Design and other types of fixation

“Experts are believed to be able to store and access information in larger cognitive chunks than novices can and to recognize underlying principles rather than focusing on the surface features of problems (Dorner, 1999; Nigel, 2004; Purcell & Gero, 1996; Suwa et al., 2000).”

“Purcell and Gero (1992, 1996) extend the Jansson and Smith (1991) experiments by showing that fix-ation effects only occur with example designs that include principles that are already familiar.”

“, see [31, 45]).”

“This could result in fixation by novice and expert designers alike ( Jansson & Smith, 1991; Linsey & Viswanathan, 2010), although this trend was found to be less prevalent in one study involving senior undergraduate industrial designers (Purcell & Gero, 1996).”

“1 On the basis of VanLehn's (1998) findings and the evidence provided in the design fixation literature (Jansson & Smith, 1991; Purcell & Gero, 1996; Purcell et al., 1993), we predicted that references to the example would be more frequent in the fixation condition, in which participants should…”

“…the concept of design fixation is often explicitly connected to psychological work on functional fixedness,6 mental set and the Einstellung effect, Purcell and Gero (1996) note that fixation might exist in a number of forms and that ‘we as researchers need to be wary of becoming fixated on our…”

“When a person experiences design fixation, they tend to adhere to pre-conceived ideas and concepts, limiting exploration of the design space during ideation [30, 40, 47].”

“frozen, a phenomenon known as design fixation [21].”

“A number of studies have investigated this premature closure of the search process, defined as fixation (Cross, 2001; Jansson & Smith, 1991; Purcell & Gero, 1996; Linsey, Tseng, Fu, Cagan, Wood, & Schunn, 2010).”

“Purcell and Gero (1996), after a series of experiments, concluded that mechanical designers might become fixated on principles when the example shown embodies typical principles concerning the knowledge base of the discipline, or when the example contains a principle unusual to the context and/or…”

“In the literature on problem solving, this initial phase is regarded as crucial to the success of problem-solving processes (Goel and Pirolli, 1992; Guindon, 1990; Purcell and Gero, 1996; Simon, 1973).”

“…initial conceptual stages, it has been shown that designers are particularly susceptible to information from example solutions such as existing products that are similar to what is being designed (Chrysikou & Weisberg, 2005; Jansson & Smith, 1991; Perttula & Liikkanen, 2006; Purcell & Gero, 1996).”

“On the process side, CSTs are most frequently evaluated by means of subjective self-reports of experience from tool users.”

“This may reflect something about design education that makes industrial designers continuously search for difference, perhaps even becoming fixated on being creative (Purcell & Gero, 1996).”

“It has been suggested that fixation researchers should be wary of becoming fixated on what fixation is (Purcell & Gero, 1996).”

“Still other studies focus on the differences between design in different domains, examining a third aspect in this analysis concerning the nature of design (e.g., Akin, 2001; Purcell & Gero, 1996).”

“[36] Designers fixated on features that defied the guidelines of the design problem Chrysikou and Weisberg [37] Chrysikou and Weisberg [37] Mechanical engineers and industrial designers fixate in different ways, with ME’s becoming fixated on a particular unusual principle used to solve a problem, while ID’s may become…”

“…(Christiansen & Schunn, 2007; Chrysikou & Weisberg, 2005; Jansson & Smith, 1991; Kolodner & Wills, 1996; Linsey, Tseng, Fu, Cagan, & Wood, 2010; Nijstad, Stroebe, & Lodewijk, 2002; Perttula & Sipila, 2007; Purcell & Gero, 1996; Purcell, Williams, & Gero, 1993; Smith, Ward, & Schumacher, 1993).”

“…evidence that designers often consider only a small set of related concepts when generating ideas (Ball et al., 1994; Chrysikou & Weisberg, 2005; Dong & Sarkar, 2011; Linsey et al., 2010; Purcell & Gero, 1996; Sio et al., 2015; Smith, 1995; Viswanathan & Linsey, 2013; Youmans & Arciszewski, 2014).”

“This pattern of idea production tends to occur in settings where users need to suggest ideas on topics they are familiar with or on features that are commonly known (Jansson and Smith, 1991; Perttula and Sipilä, 2007; Purcell and Gero, 1996).”

“This also reduces the flexibility of designers in choosing novel features for the solutions they generate [8].”

“This strong commitment to a concept is called fixation, and is described as the negative effect of an early commitment to a design (Purcell and Gero 1996; Purcell et al 1993) or as a blind adherence to a set of ideas or concepts limiting the output of conceptual design (Jansson and Smith 1991;…”

“In design education, design instructors report that students often commit to the design ideas that they think of first (Purcell & Gero, 1996).”

“For example, Jansson and Smith (1991; see also Purcell & Gero, 1996) asked engineering design students and professionals to generate as many solutions as possible for a series of such open-ended design problems (e.g., design a bike-rack for a car).”

“…well tuned to task demands, they are influenced by prior experiences of similar objects and situations, even when the designers know they should disregard this experience – an instance of a general phenomenon known to psychologists as fixation (Jansson and Smith, 1991; Purcell and Gero, 1996).”

