Creativity and fixation in the real world: A literature review of case study research

Abstract

There are several prior case studies of design creativity which relate to design fixation. There is also a broader literature of qualitative research surrounding these cases, both within and beyond the design literature. However, these various texts are widely distributed, not well connected and seemingly not well known. This paper reviews the relevant literature, collecting many of these studies together for the first time. This allows the texts to be compared, their common themes to be identified and future work to be planned.More of such studies are necessary to increase the breadth and depth of accounts of creative design. This would permit connections and contrasts to be made and promote methodological diversity within research on inspiration and fixation.

Conceptualising Design Fixation and Design Limitation and Quantifying Their Impacts on Resource Use and Carbon Emissions

“…This article also conceptualised the design fixation on higher scales such as organisations and institutions, and thereby provided a greater understanding in particular to design fixations in teams and organisations as well as the scalability of the concept. This is expected to enhance the body of knowledge on design fixation [15,47], which is to date largely based on experimental research of individual designers and informs little on real-world design [109]. On the organisational level, this article showed that the literature found that conceptual fixation occurred in large organisations [58] and that the knowledge fixation was found as an important gap [40] (see Section 3.4).…”

Virtual Reality design-build-test games with physics simulation: opportunities for researching design cognition

“…Case studies typically involve more naturalistic observations of designers engaging with their design activities, often in commercial projects. In these studies, researchers record the progress and development of design activities, by some combination of direct observation, document analysis and participant interviews (e.g., see Crilly, 2019a;Crilly & Moroşanu Firth, 2019;Cross, 2001;Jonson, 2005;Sosa, 2019;Yilmaz & Seifert, 2011).…”

“…However, detailed critical comparisons are difficult because of substantial variation in how individual methods are applied and how they are tailored to specific research questions. For illustrations of this, see discussions about the validity of protocol studies in design and problem solving (e.g., Blech et al, 2019;Chiu & Shu, 2010); experiments in design and engineering (e.g., Cash et al, 2016;Panchal & Szajnfarber, 2017) and case studies in design and cognition (e.g., Crilly, 2019a;Wallace & Gruber, 1989). However, whatever strengths and weaknesses are identified with existing methods, the development of alternative approaches should not be seen as an attack: methodological diversity is beneficial for exploring different aspects of the phenomena of interest and providing crossmethod checks (for such arguments applied to design research see Crilly, 2019b; for wider arguments see Greene et al, 1989;Mingers, 1997;van Peer et al, 2012).…”

Modelling Design Trade-Offs Using a Set Theory Approach: Alternative Paths for Navigating Trade-Off Situations

“…Literature on design practice shows that designers do not typically perform an exhaustive search of all viable designs. Instead, the typical design process involves a seed idea that is then developed into a family of designs by iterative changes (Crilly, 2019a;Hatchuel and Weil, 2009). Furthermore, these iterative changes include series of arbitrary decisions that initially pass with their importance unnoticed, but limit the design space (Crilly, 2019b).…”