Creativity or Cooptation? Thinking Beyond Instrumentalism When Teaching Design Thinking

Abstract

This essay frames design thinking (DT) as a form of experiential learning and describes what we, as DT educators, have come to consider its “shadow side.” We are concerned that, through uncritical promotion of instrumentalist approaches to creativity, DT classes unwittingly marginalize from the curriculum other forms of creativity, such as those that are rebellious and self-expressive. By drawing on existing critiques of the dominant creativity discourse, we explore what a more critically oriented approach to DT might look like.