Shaping Products: Differences Between Expert and Novice Industrial Designers

Abstract

The process of shaping a product's visual appearance is crucial in determining consumer response. However, extant research on the nature of expertise in this process is scarce. Specifically, there is absence of studies investigating differences between how expert and novice industrial designers use information in this process. This research, using think aloud method, compared informational behaviour of an expert and a novice industrial designer in shaping products. We report rich qualitative accounts of their informational behaviour, revealing a sharp contrast between them.

An Industry-Academia, Multidisciplinary and Expertise-Heterogeneous Design Approach: A Case Study on Designing for Mobility

“…While adopting the Dreyfus Model as a theoretical basis to better appreciate the development and progression from lower to higher levels of design skills by design students, academics reflect on some of the limitations of the general skills development model, propose a version of the framework centred upon design, and call for more research on the transformations of designers [7]. Other studies continue to elaborate further on the behavioural and cognitive distinctions between design novices and experts during design processes and contribute to the consolidation of knowledge on those individual differences [37,38]. Conversely, some academics shift the focus to the implications of interpersonal novice-expert interactions in design engineering activities, which implies a change in the unit of analysis from skilled individuals to heterogeneously-skilled groups [8].…”

Methodological Design: Effects of a Morphological Approach for Different Students and Professionals

“…Therefor it is important to focus on this phase and to study effects of the method to different students groups as we want to prepare our students in the best possible way to generate added value to the current design practice in industry. The literature review (Ho 2001, Ahmed et al, 2003, Goldtschmidt 2013, Björklund 2013, Seidel and Fixson 2013, Kok et al, 2016, Self et al, 2017, Sola et al, 2017, Mosely et al, 2018, Jagtap 2018, Kierman et al, 2019 suggests a significant difference between both student groups, novice and more experienced ones, therefor made it interesting to further research this aspect. Our main aim is therefor to investigate the effect of the proposed design method to different student groups, especially Bachelor and Master students to see whether the method is more effective for one of the groups.…”

Design Expertise: A Structured Literature Review

“…Currently, there is a plethora of different directions in the field of design expertise research e.g., industrial design (Huang and Li, 2015;Oygür and Ülkebas, 2021;Yilmaz and Daly, 2016;Jagtap, 2018;Rusten and Bryson, 2007), engineering design (Ahmed, 2007;Atman et. al., 2007;Steele, 2012), and architectural design (Alipour, 2021;Bernal, 2016;Gulari, 2015;Oluwatayo et.…”