A learning toolkit to promote creative and critical thinking in product design and development through Design Thinking

Recent literature suggests that the development of cognitive skills, namely creative and critical thinking skills, should constitute explicit learning goals in the engineering design domain. Given the characteristics of design problems, product design and development courses, usually functioning according to project based learning methodology, constitute an opportunity to improve those skills. This paper presents a learning toolkit for product design and development courses based on the Design Thinking concept. The toolkit presented here includes four tools specifically conceived to promote students' creative and critical thinking skills. Some of these tools have already been applied in a didactic intervention integrated with an experimental study which aimed to evaluate the evolution of students' creative and critical thinking performance. Creativity and critical thinking tests pre and post intervention were applied. Results show evidence of students' creative thinking performance improvement. This article indicates that is possible to improve higher education students' thinking skills through carefully designed didactic interventions and instruments.