Cohorts and cultures: developing future design thinkers

Design Thinking (DT) is a required skill of computing graduates according to the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA). However, according to the 2016 AIIA work ready skills survey there is a job-ready skills gap between the industry expectations of design thinking skills and the ICT graduate capabilities in Australia. Design thinking applies methods that focus on problem-solving, ideating, and iterating in small bursts with continual feedback from users/stakeholders. This paper describes how an Australian university has embedded DT into the core of a Bachelor of Information Technology degree in a way that not only scaffolds DT skill sets across the three-year degree but creates a culture of design thinking. This DT 'strand' involves a two-day sprint that includes every year level as a mixed cohort. This paper presents the implementation of the DT strand and the industry-driven two-day sprint.