Constellation Design Thinking: Hybrid Pedagogies for Nonlinear Learning in Art and Design Education

Design thinking has firmly established itself as a foundational pedagogy in art and design education, providing novice learners with a structured scaffold to navigate complex, ill‐defined creative problems. Although established design process models already incorporate iteration, feedback loops and reflective movement, novice learners may still struggle to operationalise these principles when navigating multiple UX domains in studio‐based projects. This difficulty may constrain the development of reflective practice, nonlinear reasoning and interdisciplinary synthesis—competencies that are increasingly critical in the complex, data‐driven landscape of contemporary design. This study responds to this pedagogical‐operational challenge by introducing Constellation Design Thinking as a metacognitive scaffold that complements existing iterative design process models and helps students visualise, negotiate and justify relationships among complex UX domains. The study was implemented across three consecutive semesters with 54 undergraduate students in an advanced UX/UI design studio course in South Korea. The curriculum employed a hybrid structure, combining theoretical lectures, constellation mapping workshops and structured reflective journaling. A mixed‐methods evaluation strategy was adopted, utilising pre–post surveys to measure cognitive flexibility, rubric‐based project assessments to evaluate synthesis and combined deductive and inductive coding of 285 reflective journals to track developmental trajectories in student reasoning. Results indicated statistically significant within‐group improvements in cognitive flexibility (d_z = 1.39), reflective practice (d_z = 1.50) and integrative capacity (d_z = 1.45), which are interpreted as observed improvements within the studied course context rather than as causal validation. Two in‐depth practice‐based case studies—a mobile banking ‘Auto‐Save’ feature and an online shopping checkout redesign—further illustrated how constellation pathways supported students in balancing creativity, inclusivity and strategy. The findings suggest that constellation‐based pedagogy can support students' relational, reflective and strategic reasoning by making complex UX domain relationships visible, negotiable and defensible in studio‐based learning.