Facilitating design thinking: A comparison of design expertise

Design thinking - as a problem-solving approach - has been taught in informal and formal education settings across various disciplines globally (within both academia and industry), yet little research has focused on what level of design expertise facilitators require to educate non-design students. This paper analyses two informal immersive learning experience case studies from Australia and the Netherlands to explore the role of the facilitator in the teaching of design thinking to non-designers. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the level of design expertise of the facilitator, as well as the complexity of the problem being addressed and how these impact the value of the learning experience of design thinking for a non-design audience. Fifteen (15) student group projects were observed across the two international case studies i) Brisbane, Australia (Morehen, Wright, & Wrigley, 2013) and ii) Utrecht, The Netherlands (Dijksterhuis, 2016) with some variances of learning experiences as well as some notable similarities. The results show in addition to design expertise levels, problem complexity impacts the facilitation of informal design thinking workshops.