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Expertise in design: an overview
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Cross, Nigel (2004). Expertise in design: an overview. Design Studies, 25(5), pp. 427–441.
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Design Studies, Vol. 25, No. 5, pp. 427-441, 2004
Expertise in Design: an overview
Nigel Cross
Department of Design and Innovation
Faculty of Technology
The Open University
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
UK
Abstract
This is a review paper of the field of research into expertise in design. There has been
a growth of empirical and formalised study of designer behaviour, and this paper
focuses specifically on expert performance. Some background information from the
study of expertise in other fields is introduced. The studies of design expertise that are
reviewed refer to expert vs. novice performance, expert designer behaviour and
outstanding designers. It seems that expertise in design has some aspects that are
siginificantly different from expertise in other fields.
Keywords: design behaviour, design cognition, design process, expertise
The focus of this review paper is the nature of expert performance in design.
The topic of expertise has been receiving increasing attention in the design research
community. There has been a rapidly growing development of protocol and other
empirical studies of design cognition, amongst which have been studies of expert, or
experienced designers, comparisons of the processes of novice and expert designers,
and some interview studies on outstanding or exceptional designers. A significant
addition to work in this area was the recent Design Thinking Research Symposium on
Expertise in Design
1
.
1 Expertise
There is, of course, a substantial and long history of work on understanding expertise
in some other fields and contexts, including chess, music and sports. From these
studies, there is a general view that expertise develops over time as a person matures,
but that 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 fields – 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, whilst in the arts it may be in
their forties. Some outstanding individuals seem to defy the general picture, and to
continue producing great work well into later years. But one aspect that seems agreed

from studies of expertise is that it requires a minimum period of practice and
sustained involvement before performance reaches an international peer-level of
achievement – at least 10 years from first involvement
2
.
Expertise is not simply a matter of possessing ‘talent’, but is the result of a dedicated
application to a chosen field. According to Ericsson
3
, who is an expert in the study of
expertise, ‘Superior expert performance is primarily acquired . . . Many thousands of
hours of deliberate practice and training are necessary to reach the highest levels of
performance’. He comments that ‘Most international masters emphasise the role of
motivation, concentration, and the willingness to work hard on improving
performance.’ Ericsson
4
suggests that deliberate practice (i.e. practice deliberately
guided towards improvement of performance) is one of the key factors in the
acquisition of expertise: ‘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 child 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.
The development of expertise probably passes through different phases. We are all
familiar with the concepts of the novice and the expert – and that something happens
in the development from one to the other. A novice undergoes training and education
in their chosen field, and then at some later point becomes an expert. 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 phase of
development, reaching outstanding levels of achievement and eminence. 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 practice with a dedication – and
probably a joy – that sets them apart. In areas such as sports and music and chess,
there are established programmes of training for these neophytes; perhaps the design
community also needs to focus some attention on this earliest phase in the
development of expertise.
2 Expert vs. novice designers
Novice behaviour is usually associated with a ‘depth-first’ approach to problem
solving, i.e. sequentially identifying and exploring sub-solutions in depth, whereas the
strategies of experts are usually regarded as being predominantly top-down and
breadth-first approaches. Many of the classic studies of expertise have been based on
examples of game-playing (e.g. chess), or on comparisons of experts versus novices
in solving routine problems (e.g. physics). These are all well-defined problems,
whereas designers characteristically deal with ill-defined problems. Ho
5
, in a protocol
study of a novice and an expert product designer, found that their problem-solving
strategies did not conform with the ‘standard’ expectations derived from studies in
well-defined problem domains. The expert designer used explicit problem
decomposing strategies, which the novice appeared not to possess, but both expert
and novice used similar, bottom-up, or working-backward, problem solving strategies.

Some studies of expertise in fields such as creative writing and computer
programming
6, 7
, where problems are ill-defined, also suggest 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 define 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. This was also suggested in
observations of expert designers
8
.
Education in design has well-established practices that are assumed to help the
progression from novice to expert; but there is still precious little real understanding
of the differences between novice and expert performance in design, and how to help
students move from one to the other. Research questions to address here include:
What are the key differences between expert and novice behaviour and cognition?
