Designing for Digital Education Futures: Design Thinking for Fostering Higher Education Students’ Sustainability Competencies

This study explores how design thinking (DT) for sustainable futures fosters higher education (HE) students’ sustainability competencies. By analysing the DT process of two teams of HE students co-designing digital educational technologies to address sustainability challenges (namely, children’s nature connection and their engagements with fast fashion), we identify how sustainability competencies defined by the GreenComp framework emerge temporally, across the DT phases, and which DT practices foster or hinder their development. Our findings identify three specific DT practices—and three ways to enact those practices effectively—that unlock the transformative potential of DT and enable HE students to embody sustainability values, embrace complexity in sustainability, and envision sustainable futures. Our work contributes to the field of Education for Sustainability (EfS) by demonstrating how design-based learning can promote challenge-centred, collaborative sustainability learning within HE. Drawing on our findings, we also raise the need for new pedagogical interventions that can strengthen the emergence of sustainability competencies in the process of DT.