Computational Modeling of Designer Proficiency
What makes a designer proficient? We examined different proficiency designers in engineering configuration design problems and discovered the differences in their behavior. A computational model of the different proficiency designers was created which explicitly modeled these behavioral differences and successfully mimicked the behavior and performance of the different proficiency designers. These agents can used to explore questions like which team members have the largest influence on team performance, how organizations should distribute different proficiency agents to their design teams, and how lower-proficiency designers can learn to become higher-proficiency designers. Results from this work have shown that the most proficient member of a configuration design team will have the largest effect on team performance, which is a finding that helps inform how design teams should be constructed