How is the transition made from novice to expert? Can certain educational methods
assist the transition more effectively or efficiently?
Christiaans and Dorst
9
, from protocol studies of junior and senior industrial design
students, found that some students became stuck on information gathering, rather than
progressing to solution generation. Interestingly, they found that this was not such a
significant difficulty for junior students, who did not gather a lot of information, and
tended to ‘solve a simple problem’, being unaware of a lot of potential criteria and
difficulties. But they found that senior students could be divided into two types. The
more successful group, in terms of the creativity quality of their solutions, ‘asks less
information, processes it instantly, and gives the impression of consciously building
up an image of the problem. They look for and make priorities early on in the
process.’ The other group gathered lots of information, but for them ‘gathering data
was sometimes just a substitute activity for actually doing any design work’
10
.
A similar finding was reported by Atman et al.
11
, who found from their protocol
analysis 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.’ 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. 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. Atman et al. found that, in comparison to the freshmen, senior
students gathered more information, considered more alternative solutions, and
transitioned more frequently between types of design activities.
In further, longitudinal studies of freshman vs. senior student behaviours, Adams et
al.
12
found that changes in individual students’ behaviours over time can be quite
complex and variable. As well as those for whom there was definite change, some of
the students did not appear to change their behaviours at all and some simply spent
more time on design projects but without any qualitative behavioural changes. It also

appeared that students exhibited different behavioural changes for different types of
design projects.
Differences between the behaviour of novice and experienced designers in
engineering were studied by Ahmed et al.
13
. They found clear differences between the
behaviours of new (graduate) entrants to the engineering design profession and much
more experienced colleagues. 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 considered whether it seemed worthwhile to
move further into the implementation stage of a design decision. In contrast to the
novices’ trial-and-error approach, the experienced designers employed integrated
design strategies.
Protocol studies of two novice and two expert designers in the field of weaving design
were made by Seitamaa-Hakkarainen and Hakkarainen
14
. They found that the experts
integrated the visual and technical elements of weaving, and generally considered
them in a parallel way during the design process. 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.’ In contrast, the novices organised
their process around the composition space and only occasionally jumped to the
construction space to explore how visual ideas could be realised in weaving.
Kavakli and Gero
15
compared the cognitive performances of a novice and an expert
architect, using data from protocol studies. Over a similar time period, there were
significant differences in output between the two. Analysis of the expert’s protocol
showed 2916 actions, divided into 348 segments of simultaneous cognitive actions,
whilst the novice’s showed 1027 actions, with 122 segmements of simultaneous
cognitive actions. Thus, the speed of cognitive processes was much higher for the
expert, and the expert’s rate of cognitive activity continuously rose throughout the
experiment, whilst the novice’s cognitive activity started at a peak and declined
continuously. Kavakli and Gero found a structured organisation and systematic
expansion in the expert’s cognitive activity, as opposed to an exhaustive search
strategy in the novice’s: ‘The expert seems to have control of his cognitive activity
and governs his performance in a more efficient way than the novice, because his
cognitive actions are well organised and clearly structured.’
3 Expert behaviour in design
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 can, and
to recognise underlying principles, rather than focussing on the surface features of
problems.

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. 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. Lloyd and Scott
16
, from protocol studies of experienced engineering
designers, found that this solution-focused approach (identified by Lawson
17
)
appeared to be related to the degree and type of previous experience of the designers.
They found that more experienced designers used more ‘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 the variable of specific experienceof 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.’
This kind of ‘problem setting’ is a characteristic of reflective practice identified by
Schön
18
: ‘Problem setting is the process in which, interactively, we name the things
to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them.’ This
seems to characterise well what has been observed of the problem formulation aspects
of expert designer behaviour. Designers select features of the problem space to which
they choose to attend (naming) and identify areas of the solution space in which they
choose to explore (framing). Schön
19
suggested that: ‘In order to formulate a design
problem to be solved, the designer must frame a problematic design situation: set its
boundaries, select particular things and relations for attention, and impose on the
situation a coherence that guides subsequent moves.’
Schön
19
also pointed out that ‘the work of framing is seldom done in one burst at the
beginning of a design process.’ This was confirmed in Goel and Pirolli’s
20
protocol
studies of several types of designers (architects, engineers and instructional
designers). They found that ‘problem structuring’ activities not only dominated at the
beginning of the design task, but also re-occurred periodically throughout the task.