“If design literature builds on this notion of fixation in design processes (Purcell & Gero, 1996; Chrysikou & Weisberg, 2005; Perttula & Liikanen, 2006; Linsey et al, 2010) or even proposes practical methodologies to overcome fixation effects (Van der Vlugt & Wiering, 2002; Linsey et al. 2009;…”

“…January 2, 2013; published online February 20, 2013 Negative effects of introducing analogical information or examples are possible as well, a main one being design fixation [16] [17] [18] [19], or the " blind adherence to a set of ideas or concepts limiting the output of conceptual design " [16].”

“We agree with other authors [28, 38] that solution transfer per se does not mean that the resulting ideas are not creative (or were not produced by a creative process).”

“…montré un effet de design fixation ou de conformité aux exemplesfournis par l’expéri-mentateur (Chrysikou & Weisberg, 2005 ; Jansson & Smith, 1991 ; Purcell & Gero, 1996 ; Smith, Ward, & Shumacher, 1993), nous défendons l’idée que certains types d’exemples ou de sources d’inspiration inciteront…”

“A similar fixation effect on the most accessible and common knowledge has been reported when individuals have to generate ideas rather than solve a problem (Ward, 1994; Agogué et al., 2014a, 2015; Purcell and Gero, 1996; Jansson and Smith, 1991).”

“Early focus on one idea is referred to by various names such as ‘‘design shutdown’’ (Newstetter and McCracken 2001) and ‘‘design fixation’’ (Purcell and Gero 1996).”

“…pictorial examples to allow designers to consider additional design information without over constraining the design (Christiaans & Van Andel, 1993; Purcell & Gero, 1996; Christensen & Schunn, 2007; Tseng et al., 2008; Yang, 2009), and audiorecorded examples to foster retrieval of long-term…”

“Jansson and Smith 1991 , Smith 1995 , Purcell and Gero 1996 , Chrysikou and Weisberg 2005 ).”

“A number of studies in various domains of creative production show that the semantic structure of a category has a substantial influence on what people produce (eg, Purcell & Gero, 1996 ; Smith, Ward, & Schumacher, 1993 ; Ward, Patterson, Sifonis, Dodds, & Saunders, 2002 ).”

“The same result has been replicated by many similar studies (Purcell and Gero 1992, 1996; Chrysikou and Weisberg 2005; Cardoso, Badke-Schaub, and Luz 2009; Linsey et al. 2010; Cardoso and Badke-Schaub 2011), in various experimental conditions.”

“…design perspectives can provide rich results that allow for design disciplines to learn from each other (e.g., Cross & Roozenburg, 1992; Daly, 2008; Daly, Adams, & Bodner, 2012; Goldschmidt & Rodgers, 2013; Lloyd & Scott, 1994; Purcell & Gero, 1996; Yilmaz, Daly, Seifert, & Gonzalez, 2010, 2015).”

“But even if designers are actively encouraged to free themselves from existing ideas, they struggle to do so, as research on fixation by Purcell and Gero (1996) and Jansson and Smith (1991) has shown.”

“Design fixation has been identified as a common block to creativity; it is the tendency of a designer to favor a design from previous experience, a design seen or developed by the designer [27].”

“…refers to something that blocks successful completion of various types of cognitive operations, including those involved in memory, problem solving, and creative idea generation(e.g., Smith & Blankenship, 1989; Jansson & Smith, 1991; Smith, 1994; Purcell & Gero, 1996; Chrysikou & Weisberg, 2005).”

“The fixation effect refers to an inability to propose new ideas based on new knowledge if specific knowledge has already been activated (Jansson & Smith, 1991; Purcell & Gero, 1996).”

“It is suggested that training students in the use of metaphors can be considered particularly helpful in the design studio, currently dominated by traditional designeducation approaches such as the instructor self-experience, and other normative approaches, such as precedent-based learning (see, for example, Ak|n, 200…”

“…have developed a variety of constraint management methods for creative thinking: while these cannot be used directly in other fields they indicate how designers, especially in aesthetic design fields, could be taught a wider variety of ways to reconceptualize and rerepresent their problems.”

“Individual  Group Level of expertise or domain knowledge [42], [10], [9], [39], [43], [44], [45]”

“In particular, novice designers often view a presented problem as fixed (Purcell & Gero, 1996), so encouraging this realization through training with Problem Exploration Perspectives may support their development as engineers able to investigate and find problems leading to interesting solutions.”

“This last point highlights the relationship between fixation and framing.”

“Designers experience ‘fixation’ or the tendency to become focused on specific options early in the design process, limiting the consideration of a variety of alternative designs (Purcell & Gero, 1996).”

“(See Jansson & Smith, 1991, and Purcell & Gero, 1996, for experimental studies of fixation in product design.)”

“However, the problem representations that trigger the recall of these semi-abstract solution classes will include inappropriate assumptions, and designers may fixate on recent or salient solution types even when they know they are inappropriate (cf. Purcell and Gero 1996).”

“backgrounds [12,89] and different levels of experience [41,90].”