A Step Beyond to Overcome Design Fixation: A Design-by-Analogy Approach

Abstract

Design fixation is a phenomenon that negatively impacts design outcomes, especially when it occurs during the ideation stage of a design process. This study expands our understanding of design fixation by presenting a review of de-fixation approaches, as well as metrics employed to understand and account for design fixation. The study then explores the relevant ideation approach of Design-by-Analogy (DbA) to overcome design fixation, with a fixation experiment of 73 knowledge-domain experts. The study provides a design fixation framework and constitutes a genuine contribution to effectively identify approaches to mitigate design fixation in a wide range of design problems.