The occurence of problem framing activities has been noted often in studies of
architects. Lloyd and Scott
21
, from studies of (mostly senior-student) architects,
reported that ‘In each protocol there comes a time when the designer makes a
statement that summarises how he or she sees the problem or, to be more specific, the
structure of the situation that the problem presents.’ They referred to this ‘way of
seeing the design situation’ as the designer’s ‘problem paradigm’. As with their
studies of engineers, Lloyd and Scott found that the architects who had specific prior
experience of the problem type had different approaches from their less-experienced
colleagues: the experienced architects’ approaches were characterised by strong
problem paradigms, or ‘guiding themes’. This approach was also identified in expert
architects by Darke
22
, who referred to their use of guiding principles or ‘primary
generators’.
Although designers change goals and constraints as they design, they appear to hang
on to their principal solution concept for as long as possible, even when detailed
development of the scheme throws up unexpected difficulties and shortcomings in the

solution concept. Some of the changing of goals and constraints during designing is
associated with resolving such difficulties without having to start again with a major
new concept. For example, from case studies of professional architectural design,
Rowe
23
observed that: ‘A dominant influence is exerted by initial design ideas on
subsequent problem-solving directions . . . Even when severe problems are
encountered, a considerable effort is made to make the initial idea work, rather than to
stand back and adopt a fresh point of departure.’
The same phenomenon was observed by Ullman et al.
24
, in protocol studies of
experienced mechanical engineering designers. They found that ‘designers typically
pursue only a single design proposal’, and that ‘there were many cases where major
problems had been identified in a proposal and yet the designer preferred to apply
patches rather than to reject the proposal outright and develop a better one.’ A similar
observation was also made by Ball et al.
25
, from their studies of senior students
conducting ‘real-world’, final-year design projects in electronic engineering: ‘When
the designers were seen to generate a solution which soon proved less than
satisfactory, they actually seemed loath to discard the solution and spend time and
effort in the search for a better alternative. Indeed the subjects appeared to adhere
religiously to their unsatisfactory solutions and tended to develop them laboriously by
the production of various slightly improved versions until something workable was
attained.’
Ball et al. regarded this behaviour as indicating a ‘fixation’ on initial concepts, and a
reliance on a simple ‘satisficing’ design strategy in contrast to any more ‘well-
motivated’ process of optimisation. They found it difficult to account for this
apparently unprincipled design behaviour. Nevertheless, adherence to initial concepts
and a satisficing strategy seem to be normal expert design behaviour. Guindon
26
, in a
study of experienced software designers, found that ‘designers adopted a kernel
solution very early in the session and did not elaborate any alternative solutions in
depth. If designers retrieved alternative solutions for a subproblem, they quickly
rejected all but one alternative by a trade-off analysis using a preferred evaluation
criterion.’
Designers tend to use solution conjectures as the means of developing their
understanding of the problem. Since ‘the problem’ cannot be fully understood in
isolation from consideration of ‘the solution’, it is natural that solution conjectures
should be used as a means of helping to explore and understand the problem
formulation. As Kolodner and Wills
27
observed, from a study of senior student
engineering designers: ‘Proposed solutions often directly remind designers of issues
to consider. The problem and solution co-evolve.’
This interpretation of design as a co-evolution of solution and problem spaces has
also been proposed by others, and has been found by Dorst and Cross
28
in protocol
studies of experienced industrial designers. They reported that: ‘The designers start by
exploring the [problem space], and find, discover, or recognise a partial structure.
That partial structure is then used to provide them also with a partial structuring of the
[solution space]. They consider the implications of the partial structure within the
[solution space], use it to generate some initial ideas for the form of a design concept,
and so extend and develop the partial structuring. . . They transfer the developed
partial structure back into the [problem space], and again consider implications and

extend the structuring of the [problem space]. Their goal . . . is to create a matching
problem-solution pair.’
