Making Connections: Potential for Teaching Design / Design Thinking in a Classroom

Making Connections: Potential for Teaching Design / Design Thinking in a Classroom 

Thinking about design in a classroom, I’m interested in how students can learn through simplifying and reorganizing visual information. Design thinking can shift the focus away from technical skill and toward decision-making, where students actively choose how to build an image.

One approach is to have students create portraits using only basic shapes and a limited color palette. This pushes them to think about how identity can be expressed through form and color, rather than relying on realistic detail. Another approach is to ask students to take an existing image and reduce it into simple shapes and color blocks. This helps them understand how images are constructed and how composition works. A third approach is to have students build a composition by repeating and adjusting a single shape. Through this, they can explore balance, rhythm, and variation in a direct way. These approaches keep the focus on structure, organization, and visual choices, instead of accuracy or rendering skill, and make the process more about thinking than copying.