ABSTRACT

Design thinking co-evolved from a range of disciplines: software development, engineering, anthropology, psychology, the arts and business. This chapter identifies how design thinking and teacher education share many commonalities. It describes what design thinking is, how designers think and what tools they specifically use. The chapter focuses on how teacher education might promote digital well-being amongst student teachers. It utilizes a four-stage design thinking approach to develop person-centred solutions to this problem. The process of design thinking involves the ‘development of idea stages, applying an iterative process that forces solvers to move back and forth between inspiration, ideation and implementation’. The hybrid approach helps the design thinker to really engage with the voices of stakeholders to define the problem and then to iteratively work towards a solution. The chapter presents a case study that illustrates the process undertaken by the authors as they sought to look at a complex, somewhat ‘wicked’ design problem in the domain of digital well-being.