Design thinking is a structured process that helps us solve problems in new and creative ways. Tim Brown, the Chair of IDEO, defines design thinking as:

“a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”  

It allows people who aren’t trained as designers to use creative tools to address a wide range of challenges, including designing better products, services ,and even business processes and strategies. Design thinking can also help us avoid biases or an attachment to specific behaviours (i.e., “that’s how we do things here”) that can block innovation (Liedtka 2018).

There are different models and tools that can be used to implement design thinking, which we’ll get to. But first, let’s explore some of the mindsets at the core of design thinking, and how they might apply to international education:

• Human-centred: Our focus should be on the end user of the products and services we are designing – that is, international students. What are their needs and wants, and how can we better serve them? Listening to students will help us design experiences that will meet their needs.
• Bias to action: What is the smallest step you could take right now? Make it simple to start, to get your ideas out of your head and test them. Then keep iterating, refining and testing your ideas to more quickly come to solutions.
• Empathy and curiosity: Learn to step into your students’ shoes and develop deep empathy and curiosity. Leave behind preconceived ideas that you have about what international students want and need. Get curious about the behaviours that you observe, and whether those match what students tell you.
• Experiment and prototype: Don’t be afraid of failure; it is a powerful way to learn. Design thinking is iterative. Create small experiments that enable you to test ideas, iterate, and try again without taking big risks.
• Embrace ambiguity: Let go of any ‘answers’ you may have at the outset and trust the process to create the best insights and results.

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There are different models for design thinking but a common one uses five stages: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test. These stages don’t always have to be sequential and they may happen more than once (for example, you may develop and test several prototypes, and then ideate again). Let’s explore what happens at each of these stages.

3.1 Empathise

This stage is all about understanding users, who in this case are international students. How can we learn as much as possible about them – not only what we observe about their behaviours and preferences, but also their motivations, pain points, attitudes and aspirations. Dig deep to move past your assumptions and get really curious about your students’ needs. 

3.2 Design

Once you’ve learned as much as possible about your students, gather all the insights you’ve collected. What themes or patterns are bubbling to the surface? What unmet needs were a surprise to you? What unexpected barriers might influence the ways international students engage with their experiences? 

At the end of this phase you should have a defined question or problem in mind that you want to try and solve. This is often phrased as a “How might we…?” question.

3.3 Ideate

Now that we have a problem we want to solve, we’re ready to create as many ideas as we can about how to solve it. There are different methods for ideation, but the important thing is that we are not sifting or judging ideas at this stage; we are simply generating as many possible ideas as we can. 

This is often called a “divergent” stage because we want to go as broad and creative as we can. Don’t filter. Allow yourself to be creative and come up with wild ideas!

Only once you’ve generated a lot of potential ideas should you then “converge” and start honing in on a few ideas that seem to have the most potential.

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3.4 Prototype

This stage is about experimentation. We pick a few ideas that we think may have legs and we create low fidelity prototypes to quickly and cheaply test them. 

We aren’t trying to create a perfect solution to the problem; we’re just trying to bring our ideas to life in a way that users can try them out and give us feedback. We may create many iterations of our prototypes, continuously learning and improving, before we land on something that we want to test.

3.5 Test

Again, there are lots of different ways to test our prototype, but the key aspect of this stage is that it doesn’t have to be really expensive or difficult. Start small – even with a group of your current students – to learn and improve. 

Adapt your prototype as you go. You may even need to go back to the empathise stage to understand a certain aspect of your users that you need to learn more about, or the ideate phase to generate a whole lot more ideas about a new problem you’ve discovered.

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If this all feels a bit vague right now, don’t worry. Now we’re going to apply this process to two case studies so you can see how it might work in practice for international educators. 

First, we’ll look at a scenario to create a new international education programme.

Scenario 1: Developing an English Language programme for a new market

An English Language School is looking to diversify its international students by reaching into a new market: Brazil. Their current programme is designed for Asian students, and they are wondering how they will need to adapt it for Brazilian students. Design thinking provides a possible structure for them to solve this challenge.

Step 1: Empathise

The school needs to learn as much as possible about students from Brazil, and what they might want to get out of an English Language programme in Aotearoa. The school starts with some desktop research, and on Education New Zealand’s IntelliLab, they learn that Brazil is a growing market. 

