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Previous studies in general human cognition indicate that the use of differentsearching strategies to solve well-structured scientific problem have much to dowith experiences. Expert scientists tend to use working-forward strategies tosolve problems, while novices tend to use working-backward ones. As far as the studies in design cognition, although design problems are mostly ill-structured, it was found that designers often decompose a single ill-structured design problem into several well-structured sub-problems. In view of this, we can say that well-structured problems exist in both scientific and design problems. However, there it seems that, so far, has been no studies focusing on the designer''s searching strategies in dealing with well-structured design sub-problems. The objective of this study is thus to explore different searching strategies employed by expert and novice designers to solve well-structured industrial design sub-problems. The research method adopted is protocol analysis. The results suggest that, probably because of the differences in the nature of the structures between scientific and design problems, different from the scientists, both expert and novice designers tend to employ working-backward strategy while dealing with design sub-problems. Based on these results, a cognitive model of searching strategy in industrial design thinking is proposed at the end of this paper.
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