Design thinking for digital fabrication in education

In this paper, we argue that digital fabrication in education may benefit from design thinking, to foster a more profound understanding of digital fabrication processes among students. Two related studies of digital fabrication in education are presented in the paper. In an observational study we found that students (eleven to fifteen) lacked an understanding of the complexity of the digital fabrication process impeding on the potentials of digital fabrication in education. In a second explorative research through design study, we investigated how a focus on design thinking affected the students’ performance in digital fabrication processes. Our findings indicate that design thinking can provide students with a general understanding of the creative and complex process through which artifacts and futures emerge in processes of digital fabrication.