of “productive reflection” as a mechanism for institutional change, lessons learned, and thoughts on further modifications to the model. The COVID-19 crisis disrupted and delayed the final stages of our project, but the design principles that framed it remain relevant.

We hope these ideas will inspire others in higher education to modify design thinking to suit their own contexts, especially those involving organizational change. We view design thinking as a flexible and powerful method of helping higher education institutions harness creativity towards the imagination of fresh solutions for challenging problems and look forward to engaging in a conversation about the future of design in higher education.