They want to learn more about how Brazilian students like and want to study English, so they arrange a series of online conversations with students in Brazil to understand them a bit more. 

Step 2: Design

The conversations with students lead to lots of insights that might help the school design a programme that suits their needs. One insight that stands out to the school is that Brazilian students want English Language programmes with work opportunities. 

The school decides that this is a challenge they’d like to focus on in developing their new programme. Their design challenge is:

How might we design an English language programme that enables Brazilian students to have work opportunities while they study?

Step 3: Ideate

With a clear question in mind, the school now moves into brainstorming creative ways that they might be able to offer work opportunities to students. They gather all of their staff for a 2-hour workshop to generate as many ideas as possible. 

No filtering is allowed until the final half hour. Once a long list of wild and crazy ideas is generated, staff get to vote on their top ideas for further exploration. 

The most voted idea is a “Job Ready” programme that helps students with CV writing, job searching, interviewing, and understanding the New Zealand workplace. They decide to explore this idea further.

Step 4: Prototype

The school decides that an easy way to prototype their Job Ready concept is to create a webpage with a description of what the course might entail. In a few hours, they create a page with details about the course curriculum and learning outcomes.

Step 5: Test

The school can now go back to the Brazilian students that they spoke with earlier, and test their programme prototype. They arrange to show the students the programme via an online video call, and they record their impressions and reactions to the prototype.

One thing the school learns is that while students seem to like the concept, they want assurance that they will get a job placement. 

The school decides they need to talk with New Zealand employers about how this might work. They arrange another series of empathy conversations with several businesses that have employed their students in the past, and use this to iterate their prototype for further testing.

Scenario 2: Improving student communications

Design thinking is most commonly used as a process for product/service development. However, it can also be used to develop or improve a process, system or strategy. Here is an example of what that might look like.

In this scenario, a secondary school is welcoming a cohort of international students again, after several years without them during the COVID-19 pandemic. They want to improve their system for communicating with students, so that the students have a single point of contact for information and to seek help.

Step 1: Empathise

The school started to investigate the features of expensive software systems, but they have realised there is a lot they need to know about what students need and how they would use the system.

They contact some previous international students who attended their school, and have unstructured interviews, or ‘empathy conversations’, with them about their experiences communicating with the school. 

Step 2: Design

The school gathers lots of insights, and one that stands out as particularly important is that students most need close communication when they first arrive in New Zealand. 

The school decides this is a good place to start in designing their new communication system. Their design challenge is:

How might we design a system to help international students communicate with the school when they first arrive in Aotearoa?

Step 3: Ideate

With a clear question in mind, the school now moves into brainstorming creative ways that they might improve their process of communicating with new international students. 

They gather all of their staff for a brainstorming session to generate as many ideas as possible. They also go back to past international students and ask for their ideas. 

The school committee working on this challenge reviews all of the ideas, and they agree that they would like to explore further a WhatsApp group that international students can use to ask questions. A staff member and a senior domestic student would be assigned to monitor the group and answer any questions that arise.

Step 4: Prototype

It is very quick and easy for the school to set up a WhatsApp group. They decide on a staff member and domestic student who will monitor the group, and give them a list of frequently asked questions. 

That’s all they needed for their prototype to be ready for testing!

Step 5: Test

Because the challenge is about communicating with students when they first arrive in the country, the school decides it’s important to test the WhatsApp group in this context. They have two students arriving from India soon, so the school asks the students if they would be willing to test the group with them. 

On arrival, a staff member gives both students a phone with WhatsApp loaded and ensures they know how to use it and the group chat.

Over the next few days, the school monitors the group, but neither of the students use it. 

Luckily it was quick and easy to set up, and now they can talk with the students about why the group didn’t work for them, and what their next prototype might look like.

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This topic has explained how design thinking can be used to improve international education for the benefit of both students and practitioners. The following resources may be useful for readers who want to learn more about design thinking and human-centred design. 

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Beyond Sticky Notes. What is co-design?

Cohen, R (2015). Design Thinking: A Unified Framework for Innovation. Forbes. 

Friis Dam, R & Yu Siang, T (2022). What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

IDEO (2015). The field guide to human-centred design

IDEO (2023). Resources on Design Thinking

Liedtka , J (2018). Why Design Thinking Works. Harvard Business Review.

Standage, H (2018). Using Design Thinking to enhance the international student experience and their understanding of employability. University of Essex.