Blog: Human - AI Collaboration for Design Thinking in Education
Design thinking encourages student-centric innovations by training learners with creative thinking, helping educators systematically design learning materials, and supporting researchers to develop innovative tools and approaches for education. On the other hand, AI is rapidly evolving and offering new ways to brainstorm, ideate, prototype, and provide personalized learning. Considering the nature of design thinking and the role of AI in education, AI strengthens the design thinking process:
- Support Empathy: AI can support the empathy stage of design thinking by analyzing learner feedback at scale to uncover key challenges and pain points. It can also simulate diverse learner personas, helping educators and designers better understand user needs and experiences.
- Enhance Ideation: AI can enhance brainstorming sessions by offering a variety of new perspectives and creative suggestions that broaden the scope of ideas. It can also generate alternative approaches to challenges, encouraging experimentation and pushing the boundaries of conventional thinking.
- Assist Prototyping: Prototyping can be a time-consuming process; however, AI can make this process faster and easier through automated visual generation, simulating usage scenarios, and quickly sketching ideas.
- Facilitate Reflection: AI can facilitate reflection as an essential stage of the design thinking process in education. It helps learners and educators analyze how well ideas or solutions meet their goals and needs. It can also provide guiding prompts that encourage critical thinking about what worked, what did not, and how things could be improved, while suggesting alternatives to compare against their own choices.
While AI offers opportunities to strengthen design thinking in education, it also introduces important challenges if not integrated thoughtfully. A key limitation is the lack of human empathy: although AI can analyze learner data and simulate personas, it cannot genuinely "feel" or fully grasp the nuanced emotions, cultural contexts, and lived experiences of learners. Furthermore, the risk of misinformation persists, as AI outputs may be biased, incomplete, or factually inaccurate, potentially misleading both learners and educators if not carefully verified. Finally, there is the challenge of erosion of skills, where overreliance on automated idea generation and prototyping may reduce learners' own capacity for problem-solving, creativity, and critical thinking. These challenges highlight the need for a balanced, human-centered approach where AI is used as a supportive partner rather than a replacement for human judgment and empathy.
Addressing these challenges requires moving toward nonlinear collaboration in Design Thinking for education, where humans and AI work together in a dynamic loop of interaction, critique, and refinement. Instead of relying on AI in a linear way, this can foster deeper engagement and preserve the uniquely human qualities of empathy, imagination, and critical reflection. In doing so, educators and learners can harness AI's strengths in speed and scale without losing sight of the human-centered values that make Design Thinking transformative for education.
References:
- Understanding Nonlinear Collaboration between Human and AI Agents: A Co-design Framework for Creative Design | Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Teaching Empathy Through Design Thinking
- ChatGPT and Student Behavior in Programming Education
- written by Hamayoon Behmanush
