Applying Design Thinking Principles to Curricular Development in Medical Education

Medical education is an ever-evolving field, resulting in numerous changes and modifications to curricular structure, learner assessment, feedback, and remediation. To best meet the needs of the individual learners, it is important to design curricula that meet their real needs. Design thinking (DT) first gained popularity in the 1960s and, since then, has been applied to problem solving within business, primary education, and medicine. The process involves five stages: discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation, and evolution, which are targeted toward empathizing with end-users to uncover and design for unmet needs. In this paper, we describe the five-stage DT approach with specific application to medical education and discuss future directions within the medical education field.