by Nigel Cross
The differences in the thinking processes of the two subjects become clear in graphs of the amount of time each devoted to different cognitive activities, as revealed by their ‘think aloud’ comments made during the experiments. These are shown in Figure 8.3. The control subject focused initially on ‘problem structuring’, with periodical returns to this. He then moved to ‘preliminary design’ and on to ‘refinement’ and ‘detailing’. The graph of the control subject clearly shows a controlled but complex pattern of activities, with overlap and quick transitions between activities. In contrast, the patient subject spent a huge amount of time on attempting ‘problem structuring’, and only small amounts of time on ‘preliminary design’ and ‘refinement’.
8.2 The sketches made by the patient with neurological damage.
The experimenters reported that: ‘The patient understood the task and even observed that “this is a very simple problem”. His sophisticated architectural knowledge base was still intact and he used it quite skilfully during the problem structuring phase. However, the patient’s problem-solving behaviour differed from the control’s behaviour in the following ways: (1) he was unable to make the transition from problem structuring to problem solving; (2) as a result preliminary design did not start until two-thirds of the way into the session; (3) the preliminary design phase was minimal and erratic, consisting of three independently generated fragments; (4) there was no progression or lateral development of these fragments; (5) there was no carry-over of abstract information into the preliminary design or later phases; and (6) the patient did not make it to the detailing phase.’ In short, the patient simply could not perform the relatively simple design task.
8.3 The pattern of design activities as recorded in the think-aloud comments of (a) the control subject, (b) the patient
In this unhappy case we can see exposed some of the considerable complexity that there is in normal design thinking, and evidence that the brain has high-level cognitive functions that control or process activities that are essential aspects of design ability and that contribute to design thinking as a form of intelligence.
Studies of brain activities have identified specific areas of the right hemisphere of the brain as being active during design thinking. The two hemispheres of the brain, right and left, appear to have different cognitive specialisms. Neuroscience studies tend to confirm that the right hemisphere of the brain is more specialised in spatial and constructional tasks, in aesthetic perception and emotions. The left hemisphere is more specialised in language abilities and verbal reasoning. Damage to the left hemisphere often results in the loss of some speech functions, whereas damage to the right hemisphere, as we have seen, can result, among other things, in the loss of design ability.
A view of design thinking as a distinct form of intelligence does not necessarily mean that some people ‘have it’ and some people do not. Design ability is something that everyone has, to some extent, because it is embedded in our brains as a natural cognitive function. Like other forms of intelligence and ability it may be possessed, or may be manifested in performance, at higher levels by some people than by others. And like other forms of intelligence and ability, design intelligence is not simply a given ‘talent’ or ‘gift’, but can be trained and developed. Otherwise, what would be the point of having design schools?
Development of Expertise
Education is not only about the development of knowledge but also about developing ways of thinking and acting. We are all familiar with the concepts of the novice learner and the expert performer, and aware that something happens in the development from one to the other. A novice undergoes training and education in his or her chosen field, and then at some later point becomes an expert. Education in design has well-established practices that are assumed to help this progression from novice to expert; but there is still rather limited understanding of the differences between novice and expert performance in design, and how to help students move from one to the other.
There has been more of a history of work on understanding expertise in some other fields and contexts, including chess, music, science and sports. From these studies, there is a general view that expertise can only be developed over time as a person matures. Usually, there comes a point when a peak of performance is reached, and then an inevitable decline begins. This performance peak will be reached at different ages in different domains: for physical sports, it may be around the age of middle-twenties, whereas in mental activities it may not be until much later in life; in the sciences, people seem to produce their best work in their thirties, while in the arts it may be in their forties. Some outstanding individuals seem to defy the general pattern of development-peak-decline, and to continue producing great work well into later years.
A universal aspect that seems agreed from studies of expertise is that it requires a minimum period of practice and sustained involvement before performance reaches a recognised expert level of achievement – at least 10 years from first involvement. This is not simply a matter of experience or exposure to the field of endeavour, but of dedicated application. One of the key factors in the acquisition of expertise is believed to be sustained, deliberate, guided practice.
The psychologist Anders Ericsson, who is an expert in the study of expertise, has suggested that ‘The attained level of performance of many types of experts, such as musicians, chess players and athletes, is closely related to their accumulated amount of deliberate practice.’ Usually, a young person may display a certain aptitude or interest, and parents or teachers then encourage and guide their development. But without the dedicated application of the individual, levels of performance will remain modest. Again, according to Ericsson, ‘Superior expert performance is primarily acquired … Many thousands of hours of deliberate practice and training are necessary to reach the highest levels of performance … Most international masters emphasise the role of motivation, concentration, and the willingness to work hard on improving performance … The masters seem to consider inborn capacities and innate talent as relatively unimportant.’
