2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 72: How to Develop Engineering Students as Design Thinkers: A Systematic Review of Design Thinking Implementations in Engineering Education

Presented at Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) Poster Session

Since the 21st century, the concept of design thinking has gained increasing attention from engineering educators. Design thinking is an interdisciplinary and experimental learning process. Currently, some of the world's leading engineering education institutions have begun to make significant changes to cultivate students to apply design thinking to solving complex engineering problems. However, training engineers who can deliver practical and creative design solutions is still an ongoing challenge for traditional engineering education, due to the diverse practice approaches offered by different educational institutions and the inconsistency between its theory and practice.

This study, therefore, aims to conduct a systematic literature review on design thinking embedded in an engineering curriculum in higher education to understand the current landscape and existing theories as well as practices of applying design thinking in engineering education. It illustrates the variety of implementations of design thinking at different course levels. It has summarised and synthesized 167 relevant papers published in the last 20 years based on the systematic review method and meta-analysis (PRISMA) process, several key factors including curriculum content setting, curriculum framework, students learning outcomes, major findings, and teacher training are examined. It also provides instructional guidelines and directions for future design thinking cultivating research opportunities.

Authors

Miss Yuwei Deng King's College London [biography]

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in the School of Engineering at King's College London. My research interests are designing and implementing convergent design thinking for engineering higher education.
Dr. Wei Liu King's College London [biography]

Dr Wei Liu is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at King's College London with extensive teaching and research experience across design, engineering and management.

Wei accomplished her PhD at the University of Cambridge and was Visiting Fellow at Harvard University to explore design education in interdisciplinary fields. Before joining King’s, she conducted academic research and teaching in the UK, US and China. She worked as a faculty member at Cambridge Judge Business School as well as practiced leadership as Assistant Dean at Tongji University and Director of Design Research Group at Aston University. Wei was founding director of several interdisciplinary degree programmes such as MSci Design, Enterprise and Innovation, the first degree programme of its kind in the UK to teach Engineering, Design and Business to trigger students' creativity and entrepreneurship for solving real-world problems. She has won Academic Awards for Teaching Excellency, and is recognised as a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) in the UK.

Wei has rich experience of conducting interdisciplinary research, and has obtained over £1.3 million research grants from EPSRC, NSFC and other prestigious funding bodies. She won Best Paper Awards from Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) Conference and British Academy of Management (BAM) Conference. Her research outputs have been published in the leading design, advanced manufacturing and innovation management journals including The Design Journal, Rapid Prototyping Journal, 3D printing and Additive Manufacturing, and R&D Management.

Wei also has professional design experience in world leading business and design consultancies (BCG, IBM and TEAMS Design), where she led the design and development of consumer goods, industrial products and digital products for global top brands. Many of her designed products have been produced and sold in the market. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA).

Download paper (1.1 MB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session