Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has changed at a quick pace, where new scientific and technological advancements have transformed society’s habits and its overall mindset. This transformation brought great civilization advancements, but also great issues in the societal, economic and personal levels, like global warming, globalization, inequality, anxiety and stress. However, educational system is one of the few things that remained similar to the nineteenth century, where in most of the primary schools, the approach still teacher centered, the evaluations occur by grading and subject matters that might not even be relevant anymore to the today’s society still part of the curriculum. In fact, according to Fadel (2011), the last major change in the educational system happened in the late 1800’s (p. 01). These old-fashioned methods did not prepare students to develop critical thinking and creativity to solve twenty-first century world’s problem. The need for change gradually became a debate among pedagogues and education professionals in the last few decades. UNESCO’s guide, in 2014, proposed a fresh set of new educational principles and practices, one that enable students ability to understand human development in all its levels,  and be prepared for “a volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous world” (p. 5). This guide highlights creativity, critical thinking and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) learning as some of the essential skills for this century, which can be achieved by encouraging problem solving and ideas’ generation through exploration, by developing an inquiry-based learning and by integrating different disciplines using collaborative methods. Those principles intend to integrate knowledge and behaviour for students to function well in a complex global society, and to develop their ability to solve wicked problems. The challenge lays on ways to combine a variety of knowledge and to find a channel that facilitates the easy communication among subject matter’s specialists. The answer may lie on design, a concept that encompasses multiple fields and it is intrinsic to our daily lives, and because of that, might not always receive the proper importance that it deserves. Although design is not a new concept in human history, it only became an academic discipline in the last century (Friedman, 2000, p. 07). Based on the definitions of different authors, this paper highlights design’s three core characteristics that can be the key to develop the skills necessary for the twenty-first century world, they are: creativity, through idea generation and exploration; prototyping, which develop  non-verbal communication; and critical thinking, though an inquiry based process to solve ill-defined problems with a solution-focused approach. The reason why this paper argues that design processes should be applied in early education is based on the constructivist theory, more specifically, on Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, which he proposed that concrete and iconic models of cognition happen in early childhood, meaning that the child between seven to eleven years old, can connect information internally, hence think logically and can start taking an active role in education. This paper explores the relationship between design and pedagogy, by connecting Cross, N. (2006)’s ideas from his book Designerly Ways of Knowing to two examples of design process applied in early education, and tries investigate how the collaboration between these two fields can contribute to improving cognitive development and build citizens that are able to solve complex issues, by using creativity. The first example presented in this paper is a study in STEAM learning applied to schools in Canada; it collected qualitative data from a hundred and three participants, by observation of the students, interviews and focus groups with the teachers. The focus of this study was to understand the skills developed and the benefits that this method provided. The second example is a study that explored design-driven education applied to a primary school in Finland; it collected qualitative data from five educators, through observation and semi-structured interviews. The aim of this study was to gain insights on design practices applied to educational settings and understand how it changed teaching culture. Both methods are child-centered, encourage to work by project, on a collaborative and constructivist approach, in many situations the use of technological devices is present to support students to express non-verbal ideas. One of the participants acknowledge that design process is quite close to an ideal learning process, which encourages students to explore and discover, allowing them to commit errors and become more creative. The outcomes of these analyses show how some of the intrinsic design’s characteristics, when applied into schools’ new pedagogical approaches, can be beneficial to society as a whole, even when in some cases, educators apply those characteristics subconsciously, or with a different terminology. It also became clear that technology is an important tool to support students’ creative process. Furthermore, the skills developed are transferable, like perseverance and empathy, which enable them to apply to different contexts. The aim of this paper is to generate a reflection about the potential of applying design to general education and to assess the positive impact it can potentially generate for society as a whole, furthermore, contributing to the discussion of the future of design.