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 support system, which helps the designer perceive and predict the occurrences of design fixation. The situation awareness support system is empirically evaluated in its utility in mitigating design fixation. The study result shows that the situation awareness support system can help the designer to mitigate design fixation while not influencing significant impact on the ideation performance.

This study presents a novel ideation aid termed technologically-related products from other domains (TeRPODs) for addressing technology-push product concept generation problems. A technology-push product concept generation problem is specified in terms of a new technology and a target product/industry/business domain for which the technology is to be utilized to create novel products/applications. TeRPODs are example applications of the technology collected from domains other than the target domain and serve as brainstorming stimuli during the new product concept generation. An experiment was conducted to empirically evaluate the utility of TeRPODs. The technology-push product concept generation problem considered was that of developing new applications of the augmented reality head-up display (AR HUD) technology for the automotive domain. Two groups of participants, one utilizing a relevant set of TeRPODs (the TeRPODs group) for ideation and the other (the control group) without any ideation aids, performed individual brainstorming to generate new automotive AR HUD application concepts. The TeRPODs group produced a significantly better ideation outcome than the control group in the quantity and diversity of ideation outcome. Also, the use of TeRPODs significantly improved usefulness, novelty, preference and profitability ratings of generated ideas. TeRPODs may serve as a useful ideation tool for technology-push inventions.