Design myopia and vicarious learning from good versus bad examples in creative design competitions
Christoph Riedl, Victor P. Seidel · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2016
High-quality creative design work creates tremendous value for organizations, but how do individual designers learn to produce better designs? Learning through direct experience often presumes evaluation of performance that is objective and immediate; in creative design work that evaluation is social and often temporarily displaced, providing hard-to- interpret signals for learning. We investigate how individual designers learn from direct experience and learn vicariously from indirect experience-evaluating both good and bad examples of others. Our analysis draws on data from a ten-year panel of almost 180,000 design submissions and 150 million evaluations. We find that in the absence of any vicarious learning, individuals experience “design myopia” resulting in successively lower quality designs before reaching a positive learning rate. Furthermore, we find that while individuals learn from evaluating the good examples of others, they fail to learn from evaluating bad examples. However, individuals’ can overcome their inability to learn from bad examples through prior experience in evaluating good examples. We also find that experience helps designers not only to gain high evaluation from consumers but also to understand the “black box” of how designs are chosen by firms for production.