The development of expertise usually seems to pass through different phases (Figure 8.4). In all fields, the accumulation of experience is a vital part of the transformation to expert. For some people, the ‘expert’ level of achievement is where they remain, perhaps with some continued moderate improvement before reaching their peak and beginning their decline. A few manage to go beyond the level of their peers, into a further stage of development, reaching outstanding levels of achievement and mastery. At the other end of the scale of maturity, at a young age, all of us are introduced to a variety of human activities, whether it be playing football or playing the violin. We all improve a little, but some, as noted above, will begin to practise with a dedication – and probably a joy – that sets them apart.
8.4 Stages in the development of expertise.
The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus has outlined six phases of development from novice to expert and on to ‘visionary’ levels of ability. He suggested that a novice strictly follows given rules to deal with a problem, and develops to an ‘advanced beginner’ who shows some sensitivity to exceptions to the rules. Dreyfus then distinguished competent, expert and master levels of performance as follows:
A competent problem solver works in a radically different way. Elements in a situation are selected for special attention because of their relevance. A plan is developed to achieve the goals … Problem solving at this level involves the seeking of opportunities. The process takes on a trial-and-error character, with some learning and reflection … The expert responds to a specific situation intuitively, and performs the appropriate action straightaway. There is no problem solving and reasoning that can be distinguished at this level of working … The master sees the standard ways of working that experienced professionals use not as natural but as contingent. A master displays a deeper involvement in the professional field as a whole, dwelling on successes and failures. This attitude requires an acute sense of
context, and openness to subtle cues.
Moving from one level of expertise to another is not necessarily a steady progression. It is not simply a matter of knowing more and learning to work more quickly or smoothly. The changes of level involve working in different ways. This shift to working in a different way can develop almost unnoticed by the learner but can mean shifts in level of attention that we all experience in learning a skill, as the fundamentals become performed unconsciously.
Novice to Expert
Developing greater expertise generally means developing a broader and more complex understanding of what has to be achieved. For example, studies of novice and expert designers in the field of woven textiles found that the novices concentrated on the visual composition task and only occasionally jumped to construction issues to explore how the visual ideas could be realised in the weaving. In contrast, experts integrated both the visual and the technical elements of weaving, and generally considered them in a parallel way during the design process. Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen and Kai Hakkarainen found that this iteration between the ‘composition space’ and the ‘construction space’ was a significant aspect of the experts’ design process; they ‘continuously moved from one design space to another to carry out very detailed processes of search for design solutions.’
How to develop such changes from novice to expert remains rather obscure. In studies of junior vs senior student design behaviours, Robin Adams and her colleagues found that changes in individual students’ behaviours over the three or four years of their studies were quite complex and variable. Although there were identifiable changes in behaviour for many of the students, some did not appear to change their behaviours at all and some seniors simply spent more time on the given design projects but without any qualitative behavioural changes. It also appeared that some students exhibited different behavioural changes for different types of design projects; they were perhaps on the cusp of development from ‘advanced beginner’ to ‘competent’, showing more sensitivity to different problem situations.
In the previous chapter I mentioned how some student designers can seem to get stuck in gathering information, as a kind of substitute for actually doing any design work. A similar conclusion was reached by Cindy Atman and her colleagues, who found from protocol studies of engineering students that, for novices (freshmen with no design experience), ‘those subjects who spent a large proportion of their time defining the problem did not produce quality designs’. As with the industrial design students, some of the freshmen engineering students, it seemed, simply became stuck in problem-definition and did not progress satisfactorily into further stages of the design process. However, with senior students, Atman et al. did find that attention to ‘problem scoping’ (i.e., ‘adequately setting up the problem before analysis begins’, including gathering a larger amount and wider range of problem-related information) did result in better designs.
In studies of problem solving, novice behaviour is usually associated with a ‘depth-first’ approach, which means that the novice identifies a problem aspect and immediately begins exploring its solution in depth. This results in partial sub-solutions that may be difficult to reconcile together into a satisfactory overall solution. The strategies of experts, however, are usually regarded as exhibiting predominantly breadth-first approaches – i.e., starting with a broad problem exploration and developing related sub-solutions together in parallel. Differences of this nature were found between the behaviour of novice and experienced designers by Saeema Ahmed and her colleagues. They found clear differences between the behaviours of new (graduate) entrants to the engineering profession and much more experienced engineers. The novices used ‘trial and error’ techniques of generating and implementing a design modification, evaluating it, then generating another, and so on through many iterations. Experienced engineers were observed to make a preliminary evaluation of their tentative decisions before implementing them and making a final evaluation. They used the foresight they had gained from experience to consider whether it seemed worthwhile to move further into the implementation stage of a design decision.
