The Age of Imagination: How Design Thinking Prepares Students for What Comes Next

In the age of AI, our greatest challenge isn’t learning new tools, it’s building the human and digital teams that can imagine what to do with them.

Nov 10, 2025

Coding teaches the language of technology.
Design teaches the language of possibility.

Everything good was once imagined

That’s the line Canva used to launch its new campaign: The Imagination Era. For decades, the Information Age rewarded those who could collect, organize, and deliver knowledge efficiently. But now, information isn’t scarce, it’s everywhere.

AI can summarize, synthesize, and personalize faster than we ever could.
So the real question isn’t how much we know anymore.
It’s what will we do with everything we know?

And for those of us in education, that question gets even harder:

If imagination is now the most important skill of our time, why are our schools still designed for information delivery?

We say we want creativity and collaboration.
We say we value critical thinking.
But the systems we’ve built still reward compliance.

We’ve built entire generations of classrooms, assessments, and policies on the idea that information was the advantage. But what happens when every student has instant access to infinite knowledge, yet very little space to imagine what to do with it?

That’s the tension of this moment. And it’s why, in 2014, I decided to start answering that question for myself. What inspired this work was one line from a Ted Talk from Erik Brynjolfsson that changed how I saw everything:

Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny.

You see this challenge isn’t new. It’s one I, and many others experienced when we graduated from college in 2007, the last inflection point as it was the same year Steve Jobs launched the iPhone. Again we say some people who had access and exposure to existing and emerging technologies, and were able to design for what’s next. And others who were left in the dark, struggling to adapt, wondering why what they had spent years investing in school for, was not delivering on its return.

Brynjolfsson was right, technology isn’t destiny; we shape it. But that raised a harder question for me: how? Over time I realized that real innovation doesn’t start with tools or policy, it starts with empathy, and the imagination to design something better.

Cultures of innovation begin with a culture of empathy.

That realization has guided everything I’ve done through Designing Schools over the past decade, an exploration of what happens when we stop treating school as something to manage and start seeing it as something we can design.

Let’s Define What We Mean By Thinking

For most of modern history, information was power. We built our schools, careers, and even our identities around how well we could collect and recall it.

But today, information is no longer the advantage, it’s the baseline. AI can summarize, analyze, and produce in seconds what once took us hours. Knowledge isn’t scarce; attention and imagination are.

Canva calls this next chapter the Imagination Era, a time defined not by what we know, but by what we can dream and build together.

Just look at the past few months: the integration of AI agents directly into web browsers has sent educators and higher ed circles into a frenzy, watching autonomous bots log into an LMS, open a Coursera course, and complete entire assignments step by step.

For many, it was a moment of shock. For others, a wake-up call. If AI can already “learn” content faster than any student, what, exactly, are we preparing humans to do?

If the Information Age was about mastering content, the Imagination Era is about designing context: how we use knowledge to create meaning, solve problems, and improve lives.

The old model says: Teach students to find the right answers.
The new reality asks: Can they imagine better questions?

Because when information is infinite, curiosity becomes the new currency.

And that’s where design thinking comes in.
It gives us a structure for imagination, a way to move from empathy to action, from ideas to impact. Not guessing what the future will bring, but designing what we want it to be. Real thinking doesn’t come from knowing more. It comes from believing you can shape what you know into something new. And that’s the beginning of agency.

And if there was ever a time to take “Hour of Code” coming up in a month and now “Hour of AI” seriously, this moment is it. And that preparation begins now, and in this series I’m looking forward to bringing you examples, people, and stories that you can take back to your teams to bring an experience to every learner. And it begins by first engaging and motivating your teams to prioritize this work with a good story about the past, present, and future.

What’s Next: From Thinking to Imagination

We’ve known for years that this was coming. But knowing and preparing are not the same thing. Back in 2017, I believed we still had time to redesign how we learn and lead. Now, that window feels much smaller. We’re watching an entire generation come of age in a world their schools weren’t built for. In most classrooms, learning still means mastering the content someone else decided was important. But in the world beyond those walls, success depends on how well you can adapt, imagine, and design what’s next. What I think we all have to reflect on is that we knew this was coming.

In 2013, the Dancing with Robots report from two professors at Harvard and MIT shared:

We must prepare our young people to do the things computers can’t do: solve complex challenges - solving problems which require imagination and new solutions, and engaging in complex communication - social interaction with other people.

In 2018, the Future of Jobs report from the World Economic Forum warned us:

By 2025, more than 40% of workplace tasks will be automated.

Yet, despite this (and it was just two of many reports), we carried on with business as usual. Now, nearly a decade later, we find ourselves paralyzed, caught between the world we prepared students for and the one they’re actually in.

And this is exactly where design thinking becomes essential. Because this won’t be solved by learning how to prompt an AI model. It will be solved by learning how to pause, to play in the problem space, and to design our way forward.

Design thinking gives us that structure, a process for moving from empathy to insight to action. It reminds us that the goal isn’t to have all the answers, but to create the conditions where better questions can emerge.

Building the Imagination Muscle

AI isn’t asking us to become more technical. It’s asking us to become more human, to design, not just deliver. And like any skill, imagination is a muscle. Right now, it’s weak, not because people don’t have it, but because most systems don’t exercise it.

Think about going to the gym.
Week one, you don’t see a difference.
Week two, still nothing.
But keep showing up, keep lifting, stretching, testing what’s possible and over time, the strength starts to show.

That’s how imagination works too. It gets stronger through small, consistent reps of curiosity and experimentation, the daily moments when we ask, “What if?” or “Why not?”

That’s why I created the Spark Prompting Framework, to help people build that creative endurance. It’s a way to prompt the human before the machine to start with empathy, curiosity, and context, not syntax. SPARK was designed for you, the human, more than the AI, to help you become more ambitious about framing the problems you want to solve, and the ideas you want to bring to life.

You can see an example of design thinking and SPARK used together during this keynote, ironically for Canva!

I’ve put together 50 SPARK templates you can edit and use.

Click here to download the guide.

Across the world the SPARK experience is what everyone shares transforms their use of AI from being just another tool, to a teammate that helps them redesign and imagine what could be.

Because if imagination is now the differentiator, our real job as educators and leaders is to create the conditions where it can grow stronger every day. If Canva is right, and we are, in fact, living in the Imagination Era, then education has to decide what role it will play in it.

Because our challenge isn’t access to information anymore.
It’s the ability to imagine what to do with it.

The future won’t be built by those who can memorize the most.
It will be built by those who can design the best.
Design learning. Design teams. Design systems that grow people, not just outputs.

That’s the work in front of us, not learning to master every new AI tool, but learning to design with them to expand what’s possible for our students, our colleagues, and ourselves. If we could have solved this by now with more information, we would have.
What we need next is imagination, guided by empathy, grounded in design, and fueled by agency.

Bring a “Design Thinking for the Imagination Age with SPARK” keynote or workshop to your organization for your team.

This keynote or workshop helps teams make the shift from using AI to designing with it. Through real-world stories, hands-on activities, and human-centered insights, Dr. Sabba Quidwai shows how design thinking and the SPARK Framework help people build creative confidence, collaborate with AI intentionally, and design solutions rooted in empathy.

Your team will leave with: