ABSTRACT
Design thinking has recently garnered widespread recognition across a variety of sectors including education, business, and development, in the non-profit, private, and public spheres alike. In contrast to some other areas of design, advocates of design thinking focus on human needs, aka those of the end-user, as a space for increased empathy and potential social impact. Innovation of this type is then implicitly (and oftentimes explicitly) linked to social progress. In this paper, we will explore the ironies around the use of design thinking for social impact in its contemporary market-friendly iterations. Namely, mainstream design thinking methodologies are limited by their myopic focus on technological innovation and failure to address political power dynamics. After identifying a need to reformat design thinking for the social good, we present a curricular framework that integrates design thinking with social justice to transcend these flaws and address complex social problems.