Expertise and Designer Burnout
Expertise and Designer Burnout
Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Department of Computer and Information Sciences, De Montfort University, Milton Keynes, UK.
Department of Psychology, Washington State University, Vancouver WA, USA
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Engineering Design
Technical University of Munich, Munich, 1999, volume 1, pp 195-200.
Introduction. Designer burnout is a serious problem in some major industries: expensively trained designers give up or change jobs because they are too stale to be effective. Developing expertise can cut two ways: designers become more efficient, but they can become less creative. What causes designer burnout? When is it a significant problem? How can it be alleviated, to retain expertise and corporate knowledge while maintaining creativity?
This paper accounts for designer burnout by relating our observations of the relationship between expertise, efficiency and creativity in knitwear design to psychological analyses of the nature of expertise and creativity. We argue that the loss of creativity with experience common among knitwear designers is a consequence of how the demands of the knitwear design task influences experiential learning. This analysis has implications for a wide range of engineering industries.
Keywords: expertise, creativity, design psychology, aesthetic design.
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Claudia Eckert
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Martin Stacey
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Jennifer Wiley
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