Design Thinking: Practicing Design Competence

Novice and expert designers think very differently. The big challenge in engineering education is developing inexperienced designers into professionals who think like expert designers. The key to developing expertise is mentoring learners in design thinking as they work with real design challenges. The book, Design Thinking, is created to provide problem-specific mentoring within individual design teams. Team members learn by testing their knowledge, reflecting on its success, revising understanding as necessary, and performing at higher levels with the advice of an experienced mentor: the Design Thinking book.The Design Thinking book is constructed around brief mentoring sessions that occur in the context of actual work of the team. Teams gain just-in-time assistance through a focused discussion on the task at hand. Members discuss questions posed and identify actions needed to refine or complete what they are doing. Team members collectively increase their understanding of the design work they are doing, identify errors or oversights in their work, and improve upon their design.By using exercises in Design Thinking, inexperienced designers practice critical review of their design processes and intermediate design products before costly mistakes are accepted without question. These pauses to reflect also invite creative ideas for improving solutions and their value. In the end, design teams produce more valuable design products and become more valuable design professionals in their future career paths. Be smart! Develop design expertise now, and it will produce exceptional dividends in the future.

Dr. Denny Davis is a retired engineering educator with over three decades of teaching students engineering design at Washington State University. With a passion for preparing graduates for success in the professional workplace, he has worked with business and engineering faculty, industry employers of engineering graduates, and engineering design educators to improve engineering design education. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Davis has led numerous projects that created instructional materials, collaborative learning strategies, and assessments to achieve exceptional learning of professional skills. Dr. Davis has adapted and implemented design learning materials for use in multidisciplinary college-level design teams, diverse student teams, and pre-college design project teams. His just-in-time exercises make learning relevant and fruitful in teams that aspire to design excellence. Dr. Davis has received local, national, and international recognitions for teaching excellence and scholarlship in design learning and assessment. He received faculty excellence awards for teaching and for expanding engineering education research at Washington State University. He is a life member and Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education.