Students striving to gain design expertise are likely to face significant barriers, some of which may be specific to a given individual, while others are likely shared among many novices in a discipline. Identifying recurrent patterns of such barriers may inform design pedagogy and indicate larger threshold concepts functioning as portals to disciplinary expertise. In this paper, 38 interior design students in their final required studio, representing three different cohort groups, participated in interviews regarding their design school experiences. From these student accounts, themes pertaining to difficulties which may have functioned as barriers in design expertise development were identified. This paper explores two central themes that are the focus of this inquiry: difficulty in seeking out standards to judge the quality of design work and difficulty in time management. Interview excerpts are used to illustrate how these issues were presented by participating students and the interaction of these factors is examined. An argument is presented that these themes may be indicators of a larger threshold concept for these students, here conceptualized as recognition of problem insufficiency. How this idea might relate to established concepts such as “wicked problems,” “problem structuring,” and “primary generators” is discussed and possible implications of such a threshold concept are explored.
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