By now you may be familiar with the axiom that to gain expertise in something requires 10,000 hours of practice. What does 10,000 hours of practice look like and how does it lead to expert status? In other words, one doesn't wake up on the morning after the 10,000 hour and suddenly have access to expertise, so there must be stages or levels on the way to "expert" status. Indeed, the state one reaches after 10,000 hours must be a constructed notion useful in evaluating relative experience—no doubt one continues to develop expertise beyond that point. It would also follow that these stages must be relevant to the practice in question. So, what do the stages of design expertise consist of?
Bryan Lawson, an architect and psychologist who specializes in researching the cognitive aspects of
design thinking (
the science of design), has developed an outline of these steps in his book
What Designers Know. He begins by framing out the levels of expertise (via Kees Dorst and Hubert Dreyfus) as they will relate to the nature of each step. In a sense, each level of expertise roughly corresponds to a cognitive ability, although in reality the transitions are very fluid. The levels in ascending order are novice, beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. These levels are fairly straightforward, even if the differences between each level entail some interesting discourse. We will take them at face value to understand the five steps towards expertise which I will list below:
