IDEA FIXATION IN DESIGN: THE INFLUENCE OF PICTURES AND WORDS

During design problem solving designers often search for support in external sources of information, such as pictures, written descriptions and physical examples of available solutions. While devising new concepts designers sometimes become too attached to particular ideas, either developed by them or induced by external precedents. Inadequate adoption of features and principles from other existing solutions has been described as design xation. These issues have been discussed as having an impact on design creativity and innovation. The study presented here investigated the in uence pictorial and written representations, of a particular solution,had upon a group of industrial design students addressing a design problem. The results clearly demonstrate the presence of xation with the participants exposed to the pictorial example, but not to the written material.Reasons for such discrepancy are discussed and examined in terms of the implications it might place upon designers' inclination to favour speci c sources of information

[1]  N. Maier Reasoning in humans. II. The solution of a problem and its appearance in consciousness. , 1931 .

[2]  Claudia Eckert,et al.  Sources of inspiration: a language of design , 2000 .

[3]  John R. Anderson Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications , 1980 .

[4]  Michael Tovey,et al.  Intuitive and objective processes in automotive design , 1992 .

[5]  P. Badke-Schaub,et al.  Creativity and Complex Problem Solving in the Social Context , 2001 .

[6]  Charles M. Eastman,et al.  New Directions in Design Cognition: Studies of Representation and Recall , 2001 .

[7]  K. Duncker,et al.  On problem-solving , 1945 .

[8]  Klaus Ehrlenspiel,et al.  Comparing designers from practice and designers with systematic design education , 1999 .

[9]  W. Newstetter,et al.  Design Knowing and Learning: Cognition in Design Education , 2001 .

[10]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  The Structure of Ill Structured Problems , 1973, Artif. Intell..

[11]  Maryanne M. Gobble,et al.  Design Thinking , 2010, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible.

[12]  Bruce Hanington,et al.  Methods in the Making: A Perspective on the State of Human Research in Design , 2003, Design Issues.

[13]  John S. Gero,et al.  Design and other types of fixation , 1996 .

[14]  Kathryn Henderson,et al.  On Line and On Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering , 1998 .

[15]  Carl Martin Allwood,et al.  Decision Making: Social and Creative Dimensions , 2010 .

[16]  S. Tipper,et al.  Negative priming between pictures and words in a selective attention task: Evidence for semantic processing of ignored stimuli , 1988, Memory & cognition.