CDIO Regional Meeting - Asia-Pacific

Teaching Design Thinking to Usability Engineering students is extremely useful because it gives them a systematic methodology to find solutions to complex problems. Design for innovation consists of problems that are typically ill-defined and solutions are unknown. Usability engineers focus on creating an understanding of design problems by researching the needs of the human users. Design thinking is based on finding user-centered solutions by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways. It teaches them how to generate ideas and do rapid prototyping and testing. There are many variants of the Design Thinking process in use today, but they are all based upon the same principles, that can be used to guide design teams to collaboratively find solutions. This presentation describes the experiences of teaching Design Thinking to Usability Engineering students in a flipped classroom setting, where students study the methods online and apply what they learned in the classroom, working in small teams on several different design challenges, simulating a real world environment.