Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Design is a complex cognitive task that pushes the limits of human information processing. How do expert designers handle this complexity? Professional and student architects solved a real-world diagram construction task that required satisfying multiple, sometimes conflicting, constraints to achieve an acceptable design. Professionals' initial designs were more consistent with task constraints and remained more consistent throughout problem solution. Students restructured their designs more often in their unsuccessful attempts to satisfy the multiple constraints imposed by the task. Analysis of subjects' verbal and action protocols suggests that one aspect of professionals' superior performance is their early recognition of the critical constraints on a design. Professionals handle these constraints before others to structure the remaining, more negotiable, constraints. By properly ordering constraints, professionals effectively minimize constraint conflicts. As conflict resolution has high processing costs, constraint prioritization may be one way that professionals cope with the complexity of design.