It may be that good designers produce good early concepts that do not need to be
altered radically during further development; or that good designers are able to
modify their concepts rather fluently and easily as difficulties are encountered during
development, without recourse to exploration of alternative concepts. Either way, it
seems that designers are reluctant to abandon early concepts, and to generate ranges
of alternatives. This does seem to be in conflict with a more ‘principled’ approach to
design, as recommended by design theorists, and even to conflict with the idea that it
is the exploration of solution concepts that assists the designer’s problem
understanding; having more than one solution concept in play should promote a more
comprehensive assessment and understanding of the problem.
Fricke
29
, from protocol studies of engineering designers, found that both generating
few alternative concepts and generating a large number of alternatives were equally
weak strategies, leading to poor design solutions. Where there was ‘unreasonable
restriction’ of the search space (when only one or a very few alternative concepts
were generated), designers became ‘fixated’ on concrete solutions too early. In the
case of ‘excessive expansion’ of the search space (generating large numbers of
alternative solution concepts), designers were then forced to spend time on organising
and managing the set of variants, rather than on careful evaluation and modification of
the alternatives. Fricke identified successful designers to be those operating a
‘balanced search’ for solution alternatives.
There have also been some reports from studies that have emphasised the
‘opportunistic’ behaviour of designers. This emphasis has been on designers’
deviations from a structured plan or methodical process into the ‘opportunistic’
pursuit of issues or partial solutions that catch the designer’s attention. For example,
Visser
30
made a longitudinal study of an experienced mechanical engineer, preparing
a design specification. The engineer claimed to be following a structured approach,
but Visser found frequent deviations from this plan. ‘The engineer had a
hierarchically structured plan for his activity, but he used it in an opportunistic way.
He used it only as long as it was profitable from the point of view of cognitive cost. If
more economical cognitive actions arose, he abandoned it.’ Thus Visser regarded
reducing ‘cognitive cost’ – i.e. the cognitive load of maintaining a principled,
structured approach – as a major reason for abandoning planned actions and instead
delving into, for example, confirming a partial solution at a relatively early stage of
the process.
From protocol studies of three experienced software system designers, Guindon
31
also emphasised the ‘opportunistic’ nature of design activities. Guindon stressed that
‘designers frequently deviate from a top-down approach. These results cannot be
accounted for by a model of the design process where problem specification and
understanding precedes solution development and where the design solution is
elaborated at successively greater levels of detail in a top-down manner.’ Guindon
observed the interleaving of problem specification with solution development,
‘drifting’ through partial solution development, and jumps into exploring suddenly-
recognised partial solutions, which were categorised as major causes of ‘opportunistic
solution development’. Guindon also referred to ‘cognitive cost’ as one possible

explanation for such behaviour: ‘Designers find it advantageous to follow a train of
thought temporarily, thus arriving at partial solutions at little cognitive cost.’
Ball and Ormerod
32
criticised a too-eager willingness to emphasise ‘opportunism’ in
design activity. In studies of expert electronics engineers they found very few
deviations from a top-down, breadth-first design strategy. But they did find some
significant deviations occurring, when designers made a rapid depth-first exploration
of a solution concept in order to assess its viability. Ball and Ormerod did not regard
such occasional depth-first explorations as implying the abandonment of a structured
approach. Instead, they suggested that expert designers will normally use a mixture of
breadth-first and depth-first approaches: ‘Much of what has been described as
opportunistic behaviour sits comfortably within a structured top-down design
framework in which designers alternate between breadth-first and depth-first modes.’
Ball and Ormerod were concerned that ‘opportunism’ seemed to imply unprincipled
design behaviour, ‘a non-systematic and heterarchical process’ in contrast to the
assumed ideal of a systematic and hierarchical process. However, rather than
regarding opportunism as unprincipled design behaviour, Guindon had suggested it
might be inevitable in design: ‘These deviations are not special cases due to bad
design habits or performance breakdowns but are, rather, a natural consequence of the
ill-structuredness of problems in the early stages of design.’
An aspect of cognitive strategy that emerges from some studies is that, especially
during creative periods of conceptual design, expert designers alternate rapidly in
shifts of attention between different aspects of their task, or between different modes
of activity. Akin and Lin
33
, in their protocol study of an experienced engineering
designer, first identified the occurrence of ‘novel design decisions’ (NDDs). These, in
contrast to routine design decisions, are decisions that are critical to the development
of the design concept. Akin and Lin also segmented the designer’s activities into three
modes: drawing, examining and thinking. Then, allowing for some implicit overlap or
carry-over of the designer’s attention from one segment to another, they represented
the designer’s activities in terms of single-, dual- or triple-mode periods. They found a
significant correlation between the triple-mode periods and the occurrence of the
NDDs: ‘Six out of a total of eight times a novel design decision was made, we found
the subject alternating between these three activity modes (examining-drawing-
thinking) in rapid succession.’ Akin and Lin are cautious about drawing any inference
of causality, concluding only that ‘Our data suggest that designers explore their
domain of ideas in a variety of activity modes . . . when they go beyond routine
decisions and achieve design breakthroughs.’
Several of these features of expert designer behaviour were confirmed and clarified by
Suwa, Gero and Purcell
34
from a protocol study of an experienced architect. They
concentrated on the occurrence of ‘unexpected discoveries’ during the design process
– that is, those instances when a designer perceives something ‘new’ in a previously-
drawn element of a solution concept – and related these to the ‘invention’ of further
issues or requirements within the design problem. They found a strong, bi-directional
correlation between unexpected discoveries and the invention of issues and
requirements: ‘Not only did unexpected discoveries become the driving force for the
invention of issues or requirements, but also the occurrence of invention, in turn,
tended to cause new unexpected discoveries.’ This helps to explain the opportunistic
nature of design activity, as the designer pursues issues and requirements in an

evolving solution concept. Suwa, Gero and Purcell suggest that their findings provide
empirical evidence both for the co-evolution of problem space and solution space and
for designing as a ‘situated’ act – that is, that designers invent design issues or
requirements in a way situated in the environment in which they design. Their
analysis also confirms the importance of rapid alternation between different modes of
activity: ‘drawing sketches, representing the visual field in the sketches, perceiving
visuo-spatial features in sketches, and conceiving of design issues or requirements are
all dynamically coupled with each other.’
4. Outstanding designers
The reality of design practice seems to be that some individuals have outstanding
design abilities. Highly creative or talented individuals become successful and highly-
regarded designers, with international reputations both within and beyond their
professional peer groups. However, many studies of designer behaviour have been
based on novices (usually students) or, at best, designers of relatively modest talents.
This is because it is easier to obtain such people as subjects for study. But if studies of
designer behaviour are limited to studies of rather inexpert designers, then our
understanding of design abilty will also be limited. Studying outstanding or
exceptional designers may give us different, and more relevant, insights and
understanding of design expertise.
Lawson
35
made a series of interview and observational studies of outstanding
architects. He found many similarities in their ways of working, and also some
differences. For example, some of the architects prefer to generate a range of
alternative solution concepts, whilst others will focus on a narrow range or just one
concept. Something they all seem to have is an ability to work along ‘parallel lines of
thought’ – that is, to maintain an open-ness, even an ambiguity, about features and
aspects of the design at different levels of detail, and to consider these levels
simultaneously, as the designing proceeds. Lawson suggests that ‘a degree of bravery
is required to allow these lines of thought to remain parallel rather longer than might
seem reasonable to the inexperienced designer.’ He also concludes that ‘one simple
message’ that recurred from his studies was ‘the extremely demanding standards set
by the designers themselves’. Outstanding expertise is fuelled by personal
commitment.
Many findings in Lawson’s studies of outstanding architects resonate with those from
studies of outstanding designers in the fields of engineering and product design by
Cross
36
. Cross reported protocol and interview studies with three outstanding
designers, and drew conclusions on the common aspects of their design strategies.
Firstly, all three designers either explicitly or implicitly relied upon ‘first principles’
in both the origination of their concepts and in the detailed development of those
concepts. Secondly, all three designers explored the problem space from a particular
perspective in order to frame the problem in a way that stimulated and pre-structured
the emergence of design concepts. In some cases, this perspective was a personal one
that the designers seem to bring to most of their designing. Finally, it appeared from
these three examples that creative design solutions arise especially when there is a
conflict to be resolved between the designer’s own high-level problem goals (their
personal commitment) and the criteria for an acceptable solution established by client
or other requirements.

