Strategic knowledge differences between an expert and a novice designer

In this chapter, we explore the effect of strategic knowledge in conceptual design process by examing the differences in cognitive processes and groupings between a novice and an expert. In our previous studies, we found that the expert’s cognitive activity and productivity (in terms of image generation) were three times as high as the novice’s in the overall design process (Kavakli et al. 1999). We investigated the structure of cognitive actions in the design protocols, and found that there is evidence for the coexistence of the cognitive actions (Kavakli and Gero 2001). Certain groups of cognitive actions increase and decrease in parallel with each other in the protocols of the novice and expert designers. We suggested that the differences in the performance of designers could be attributed to the differences in the structure of those concurrent cognitive actions. Investigating the concurrent cognitive actions, we found that the expert’s cognitive actions are well organized and clearly structured, while the novice’s cognitive performance has been divided into many groups of concurrent actions. (Kavakli and Gero 2002). In this chapter, we focus on explaining the difference in performance between the expert and novice in terms of their respective strategic knowledge.