Design Thinking for Everyone: An Interview with Eugene Korsunskiy

Joycards are collections of brief classroom activities intended to surprise and delight.

Eugene Korsunskiy is an Associate Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College. His research interests comprise human-centered design, design ethics, creative confidence, and interdisciplinary collaboration, and he has a long-standing fascination for maker pedagogy and design thinking. At Stanford, he was co-founder of SparkTruck, an early, influential mobile maker-education project that brought design-based, hands-on learning directly to schools and communities. At Dartmouth, he co-founded the Design Initiative at Dartmouth (DIAD), a program dedicated to supporting the community of designers on campus and beyond.

Reaching learners off-campus is a priority: each summer, Eugene teaches a week-long online pre-college design thinking bootcamp that introduces high school students to human-centered design through interactive exercises, teamwork, prototyping, and broader reflection on how design can shape society. The course was first created in summer 2020 as a pilot when regular classes moved online, and has been taught each summer ever since.

Eugene does not stop innovating: his most recent invention are “Joy Cards”, a project started at the Design Forge at Elon University. The first collection, The Little Book of Joy: Tiny Ways to Infuse Delight into Teaching and Learning, was published in 2025 and offers a collection of 36 concrete, ready-to-use ideas and activities contributed by educators who have tried them in their own classrooms. The most recent 2026 edition, The Second Little Book of Joy: More Ways to Infuse Delight into Teaching and Learning, is a collection of another 36 classroom ideas contributed by educators and students, all aimed at helping instructors create more joyful, engaging learning environments. The framing is that joy is not a distraction from rigorous learning, but something that can support focus, creativity, problem-solving, teamwork, and perseverance.

In the interview, we talk about how principles of design thinking work for different audiences and purposes, what first brought him to the topic, what still fascinates him about design thinking, and his key facilitation techniques.

Your work spans engineering, human-centered design, and maker pedagogy. How do these strands connect for you?

I think they’re all threads of the same sweater. In fact, I think all academic subjects are part of a large, rich holistic tapestry of education, and that separating different topics into “subjects” and “fields” and “departments” is an artificial construct and a vestige of the modern education system’s roots in a factory-based industrial organizational principles—but perhaps that’s a soapbox I can spare you for now! What I love about design is that it necessarily combines so many different skills and domains of knowledge: if you want to design something meaningful and effective (whether that’s a physical product, a digital interface, an experience, a system, or anything else), you have to bring together insights and methods from anthropology, psychology, and sociology (to determine what people might need), engineering and other technical sciences (to determine how to build what needs building) and economics, business, and other implementation sciences (to determine how to actually bring your creation into the world in an impactful and sustainable way). If we do our job as educators, then our students will go out into the world ready and empowered to make a positive impact in whatever field they choose: and I think that engineering training, design experience, and maker-based learning all help to make this happen.

At Stanford, you co-founded SparkTruck, an early mobile maker-education project. What did that experience teach you about taking design-based learning beyond the classroom?

Enough to fill a book! I’ll try to control myself here and spare your readers the interminable soliloquy, but we did make a 20-minute documentary of the journey that you can watch here. In short: we learned that educational environments of all sorts (classrooms, libraries, museums, community centers, public parks, arts festivals, and even police after-school activities leagues) are amazingly fertile places for design-inspired education. Maker-based learning clearly transcends formal educational structures, and creativity can be fostered anywhere there are curious minds and willing hands. Watching the thousands of kids with whom we interacted through that project have identity-shaping “aha” moments, in which they began to conceive of themselves as people who can make stuff—and who can therefore make an impact in the world—was such an incredibly rewarding experience.

How are design thinking and maker education connected for you? What are differences and what are similarities?

My friend and colleague Katie Krummeck, with whom I worked on the SparkTruck project, created a couple of nifty infographics on this very topic! (With very light input from me; she was the mastermind behind these.) They are here and here.

You teach design thinking to very different audiences, from undergraduate students to high school learners in your summer bootcamp. Which principles stay the same across audiences? Do you observe differences in how younger learners approach maker education and design challenges?

There’s a wonderful exercise that I like to do with my students, which was invented by Peter Skillman and popularized by Tom Wujek in his TED Talk: you give a group of ~4 people 20 sticks of spaghetti, a yard of string, a yard of masking tape, and a marshmallow, and give them 18 minutes to build the tallest tower they can. It has been done with thousands of people from all walks of life, all around the world, and the results are consistent: kindergarten-age kids are always the most successful at this activity. The reason has to do with the way they approach the challenge: rather than overthinking it like grownups tend to do, they just jump right in and start building, learning from their trial-and-error prototyping, and iterating as they go. I’ve generally found this to be true: that the older we get, the more we tend to get in our own way—our life experience ends up being accumulated baggage of “this won’t work” and “why even bother trying that” and “well, this is obviously a bad idea so we shouldn’t even give it a chance.” Kids aren’t weighed down by all that. (This is also what Ken Robinson was talking about in his popular TED Talk.) The good news, I’ve found, is that, with proper training, even grownups can be led to find their inner child again, and to release themselves from the self-limiting constraints that their logic, reason, and life experience has inevitably saddled them with. I love doing design thinking workshops for adults: it’s just so delightful to watch them remember how to find their joy and creativity again, once they let go of their learned self-consciousness and the self-imposed limitations of their intellect. It turns out that silliness and a childlike propensity to play are correlated with creativity—and so being able to tap into your inner child is, I think, a prerequisite to bringing impactful and innovative ideas to life.

