Design Thinking and ICT to Create Sustainable Development Actions

Environmental problems are complex, open and poorly defined. University students can be trained to solve environmental problems and to create actions to repair, preserve, manage or improve the environment. Some organizations have begun using design thinking with ICT to help students and the public solve complex problems. Design thinking is a creative and collaborative form of work during which intuition is important, solutions are numerous, experimentation arrives quickly, failure is perceived as learning and, mostly, consumers’ needs are taken into consideration. In the framework of a rigorous process and specific tools, design thinking calls in creative and analytical modes of reasoning for the development of products, services and healthy places adapted to the targeted public. Also, if we want to use ICT to facilitate the design thinking stages, various applications are available: Blendspace (to store all the information found about a problem), Lino (to share pictures of the problem), ICardSort (to link and sort ideas), Loomio (to choose a solution), Padlet (to draw prototypes in teams) and Wrike (to plan in a team).