COMPARING DESIGN OUTCOMES ACHIEVED BY TEAMS OF EXPERT AND NOVICE DESIGNERS THROUGH AGENT-BASED SIMULATION

Abstract Previous research has shown that experienced and novice individuals behave and think differently. Although experienced individuals are better at solving problems, organisations are constantly forming teams of experienced and novice designers to work together on their projects. It is crucial to understand how these teams affect the design outcomes. Therefore, the aim of the study is to investigate how collaborative design teams perform when composed of varying numbers of experienced and novice agents. Specifically in this paper, teams work on a routine task and design outcomes are measured in terms of quality, variety, and exploration of the design space. Since the parameters in the empirical laboratory experiments are difficult to control, an agent-based model was used to simulate these teams. In general, the results show that a team of novice agents with a small number of experienced agents produces solutions of higher quality than an all novice team of agents. However, an all novice team of agents does provide a higher variety of solutions. These results have important implications when teams of experienced and novice designers are formed to work together in practice.