Abstract:

For many decades, software had to do mainly one thing: meet the functional requirements and thus support processes and often digitize them. Accordingly, the education of software engineers was designed to be able to implement functionality. Today other terms show up when developing software solutions. The solutions should be innovative, i.e., solve a problem in a creative and original way and thus change or at least penetrate the market. They should also be user-centred, i.e., oriented towards the user and designed, developed and tested with an understanding of user needs. This changes the demands on the education of software engineers. They now have to learn methods in order to develop innovative and user-centred solutions. This is the goal of our first semester course on Design Thinking.

According to Tim Brown, Design Thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity” (Brown, 2008). It is hence an approach with many methods that support such developments, and students learn to design, prototype and test innovative solutions with a user-centric view. However, Design Thinking is not merely a collection of process and tools, but also a mindset, as has been pointed out repeatedly (see (Brenner et al., 2016), e.g.). This means to be open minded to the needs and circumstances of the people we have in mind, willing to try out new, even unexpected ways, benefitting from working in interdisciplinary teams etc. Whereas methods and tools of Design Thinking may be taught rather successfully in structured ways, the mindset might evolve only due to practical work, experience and social interaction. In our course, we decided to take a method mix including the Service-Learning approach to let the students apply Design Thinking in local, real-life projects. Service Learning is a teaching method that combines social engagement with academic learning (Reinders, 2016). This helps the students to follow a lecture more motivated, more committed and thus with greater learning success (Simons & Cleary, 2006).

In combination with learning Design Thinking in social projects that we carry out locally, we want to achieve our objectives:
- Successful learning and deep understanding of Design Thinking: Students get the theoretical knowledge of Design Thinking and can apply them to real world examples.
- Achieve Design Thinking mindset: Students recognize the work in an interdisciplinary team as valuable and idea-generating and open up to other suggestions and ideas. They understand the principles of Design Thinking,

In our article, we will explain our concept of a didactic mix of methods including Service Learning, an interactive Learning Module as a source of theoretical knowledge and the inclusion of younger high-school students into the course.

Keywords:

Service Learning, Design Thinking Mindset, User-Centric Design, Design Thinking, Learning Modules.