From the analysis of the case studies, there appeared to be similar aspects to the
creative strategies adopted by all three outstanding designers. However, although
there are similarities in creative strategies across domains, this does not necessarily
mean that experts can successfully switch practice between domains. Ericsson and
Lehmann
37
found that the superior performance of experts is usually domain-specific,
and does not transfer across domains. Extensive training within a domain still seems
to be crucial to professional expertise. More studies of expert and exceptional
designers might lead to a more informed consensus about how design skills are
exercised by experts, and on the nature of expertise in design.
5. Conclusions
Expert designers appear to be ‘ill-behaved’ problem solvers, especially in terms of the
time and attention they spend on defining the problem. However, this seems to be
appropriate behaviour, since some studies have suggested that over-concentration on
problem definition does not lead to successful design outcomes. It appears that
successful design behaviour is based not on extensive problem analysis, but on
adequate ‘problem scoping’ and on a focused or directed approach to gathering
problem information and prioritising criteria.
Processes of structuring and formulating the problem are frequently identified as key
features of design expertise. The concept of ‘problem framing’ seems to capture best
the nature of this activity. Successful, experienced and – especially – outstanding
designers are found in various studies to be pro-active in problem framing, actively
imposing their view of the problem and directing the search for solution conjectures.
Expert designers are solution-focused, not problem-focused. This appears to be a
feature of design cognition which comes with education and experience in designing.
In particular, experience in a specific problem domain enables designers to move
quickly to identifying a problem frame and proposing a solution conjecture.
Generating a wide range of alternative solution concepts is an aspect of design
behaviour which is recommended by theorists and educationists but appears not to be
normal practice for expert designers. Most expert designers become readily attached
to single, early solution concepts and are reluctant to abandon them in the face of
difficulties in developing these concepts into satisfactory solutions. This might appear
to be a weak feature of design behaviour, which may be susceptible to change through
education. However, trying to change the ‘unprincipled’ and ‘ill-behaved’ nature of
conventional design activity may be working against aspects that are actually
effective and productive features of design expertise. Generating a very wide range of
alternatives may not be a good thing: some studies have suggested that a relatively
limited amount of generation of alternatives may be the most appropriate strategy.
It has been noticed in some studies that creative, productive design behaviour seems
to be associated with frequent switching of types of cognitive activity. There is no
clear explanation for this observation, but it may be related to the need to make rapid
explorations of problem and solution in tandem, in the co-evolution of problem and
solution.

Conventional wisdom about the nature of problem-solving expertise seems often to be
contradicted by the behaviour of expert designers. In design education we must
therefore be very wary about importing models of behaviour from other fields.
Studies of design activity have frequently found ‘intuitive’ features of design
behaviour to be the most effective and relevant to the intrinsic nature of design. Some
aspects of design theory, however, have tried to develop counter-intuitive models and
prescriptions for design behaviour. We still need a much better understanding of what
constitutes expertise in design, and how we might assist novice students to gain that
expertise.
In this review paper I have concentrated mainly on protocol and similar formalised
methods of study, and I have therefore omitted a range of other kinds of studies that
also have relevant and important contributions to make to the understanding of design
expertise. Protocol analysis has some severe limitations as a research method for
investigating design activity – for instance, it is extremely weak in capturing non-
verbal thought processes, which are so important in design work
38
. Protocol analysis
offers a valuable but highly specific research technique, capturing a few aspects of
design cognition in detail, but failing to encompass many of the broader realities of
designing in context. ‘Designing in Context’ was the topic of the Design Thinking
Research Symposium held in Delft in 2001, with papers featuring in a special issue of
Design Studies
39
. Other kinds of study, which attempt to capture a broader view,
include detailed observation of industrial practice, such as Badke-Schaub and
Frankenberger
40
and Busby
41
, and ethnographic methods, such as Bucciarelli
42
.
Ethnographic approaches to the study of engineering design was also the topic of a
special issue of Design Studies
43
.
The range and number of studies surveyed in this paper suggest that the field of
studies of expertise in design is growing, and a variety of similar observations and a
number of common issues have been identified. In many cases, the issues remain
unresolved, and there is therefore still considerable work to be done to establish a
robust and reliable understanding of expertise in design.
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