and functionality of products. Many businesses and other organisations now realise the utility of embedding design as a productive asset throughout organisational policies and practices, and design thinking has been used to help many different types of business and social organisations to be more constructive and innovative. Designers bring their methods into business either by taking part themselves from the earliest stages of product and service development processes or by training others to use design methods and to build innovative thinking capabilities within organisations. In education All forms of professional design education can be assumed to be developing design thinking in students, even if only implicitly, but design thinking is also now explicitly taught in general as well as professional education, across all sectors of education. Design as a subject was introduced into secondary schools' educational curricula in the UK in the 1970s, gradually replacing and/or developing from some of the traditional art and craft subjects, and increasingly linked with technology studies. This development sparked related research studies in both education and design. New courses in design thinking have also been introduced at the university level, especially when linked with business and innovation studies. A notable early course of this type was introduced at Stanford University in 2003, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, known as the d.school. In the K–12 education sector, design thinking is used to enhance learning and promote creative thinking, teamwork, and student responsibility for learning. A design-based approach to teaching and learning has also developed more widely throughout education. Design thinking can now be seen in International Baccalaureate schools across the world, and in Maker Education organizations. In computer science Design thinking has been central to user-centered design and human-centered design—the dominant methods of designing human-computer interfaces—for over 40 years. Design thinking is also central to recent conceptions of software development in general. Criticisms Some of the diverse and popularized applications of design thinking, particularly in the business/innovation fields, have been criticized for promoting a very restricted interpretation of design skills and abilities. Lucy Kimbell accused business applications of design thinking of "de-politicizing managerial practice" through an "undertheorized" conception of design thinking. Lee Vinsel suggested that popular purveyors of design consulting "as a reform for all of higher education" misuse ideas from the fields that they purport to borrow from, and devalue discipline-specific expertise, giving students "'creative confidence' without actual capabilities". Natasha Iskander criticized a