How Design Thinking Builds Skills That Last
Key Takeaways from This Post
AI is changing what high school needs to deliver, and the schools moving with urgency are already building something better.
Human agency (purposeful identity, adaptability, strategic efficacy, and relational intelligence) is the skill set that prepares students for a future nobody can fully predict.
Design thinking is more than a curriculum. It's a framework for solving real problems, building real skills, and showing real capability.
The d.tech Innovation Certificate gives students a legitimate credential for the skills colleges and employers are already looking for.
What High School Needs to Become in an Age of AI
When ChatGPT launched, one of our veteran teachers with over 20 years in the classroom came to me and said he was having an existential crisis. He'd always been able to anchor on one thing: teaching kids to write, but now, if a machine could produce an essay in less than a minute, he had to question the value of teaching a skill students could have a machine to do in seconds.
That story stuck with me because it gets at something bigger than one teacher's classroom. If writing, one of the most fundamental things we teach, could be called into question overnight, what else could be? And more importantly: what are we actually preparing students for?
Schools have always had an answer to that question. The argument was usually about emphasis, college prep versus career readiness versus civic life, but there was always a destination. The disruption of AI feels different. Past disruptions like the widespread adoption of 1:1 mobile computing came with a rough map. This one arrived without one, and even the people building it will tell you they aren’t sure where it leads.
And that uncertainty changes the core questions we ask as educators:
What's the point of a grade if it measures the wrong things?
What do we tell students to aim for when the target keeps moving?
What does a curriculum even prepare someone for when the landscape shifts this fast?
At d.tech, we've been sitting with those questions, and here's where we've landed.
AI Is Changing What High School Needs to Deliver
Think about what a high schooler has moved through in the past few years: a global pandemic, profound social upheaval, political instability, and the arrival of AI. I can’t think of a comparable four-year stretch in my own high school experience. These students are navigating genuinely new territory.
The adults in the room are navigating it, too. AI arrived into a world where the social fabric around schools was already under strain. Polarization, social isolation, and the lingering effects of the pandemic have made it harder for teachers, families, and students to talk to one another. As Ash Vasudeva, Director of Education Programs at the Hewlett Foundation and a d.tech board member, observed in a recent conversation: "If we're not helping kids dialogue across differences, and adults aren't modeling how to dialogue across differences, I don't think we're doing the next generation any favors."
Students are arriving at the same question their teachers are: What is the purpose of school right now? They're watching a machine handle tasks they've spent years learning, and wondering what jobs will even exist by the time they graduate.
As we start to answer that question, we realize the answer isn't a comprehensive redesign; it's a repurpose of what we're trying to produce in a student. That's why we've been moving with urgency. The pace of AI and creative problem-solving in the real world is setting the tempo now.
At d.tech, that urgency led us to one central question: if the future is this uncertain, what's the one thing we can give students that will serve them regardless of where things land? Our answer is human agency, and it's reshaping how we think about school.
How d.tech's Design Thinking Curriculum Builds Human Agency
If the future is this uncertain, what's the one thing we can give students that will serve them regardless of where things land? Our answer is human agency, and it's what our design thinking curriculum is built to address. All d.tech students take four years of design thinking, progressing from learning the framework to applying it in the workplace to solving problems in their community to using it to design their own futures. Underneath that, we want students to graduate with human agency and this means that we have to give them experiences to develop the drivers of human agency, which are:
Purposeful identity: graduating anchored in your values, knowing what matters to you
Adaptability: being anchored and flexible at the same time, able to manage uncertainty without losing yourself in it
Strategic efficacy: the ability to set a goal, build a plan, and develop the actual competence to see it through
Relational intelligence: knowing how to build trusting, respectful relationships with other people
Betsy Corcoran, president of the d.tech board, named a tension that anyone who has watched a young person enter the workforce will recognize: "There is a conflict between having all of the great personal skills on the planet and having a skill that you can use to get in the door of a job."
That tension lives inside all four drivers. Real capability and human skills have to develop together.
About 26 states and hundreds of districts have begun creating “portraits of a graduate,” broad descriptions of what young people should know and be able to do by the time they finish high school, going well beyond course credits and seat time to include collaboration, civic identity, and communication. Ash noted something striking about where those portraits are landing:
"If you look at the Kentucky portrait of a graduate, and you look at Wyoming and Virginia and Washington State, they're more alike than different. They cut across red and blue lines."
These portraits point back to the same destination we’ve been building toward: students who are grounded, adaptable, and capable of contributing to the world around them, the same skills at the heart of what d.tech has been building toward for over a decade. Human agency, it turns out, is what endures.
The Innovation Certificate: Making These Skills Count Beyond High School
For years, schools have asked students to develop skills that the traditional credentialing system has no way to recognize. Colleges can read an AP score. Employers can read a GPA. But purposeful identity, adaptability, relational intelligence (the skills that actually prepare a student for an uncertain future) have had no legible signal. Until now.
Just as an AP score gives colleges a clear signal of subject-matter expertise, the Innovation Certificate gives students a way to demonstrate the human-agency skills that will serve them in college, in work, and beyond. Colleges are already looking for students who can show something substantial beyond a test score. Employers are looking for people who can communicate clearly, collaborate across differences, navigate ambiguity, take initiative, and build trust with the people around them.
The Innovation Certificate is earned by completing d.tech's design thinking curriculum — roughly 40 hours of class time over three to four months — built around a real project taken from exploration to prototype to reflection. Students finish with a credential they can add to a resume, reference in a college application, or bring to a job interview. The Innovation Diploma extends that work across a full year, with longer projects, real end users, panel presentations, and a defense of demonstrated proficiency across six learning outcomes.
We've been pushing for this kind of credential to land inside the college admissions process itself: an artifact that reflects human agency, recognized the same way colleges recognize an AP score. The credential exists, students are earning it, and the conversation about what it should count for is already happening.
What Design Thinking Prepares Students For
We are in a genuine transition. The students moving through high school right now are navigating things that have no precedent, and the schools serving them are being asked to do the same. That's uncomfortable, but it's also an opening.
At d.tech, what we have is twelve years of trying, a framework we believe in, and a deep conviction that human agency is what prepares a student for a future nobody can fully see yet. The world is moving fast. The students who know who they are, can adapt to what's in front of them, and can show what they're capable of, those are the students who will shape what comes next.
If you're curious about how the Innovation Certificate works and what it could mean for your student or your school, explore what we're building at innovationcertificate.org.