Training tomorrow's designers: A study on the design fixation

Abstract

The presence of rich pictorial stimuli around designers is a factor that affects the generation of novel ideas. Designers tend to duplicate features from the examples they encounter in their immediate surroundings or in their day-to-day activities. This adhesion to the existing features from their surroundings is termed as "design fixation". This study explores the fixation effect of examples provided to novices as a part of their class project and ways to mitigate this fixation. We investigate two hypotheses in this study: The first hypothesis is that students tend to duplicate features of examples provided to them, in their designs. The second hypothesis states that ability to build and test their designs helps students to mitigate this fixation. To investigate these, an experiment is conducted as the part of a freshmen class project. Students in three different sections are asked to solve a design problem. One section is provided with a good example, another section with a poor example and third with the poor example with a warning about what makes that design poor. The results show that in majority of cases, students duplicate features from their examples. It is also observed that students who obtain poor example tend to copy the negative feature in their solutions, thereby creating more complicated and less effective designs. They successfully mitigate this fixation as they build and test the physical models of their designs. These results indicate that existing designs and experiences has great potential to limit innovation and engineering students need to be taught effective approaches for mitigating design fixation. Fixation to features limiting functionality of designs can be mitigated by building and testing physical models of those designs. Being able to build prototypes of their ideas can help engineers in identifying the negative features. Students need to be introduced to good and poor examples and they need to be explained what makes those examples good or poor. As engineering educators, we need to train students to learn through building and thus recognize negative features in their designs. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.