A study on the effects of example familiarity and modality on design fixation

Abstract

Design fixation is a factor that negatively influences the generation of novel design concepts (Jansson & Smith, 1991;Moreno et al., 2015;Smith et al., 1993). When designers fixate, they tend to reproduce example features or features from their initial ideas. In order to mitigate design fixation, it is crucial to identify the factors that influence the extent of design fixation. This paper investigates two such factors -the modality of examples and the familiarity of designers with the example features. To investigate this, an experiment is conducted with mechanical engineering students who were asked to generate ideas to solve a peanut sheller design problem. They generated ideas in five different experimental conditions: (1) Control, where no example was given (2) the first example given in a sketch form (3) the first example given as a nonfunctional prototype (4) a second example in sketch form and (5) the second example in a working prototype form. The first example was a non-feasible solution, but it contained several features familiar to the participants. The second example was a feasible solution, but it contained less familiar features. In order to understand the extent of fixation triggered by the examples, three metrics were utilized to compare across the experimental conditions: the quantity of non-redundant ideas generated by the participants, the presence of example features in their solutions, and their fixation to the example's energy source. The results showed that in the case of the familiar example, the example modality did play an important role in the extent of design fixation. Across the examples, it was found that the first example containing several familiar features caused more fixation Viswanathan, Tomko & Linsey 3 than the second one. Overall, this paper shows that the modality in which the example was communicated and the presence of familiar features in an example influenced the fixation caused by those examples.

Design Fixation From Initial Examples: Provided Versus Self-Generated Ideas

“…Beginning engineers may have less prior knowledge of existing designs, along with little exposure to methods for generating diverse ideas. The observed findings may differ from studies with more advanced student engineers [17,39] and with expert engineers with more experience [26,28]. Further research is needed to address how prior domain knowledge influences fixation.…”

“…They reviewed 25 studies exploring factors such as modality of the example, number of examples provided, diversity, and novelty of examples; however, findings have been inconsistent across studies. Familiar examples produced more fixation [38,39], though Perttula and Silipä [40] found it also led to better design outcomes. Logically, the number of examples provided with a problem should impact fixation, but Perttula and Sipilä [40] and Dahl and Moreau [41] found no effect.…”

Generating Reuse Possibilities for Retired Wind-Turbine Blades

“…Therefore, those who were asked to use SCAMPER were given a four-page instructional aid, demonstrating how it could be applied towards concepts that reuse plastic bottles. Viswanathan et al (2016) showed that examples with familiar features caused more fixation. Therefore, examples in plasticbottle reuse were chosen as they were dissimilar to wind-turbine blades in both function and scale.…”

The effect of explicit instructions in idea generation studies

“…Presumably, differences in feature repetition results between stimulated and non-stimulated participants are more pronounced when those features represent rare, unusual solutions to the design problem, thus being very unlikely to emerge during idea generation in non-SGs. Conversely, repetition results might be similar if the features analyzed represent obvious solutions, thus being highly likely to appear in ideas with or without external stimulation [although there is recent evidence to the contrary (Viswanathan et al, 2016)]. Though the features used in both our studies are easily comparable (i.e., following a similar structure and referring to the same bike parts), we believe that the features used in study 2 were more common than those in study 1, especially the “ extendable components to change bike size ”, which frequently appeared in the designs of all groups.…”

“…Design researchers have studied many different aspects of the inspiration process, including characteristics of external stimuli or inspiration sources (e.g., the modality of representation used for the stimuli) (Linsey et al, 2008; Sarkar & Chakrabarti, 2008; Atilola & Linsey, 2015; Viswanathan et al, 2016) and aspects of the design process (e.g., time available for ideation) (Youmans, 2011 a ; Tsenn et al, 2014; Siangliulue et al, 2015). One of the stimuli characteristics that has been studied is whether the quality of the examples (i.e., good or bad) would influence feature repetition, or whether those examples would be copied indiscriminately.…”