DESIGN THINKING: THEORY AND PRACTICE

Design thinking plays critical role in 21^st century engineering education. Engineering student buddies are expected to contribute to human society through creating innovative products and services for solving real world problems. The main objective of Design thinking course is to inculcate interdisciplinary skills among engineering students for tackling the real time engineering problems contributing to the society and industry in a collaborative manner. For this purpose it is important to focus on understanding the terminology and phrases, definitions, principles and their interrelationship with the themes and contexts of topics at hand. Design thinking is a new learning approach to address twenty first century wicked problems to be solved involving state of the art technologies that lead to use new platforms for providing innovative solutions.

Many universities are increasingly incorporating design thinking into their curricula as a result.  Design thinking subject is learnt by students from various disciplines as a part of interdisciplinary but mandatory course to engineering and management education. The aim of the design thinking course is to make engineering student buddies to progressively acquire skills of synthesis towards professionally appraising the value by evaluating the products and services. For this purpose, design thinking subject is required to be learnt from fundamental and conceptual levels towards acquiring practical skills by applying meta-cognitive knowledge of analysis and synthesis procedures for achieving the problem solving capabilities across project level, business level and system level in general.

Design thinking follows the human-centred design approach by promoting trans-disciplinary creative thinking and collaboration, enabling students with acquiring cross-disciplinary skills to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and professional practice.

Many text books are available to refer and read the subject of design thinking for its learning.

The benefit of reading this book by both faculty and students is well managing their teaching and learning process of design thinking subject in the form of one stop read of the subject. This book is prepared to match the topics mentioned specific to the university syllabus in a semester based busy schedule, especially to read it while faculty and students focusing on others subjects of their professional core learning in parallel relevant to their specific branch. Also this book is attempted to focus on keeping all those topics by offering a progressively learning approach of the topic with increasing complexity considering both by making theoretical and practical learning attempts. Students are suitably guided to bring the outcomes of learning i.e. preparing both ‘design thinking’ process documents as well as power point presentation slides based prototypes taking examples of applying Software and IoT application techniques to their engineering and business problems from various fields.

We strongly believe that this becomes a mandatory reading book for students pursuing engineering and management education.