DESIGN THINKING AS COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN EDUCATION: OBSERVING STUDENT BEHAVIOR THROUGH THE DESIGN THINKING PROCESS
Background of Design Thinking Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation which draws from collaboration in order to integrate the needs of people, the potentials of technology, and the requirements for success (Innovation, Design Engineering Organization, 2012). Collaborating with others in order to bring change through a better, more effective design is part of the problem-solving process of Design Thinking (Berger, 2009). In education, Design Thinking is about helping students identify what their levers may be and serving human need. The Design Thinking process is a process in that students are asked to work collaboratively, in groups. As a teaching method of education, collaborative learning involves groups of students working together to solve a problem or accomplish a task. Collaborative learning is built on the idea that learning is naturally a social act where learning occurs through conversation (Gerlach, 1994). But Design Thinking also differs from collaborative learning in that the Design Thinking process asks students to jointly identify and solve specific problems, conduct research, and generate possible solutions to the problem they identified. The actual Design Thinking process blends art and science and is driven by human empathy (Kelley, 2005). Design is a way of solving problems and reinventing the world. In his book Glimmer, Warren Berger collaborated with top designer Bruce Mau, shared how great designers think. In Glimmer, Berger described how design could potentially improve our world through the use of innovative principles of design: personal, universal, social, and business. For Berger, principles identified in his collaboration with Mau are intended to show ways to improve how people think, work, and live. Challenges are met by people who look at the problem in a fresh way and see a glimmer of possibility for how things might be done differently (Berger, 2009). According to Berger, “Mau believes that an engineer becomes a designer when he/she truly begins to 15