Overcoming design fixation: Design by analogy studies and nonintuitive findings

Abstract

Design fixation is a phenomenon with important significance to many fields of design due to the potential negative impacts it may have in design outcomes, especially during the ideation stage of the design process. The present study aims to provide a framework for understanding, or at least probing, design fixation by presenting a review of existing defixation approaches, as well as metrics that have been employed to understand and account for design fixation. This study also describes the results of two design by analogy (DbA) methods, WordTree and SCAMPER, to overcome design fixation in an experiment that involved 97 knowledge-domain experts. The study outcomes are at least twofold: a common framework of metrics and approaches to overcome design fixation in a wide range of design problems and nonintuitive results for DbA approaches in design fixation and other related creativity metrics. The application of WordTree and SCAMPER shows that both methods yield increased novelty compared to a control, where the SCAMPER results are significantly higher than WordTree. It is also found that WordTree mitigates design fixation whereas SCAMPER appears to be ineffective for this purpose but effective to generate an increased quantity of novel ideas. These results demonstrate that both DbA methods provide de-fixation capabilities and enhance designers’ creativity during idea generation.

Design Fixation From Initial Examples: Provided Versus Self-Generated Ideas

“…We compared these fixation rates (for this first individual brainstorming phase only) in a 2 × 2 ANOVA with problem and fixation source as between group variables, and the ratio of similar concepts to total number of concepts per student (in phase 1) as the dependent measure. This fixation ratio was used to account for the varied concept set sizes generated across students [16]. The results showed a main effect of fixation source where more fixation occurred in the self-generated example condition (M = 0.32, SD = 0.24) than in the Provided Example condition (M = 0.24, SD = 0.28), F(1, 165) = 4.4, p < 0.04.…”

“…If designers cling to initial examples because generation is challenging, using generation tools as support may reduce fixation. Previous studies have explored design-by-analogy tools to support idea generation and shown that fixation effects from presented examples can be reduced [15,16]; however, these studies included a 2-day delay between an initial generation phase and a second phase with the support tool. Is it possible to mitigate design fixation within a design session?…”

“…While fixation naturally arises in many cognitive tasks as a result of associative memory processes [12][13][14], creativity in design requires identifying ways to move past fixation to identify divergent ideas. A wide variety of methods have been examined as ways to mitigate overreliance on existing designs and current knowledge [10,15,16].…”

“…If so, methods to mitigate the effects of design fixation are even more important; thus, we included an additional idea generation phase where an ideation tool, design heuristics, was provided to determine whether fixation observed in the first phase could be reduced. Other studies have shown that fixation can be reduced through the use of idea generation supports, such as analogy after a delay [15,16]. In our experiment, students worked alone to generate designs in an initial individual brainstorming phase either with or without a provided example as in Ref.…”

Generating Reuse Possibilities for Retired Wind-Turbine Blades

“…That is, each word or phrase of the acronym can be applied to a product or part to trigger potential reuses. Moreno et al (2016) observed SCAMPER's effectiveness in generating novel concepts, since reflecting on each corresponding word or phrase could provide novel insights.…”