Typologies of design thinking: the learner-led perspectives

The research aims to offer critical discourse on various perspectives on design studio teaching pedagogy. The paper begins by exploring the generic literature that focuses on a range of instruments, approaches and actions; the tools that the designers deploy in order to steer specific thought process in design. By keeping the learners at the core, the subjectivity of designers brought to main focus here. Although there are many research works on studio environment and studio framework, only a very few focus on capturing evidences of the learners' creative thinking and this research is an attempt to fill this gap and keeps the learners at the core of analysis. The method was a theoretical exploration on various perspectives on design thinking and to obtain evidences of students' thinking. Two studios of Final Year studies of Part I, from University Malaya and Taylor's University, have been the case studies of the research. The paper first offers a critical discourse on identifying a gap in architectural design studios' teaching pedagogy and second offers a set of typologies of design thinking from the case studies. The findings were 8 typologies of design thinking which could be categorised into 3 groups, based the domain of the constructs. The research reinforces and determines the importance of learner-led teaching pedagogy for architecture design studios, by formulating typologies of design thinking.