Re-Visiting Design Thinking for Learning and Practice: Critical Pedagogy, Conative Empathy

This paper argues for the importance of design thinking as a creative, collaborative activity to equip students, instructors, and practitioners with important skills to address “wicked problems” that are transforming tourism and hospitality in a (post-)COVID-19 Anthropocene. Design Thinking (DT) and Design Thinking for Engaged Learning (DTEL) are becoming increasingly popular to incorporate in practice and in courses offered across various fields of study, including tourism and hospitality. The paper reviews some of their applications and uses, drawing on a range of cross-disciplinary literature. A small case study conducted over the Summer of 2020 in an undergraduate tourism course helps to reflect on existing weaknesses in DT and the original DTEL model, which the revisions reported here seek to address. Although the model engaged learners in developing innovative solutions to real problems, the incorporation of a critical, decolonizing pedagogy is needed to help learners break free of deeply entrenched assumptions, and intentionally develop pluralistic, relational solutions to address injustices and suffering. The previous emphasis on perspective taking through a dominantly cognitive (mind) empathy approach (in traditional DT models) is balanced with affective (heart) and conative (action) empathy, as aspects of care ethics that facilitate epistemic justice and praxis.