Mitigating Design Fixation: A Visualization Tool for Enhancing Situation Awareness
Abstract
External stimuli can stimulate a designer's creativity and improve the outcome of design ideation for product/service concept generation. A psychological phenomenon that may occur during such utilization of external stimuli is design fixation, which is widely believed to adversely affect the ideation outcome. One of the difficulties in preventing or alleviating design fixation is that the designer may not easily detect or predict its occurrence during the mentally demanding task of ideation. In an effort to address the problem of design fixation, the current study develops a situation awareness (SA) support system, which helps the novice designer perceive and predict the occurrences of design fixation. The situation awareness support system (SASS) is empirically evaluated in its utility in mitigating design fixation. The study result shows that the situation awareness support system can help the novice designer to mitigate design fixation, while not influencing significant impact on the ideation performance.
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When SA stages are disrupted, people tend to fixate and explore less effectively; conversely, scaffolding the cycle from perception through comprehension to projection can broaden search and improve outcomes.
“Prior research shows that when these stages are disrupted, people tend to fi xate and explore less effectively; conversely, scaffolding the cycle from perception through comprehension to projection can broaden search and improve outcomes [43, 46, 76].”
From Criticmate: Stagewise Human–AI Co-Critique in Single-Screen UI Evaluation (2026) · cites this paper as [43]
Prior work has extensively documented what usability issues experts identify, but far less is known about how experts reason through these issues across stages of perception, interpretation, and projection.
“While prior work has extensively documented what usability issues experts identify [35, 52], far less is known about how experts reason through these issues across stages of perception, interpretation, and projection [43, 76].”
From Criticmate: Stagewise Human–AI Co-Critique in Single-Screen UI Evaluation (2026) · cites this paper as [43]
Cites
Jansson, D. G., & Smith, S. M. (1991) · Design Studies · doi:10.1016/0142-694x(91)90003-f · Cited by 1,087 · see citing works
Design and other types of fixation
Purcell, A. T., & Gero, J. S. (1996) · Design Studies · doi:10.1016/s0142-694x(96)00023-3 · Cited by 552 · see citing works
Constraining effects of examples in a creative generation task
Smith, S. M., Ward, T. B., & Schumacher, J. S. (1993) · Memory & Cognition · doi:10.3758/bf03202751 · Cited by 542 · see citing works
Designing for Situation Awareness: An Approach to User-Centered Design, Second Edition
Endsley, M. R. (2016) · doi:10.1201/b11371 · Cited by 424 · see citing works
Design fixation: Classifications and modern methods of prevention
Youmans, R. J., & Arciszewski, T. (2014) · Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing · doi:10.1017/s0890060414000043 · Cited by 121 · see citing works
Overcoming design fixation: Design by analogy studies and nonintuitive findings
Moreno, D. P., Blessing, L. T., Yang, M. C., Hernández, A. A., & Wood, K. L. (2016) · Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing · doi:10.1017/s0890060416000068 · Cited by 79 · see citing works
Distributed analogical idea generation: inventing with crowds
Yu, L., Kittur, A., & Kraut, R. E. (2014) · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2556288.2557371 · Cited by 60 · see citing works
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Criticmate: Stagewise Human–AI Co-Critique in Single-Screen UI Evaluation
Ko, J., Choi, J., Morales, C., Kim, D., & Ko, M. (2026) · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3772318.3790929 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
- Authors
- Hwang, D., Choi, B., Bae, S., & Park, W.
- Affiliations
- Singapore University of Technology and Design (SG)
- Seoul National University (KR)
- SISNETinfo Co., Ltd., 128, Gasan digital 1-ro, Geumcheon-gu, Seoul 08507, South Korea
- Venue
- Journal of Mechanical Design
- Publisher
- ASME International
- Published
- 2020-11-20
- Volume
- 143
- Issue
- 6
- ISSN
- 0161-8458 (ISSN-L)
- 1050-0472
- 1528-9001
- OpenAlex
- W3093557993
- Cited by
- 14
- References
- 7
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 3
- FWCI
- 0.86
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Mechanical Design (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Mechanical Engineering › Design Education and Practice
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Creativity in Education and Neuroscience
- Keywords
- design fixation, situational awareness, design ideation, external stimuli, creativity, novice designers, visualization tools
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