An Observational Study Of Infusing Design Thinking Into The CDIO Framework

Design Thinking (DT) is a human centric way of designing product, process, system and services, which has the potential to provide learning opportunities for engineering students to explore human desirability, technical feasibility and business viability. This paper attempts to outline how DT can be infused into a CDIO framework in the context of capstone projects since they allow students to appreciate the whole product lifecycle at logical stages (i.e. C-D-I-O). Engineering students were asked to innovate on ordinary consumer products in order to make explicit the effects of the Design Thinking process for transformative solutions based on the insights gained from ethnographic studies. Salient points for reflection, based on project supervisor’s observation as well as students’ feedback are also presented. While DT may leads to non technical solutions, the author feels a need to skilfully steer engineering students to utilise some of their disciplinary knowledge and skills.