High School Design Thinking: The Problem-Solving Skills That Hold Up in Any Career
Key takeaways from this post:
Design thinking is a toolkit for solving problems through empathy, and it travels with you into any career, industry, or challenge.
Design thinking trains students to explore the full problem space before reaching for a solution, which changes the quality of what gets built.
Empathy in design thinking means talking to the people you're designing for before assuming you know what they need.
AI produces the expected answer. The insight that creates a genuine competitive edge comes from understanding the problem first.
What a D.Tech Graduate Carries Into the World
Sam Cheng graduated from d.tech (Design Tech High School) last spring. Now, he’s a UX design fellow with Kleiner Perkins, a premier Silicon Valley venture capital firm. There he’s working on the product design for a fintech startup called Multiply, where the work involves redesigning how people navigate mortgage applications and other major financial decisions. Incredibly, this is one year out of high school.
So I asked him – as I do with other graduates – how he defines design thinking, and he gave me this: "It's a toolkit for solving problems through empathy."
Nine words: simple enough to say on an elevator, precise enough to describe what he does every day.
This is very similar to what I've seen across many d.tech graduates: the framework transfers. The problems change, the industries change, the tools change, and what stays is the underlying ability to understand a problem before reaching for a solution.
What High School Design Thinking Prepares You For
At most high schools, the path is clear: take the right classes, hit the right scores, build the activity list that signals readiness to an admissions office. Sam went through a different experience at d.tech.
Through the Innovation Diploma — developed in partnership with our Innovations Programs — Sam connected with things that don’t often show up on a syllabus. "I discovered I really enjoy UX design specifically," he told me, "and that process of designing interfaces and designing experiences that people really enjoy." He also graduated considerably better at public speaking, a skill that developed through repeated presentations and design reviews.
When students have the time and structure to build products, interview real users, and present their work to real panels, they discover what they're genuinely capable of and genuinely drawn to. Sam came out of that process with a specific identity as a UX designer and with confidence rooted in work he'd done.
He arrived at college with experience building real things. "I already had built products and [completed] real-world activities," so "I felt much prepared in the social aspect and the area outside of solely academics," he said. Sam’s entrepreneurship program turned out to value exactly what d.tech had developed in him.
How Design Thinking Teaches Students to Solve the Right Problem
One of the most consistent patterns I see in students who are learning the design thinking approach for the first time is that they tend to pull toward solutions. Someone names a problem, and the instinct is to start building immediately.
Sam had a version of this early on. During one of his first projects at d.tech, his group identified a real problem (trash and pollution in water environments) and quickly converged on something they wanted to build: a remote-controlled boat with a net to collect debris. "We really wanted to make a remote control boat," he told me, but the boat didn't solve the problem. The team had found a solution first and tried to fit the problem around it. "Making a remote control boat is way harder than we thought," Sam said. And then, the motivation faded because the purpose wasn't there.
Design thinking builds a different instinct: explore the problem space thoroughly before reaching for an answer. Sam described it as "swimming in the maze." Rather than taking the first route out, you map the whole thing until you can identify the fastest path through. "You're not just going on a ‘flat plane’ of these are all the solutions. You're really going on a three-dimensional space of all the different things around the problem and the solution."
That kind of exploration takes longer, and Sam was honest that it can feel like unnecessary work while you're in it. "A lot of us felt like it was busy work," he said of the research and interview assignments in his design thinking courses. But it's exactly what changes the quality of what gets built.
Design Thinking and Empathy: Understanding People Before Assuming You Know What They Need
Before graduating, Sam was working at the Oracle Education Foundation through a d.tech internship; there, he was helping to write technical curriculum to teach design thinking and data skills to students across the world: Brazil, Argentina, Peru, the United States. His first instinct was to design for someone like himself.
For an early data visualization exercise, his team used a chart featuring Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, and other recognizable artists. But when the team met with the Oracle volunteers teaching these courses in Brazil, they found that students weren't connecting to these US-based artists. The musicians were American, and the cultural references didn't travel.
"We had to rethink it," Sam told me. "How might we explore it from the perspective of something that everyone might understand?" The team went back through the materials and replaced the examples with globally understood references: soccer, weather patterns, and data sets that meant something regardless of where you grew up.
This experience captures what empathy means within design thinking practice: the specific work of going to talk to the people you're designing for before assuming you already know what they need. "Once you take a step back and really go through the whole thing," Sam said, "you start to uncover new insights that you might have missed previously."
So whether you're building a financial platform, writing curriculum, or designing anything meant to be used by real people, the same practice applies: understand the person you're designing for before you decide you know what they need.
What Design Thinking Builds That AI Can't Replicate
Currently, Sam works at the intersection of product design and AI. When I asked him how he thinks about the relationship between the two, he was specific.
"AI can really get you from zero to ninety percent," he told me. "But there's that last ten percent that makes something really special. That builds that moat. That comes from each individual person."
A moat, in startup terms, is what makes your work genuinely hard for anyone else to replicate. Sam's point is that AI closes the gap on the ninety percent that almost anyone could produce. What it can't average its way to is the insight that comes from deeply understanding a problem first.
AI is good at producing the expected answer: something that looks right, sounds right, and fits the pattern of what came before. Sam described it as averaging; feed a model enough input, and it produces something that resembles the center of it all. Creating something new requires a different kind of thinking.
The Stanford d.school has a class built on this premise. Students developing biomedical startups spend six weeks in a hospital doing nothing but observing. They shadow surgeons and anesthesiologists. They watch and listen. Only after those six weeks do they start thinking about what to build. "After that, they usually have burning things in their head," Sam said. "Why are these doctors using pagers from 40 years ago? Their electronic medical records are really hard to use." Those insights don't come from a search engine. They come from deep observation and a genuine understanding of the problem itself.
"If you just come up with an idea off the top of your head," Sam told me, "it's really gonna be something that anyone else could come up with. What gives you the moat is that unique insight."
In a world shaped by AI, the tools exist to execute, but design thinking builds the understanding of the problem that makes execution worthwhile.
How Design Thinking Prepares Students for Whatever Comes Next
About a year after graduation, Sam is doing exactly what d.tech is designed to produce: someone who finds the real problem before building a solution, who understands the people they're designing for, and who brings genuine insight to work that could otherwise look like anyone else's.
When I asked him what advice he'd give to an incoming student, he didn't talk about grades or classes. "Try out all of the different things," he said. "You might find things that you like and things that you don't like, but you will find that purpose and mission and the things that really excite you."
What we're building toward allows the students who come through design thinking education to learn a framework for solving real problems. More than that, they're developing the instinct to question what's in front of them, to go looking for the real problem, and to bring other people into the process. That combination of empathy, exploration, and genuine understanding is what holds up across industries, roles, and whatever landscape comes next.