The effect of cognitive biases and heuristics on industrial designers’ attitude toward overdesign. Evidence from a survey in Italy

This paper reports the preliminary findings of a survey carried out on a sample of Italian industrial designers, aimed at checking whether the attitude toward overdesign can be explained by some cognitive biases peculiar to these professionals. Namely, we initially formulated the hypothesis according to which the higher the magnitude of the bias, the higher the level of overdesign. Preliminary findings demonstrate that cognitive biases are relevant drivers of overdesign. However, negative regression coefficients have been obtained. This evidence led us to assume that we are in presence of effective heuristics rather than cognitive biases.