An underlying cognitive aspect of design creativity: Limited Commitment Mode control strategy

Design creativity can be enhanced by identifying the underlying cognitive capabilities used by expert designers and training novice designers for those capabilities specifically. It has been identified by Goel that designers use the Limited Commitment Mode (LCM) control strategy in design problem solving. In this work, we conducted a study to confirm that LCM control strategy is used in solving a design problem and to see whether there is a difference in the level of LCM control strategy between expert and student designers. We devised a quantitative measure that can indicate the level of LCM control strategy usage as well as a visual representation for LCM control strategy usage. As a result, through these methods, we concluded that expert designers used more LCM control strategy than student designers. Also, we compared LCM control strategy usage with how soon critical idea decision is made. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.