Design thinking has its origins in an extracurricular course for mechanical engineers. These roots were taken up here as the chapter reveals the potential of integrating such a course into the regular standard curriculum of aerospace engineering studies. Assessing the participatory learning experience confirms considerable potential in using design thinking as a strategy to sharpen the engineering novices' view towards humans in their roles as users. By sensitizing the students for the need to not only observe typical actions, live situations and daily routines of targeted users but also to understand the appearing challenges from within these users' perspective, requirements can be derived more precisely. Within the learning experience, students used design thinking to change processes and combined activities to improve user satisfaction, such as better identification of needs by approaching user perspectives more holistically. Following this human-centred approach fostered their reflecting on what customers really want and how an innovative corporate culture and appropriate processes, actually make product innovations possible, and can be created by deciding on the specific tasks to be dealt with. As our world is rapidly changing, tomorrow's engineers need to be prepared for co-designing changes. This chapter illustrates a promising way for accomplishing this.    «

Design thinking has its origins in an extracurricular course for mechanical engineers. These roots were taken up here as the chapter reveals the potential of integrating such a course into the regular standard curriculum of aerospace engineering studies. Assessing the participatory learning experience confirms considerable potential in using design thinking as a strategy to sharpen the engineering novices' view towards humans in their roles as users. By sensitizing the students for the need to n...    »