What have you learned about teaching a highly interactive, hands-on subject like design thinking in an online format?

That it can be done! There are obvious limitations, of course (for example, students can’t easily collaborate on creating physical artifacts), but there is still a lot that can be done. With tools like Mural and other online collaboration platforms, and even Zoom features like chat and breakout rooms, my colleagues and I have found that it’s absolutely doable to transition many design thinking exercises to an online format.

One aspect of a learning environment that’s very important in design is a collaborative community vibe, and one way to make that happen is to do warmup and ice-breaker activities during class sessions. While there are lots of games and exercises that we can do in-person, we had to scratch our heads for a minute to figure out what some online-conducive versions of these activities might be. What resulted was a list of activities that I co-authored with friends and colleagues, called “Zoom-Friendly Warmups and Icebreakers.” Activities like these have really helped to create online learning environments that are conducive to the kinds of creativity-boosting, collaborative learning experiences that design thinking is built on.

Your recent “Joy Cards” project suggests that joy and rigor can go hand in hand. Why is joy such an important dimension of teaching and learning for you right now?

There is a ton of research that demonstrates (fairly persuasively, I think) that joyful learning environments help people learn better: it has been shown that fun, play, and delight boost resilience, focus, well-being, creativity, problem-solving, and so much more. The Center for Assistive Special Technology, which has created guidelines for Universal Design for Learning, has now established an explicit guideline urging educators to “nurture joy and play”—noting that, for learners of different abilities, these are crucial elements to success in education. And, to the “right now” part of your question: I believe deeply that joy becomes even more important in times of strife and crisis. The world can seem like a really dark place right now, and it’s times like these when I think that teachers’ responsibility to uplift themselves and their learners through an intentional investment in joy becomes especially elevated.

Across your teaching and facilitation, what specific techniques do you rely on to help people build creative confidence, especially those who initially doubt that they are “creative”?

I believe deeply that there’s no such thing as “creative” people and “not creative” people—some people have just had more practice training their creative muscles, that’s all. I sometimes start my workshops by talking about dancing as an analogy: yes, some people might be born naturally more flexible or more coordinated than others, but anyone can learn the steps of a dance. Anyone can become a better dancer tomorrow than they were yesterday, simply by diligent practice. I think creativity works in exactly the same way: if you don’t ever get any opportunities to practice the act of creating stuff, you’ll likely think that you don’t have the capacity to. But if you’re constantly asked to build, draw, make, craft, and collaborate, then you’ll likely form a self-conception of a person who’s able to do those things. So in my workshops and classes, I simply give people the excuse to practice: I ask them to design, make, and build all sorts of things (physical products, graphics, digital interfaces, systems, stories, services, etc.) and at the end of those experiences—whether they’re 90-minute workshops or 10-week college courses—people always report a higher confidence in their own creative abilities. It’s really great to see.

After years of working in this field, what still fascinates you about design thinking and its application in education? Where do you think it will go, especially in the context of generative AI?

The only possible honest answer to the second question is: I have no idea! (And don’t trust anyone who tells you any differently.) We’re all navigating uncharted waters here, and it’s important to have our compass and our rudder well-tuned—that is, we need to invest in our skills of critical thinking, responsible reflection, and collaborative decision-making—so we can have a chance of arriving at wonderful destinations together. But we shouldn’t pretend to know right now where those destinations are.

What continues to fascinate me more generally about design thinking is how relevant it continues to be through all the turbulence. At its core, design thinking is a collection of tools and mindsets that foster collaboration, creativity, communication, resilience, resourcefulness, curiosity, empathy, and humility—and those will never go out of style. I also think that the job of the designer will never change (I use the word “designer” there in the broadest possible sense, to include not only people who have that word in their job title, but anyone who creates anything): it’s just the tools that will change. Finding and framing problems, and solving them responsibly—trying to make the world a better place for our planet and all of its inhabitants—this has been and will continue to be the designer’s charge. As educators, it’s our happy duty to equip our students for this task.

About

Eugene Korsunskiy is an Associate Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College, where he runs the Joy Lab and teaches courses on human-centered design and design ethics. Prior to arriving at Dartmouth, he taught at Stanford University’s d.school, where he helped to develop the “Designing Your Life” curriculum. Eugene is a Founding Co-Director of the Design Initiative at Dartmouth (DIAD), and the Executive Director of the Future of Design in Higher Education (FDHE), a global community of educators dedicated to creating and disseminating best practices in human-centered design pedagogy. While at Dartmouth, Eugene has been a recipient of the Woodhouse Excellence in Teaching Award and the Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching. He has also received a Fast Company Innovation by Design Award, and has been a speaker at several TEDx events and the Aspen Ideas Festival. Eugene has an MFA in Design from Stanford University and a BA with honors in Art & Art History from Williams College. Eugene lives in Vermont, USA with his partner, dog, and three horses.

References

Korsunskiy, E. (Ed.). (2025). The little book of joy: Tiny ways to infuse delight into teaching and learning. Dartmouth College.

Korsunskiy, E. (Ed.). (2026). The second little book of joy: More ways to infuse delight into teaching and learning. Dartmouth College.

Rouse, R., Krummeck, K., Higginbotham, D., & Crum, R. (2020). Extending the reach of academic makerspaces into K-12 schools: Delivering maker-based instruction with a mobile makerspace. IJAMM.