I think the bit about top-down, breadth-first search is erroneously regarded as a crucial concept of the paper this author cites. That is an excerpt from the in

I think the bit about top-down, breadth-first search is erroneously regarded as a crucial concept of the paper this author cites. That is an excerpt from the introductory portion of the paper, and does not appear to be the rule in terms of being a problem-solving approach. Particularly interesting is a part in the paper that describes how expert engineers would quickly abandon alternatives that incur higher cognitive cost. It is possible that breadth-first search happens before this, which is not surprising (in fact, is expected, if you think in terms of Ericsson's explanation). The crucial move is what heuristic the expert uses to prune their decision tree, in a rapid, economical, sensible, and ultimately practical fashion. So in fact, the blog post's claim of "Both product developers and designers have a tendency to jump on the first great idea they generate and head down one path, instead of patiently exploring the space of possible solutions" can't really be called a characterization of novice product devs/designers -- because you may observe the exact same behavior (i.e., observable behavior) in experts. The Lawson study cited in Nigel Cross's paper said the recurring theme in expert designers was their claim to be keeping multiple concepts in parallel. This is a reiteration of Ericsson's theories (long term working memory). The key difference, as it seems, is, unsurprisingly, exposure and experience. IMHO, "pragmatists" vs. "realists" is a suboptimal generalization.