A more complex view than that of novices as depth-first and experts as breadth-first problem solvers has gradually emerged as more studies are made of expert designer behaviour. Linden Ball and his colleagues have studied the strategies of engineering and software designers and have suggested that ‘experts will often tend to mix both breadth-first and depth-first solution development strategies … the preferred strategy of expert designers is a top-down, breadth-first one, but experts will switch to depth-first design to deal strategically with situations where their knowledge is stretched. Thus, depth-first design is a response to factors such as problem complexity and design uncertainty.’ This suggests that even expert designers will run up against unfamiliar problems, and will have to make some initial in-depth exploration of generated solution concepts in order to assess their viability.
One problem-solving strategy used by expert designers seems to be different from that employed by other kinds of problem-solvers, who usually attempt to define or understand the problem fully before making solution attempts. In common with what we saw of expert designer behaviour in our earlier protocol studies, many studies of expert design behaviour suggest that designers move rapidly to early solution conjectures, and use these conjectures as a way of exploring and defining problem-and-solution together. Peter Lloyd and Peter Scott found from protocol studies of architects and engineering designers that this solution-focused approach appeared to be related to the amount and type of previous experience of the designers. They found that more-experienced designers used more of what they called ‘generative’ reasoning, in contrast to the deductive reasoning employed more by less-experienced designers. In particular, designers with specific experience of the problem type tended to approach the design task through solution conjectures, rather than through problem analysis. They concluded that ‘[it] is specific experience of the problem type that enables designers to adopt a conjectural approach to designing, that of framing or perceiving design problems in terms of relevant solutions’.
Clearly, part of the development of expertise lies in the accumulation of experience. Something that distinguishes experts from novices is that the experts have been exposed to a large number of examples of the problems and solutions that occur in their domain. But a key competency of an expert is the ability mentally to stand back from the specifics of the accumulated examples, and form more abstract conceptualisations pertinent to their domain of expertise. Experts are believed to be able to store and access information in larger cognitive ‘chunks’ than novices, and to recognise underlying principles, rather than focusing on the surface features of problems. This kind of behaviour classically occurs in chess playing, where chess masters are able to survey chess board positions and recognise patterns, and strategies for resolving them, whereas novices cannot see beyond the next one or two moves. Bryan Lawson has drawn parallels between expertise in chess and design, and suggested that master designers also recognise patterns in problem situations and draw upon knowledge of precedents that they have abstracted into solution chunks, or ‘schemata’ as Lawson called them. A typical design schema for an architect might be a way of organising internal space, such as around an atrium, or for an industrial designer might be grouping together different functional parts of a product. Lawson also suggested that, like chess masters, design masters have repertoires of ‘gambits’, or ways of proceeding, of entering into and opening up the problem situation. A typical gambit might be like that of Kenneth Grange, starting a project by ‘trying to sort out just the functionality, just the handling of it, and by-and-large out of that comes a direction’.
In order to develop expertise it seems that a novice needs lots and lots of practice, guided by skilful teachers. The novice designer also needs exposure to many good examples of expert work in the domain, and needs to learn to perceive and retain these examples, or precedents, in terms of their
underlying schemata or organising principles. Like learning a language, it is a matter of immersion and internalising different levels of understanding and achievement.
Many of the classic studies of expertise have been based on examples of game-playing (such as chess), or on comparisons of experts vs novices in solving routine problems (e.g. in physics). These are all examples of well-defined problems, whereas designers characteristically deal with ill-defined problems. Some studies of expertise in fields such as creative writing where problems are ill-defined do suggest some parallels with observations of expert designers. It seems that some of the ‘standard’ results from studies of expertise do not match with results from studies of expertise in creative domains. For example, creative experts will reformulate the given task so that it is problematic – i.e., deliberately treat it as ill-defined – which is contrary to the assumption that experts will generally solve a problem in the ‘easiest’ way, or certainly with more ease than novices. In some ways, therefore, creative experts treat problems as ‘harder’ problems than novices do.
Just as design problems are ‘ill-defined’, so expert designers appear to be ‘ill-behaved’ problem solvers. Rather than the conventional behaviours of solvers of well-defined problems, designers are solution-focused, not problem-focused. This change of focus appears to be a feature of design expertise that develops with education and experience in designing. In particular, experience in a specific type of design domain enables designers to move quickly to formulating a problem ‘frame’ and proposing a solution conjecture. In various studies, successful, experienced designers are repeatedly found to be proactive in problem framing, actively imposing their view of the problem and directing the search for solution conjectures. Processes of structuring and formulating the problem are frequently identified as key features of design expertise.