The Effects of Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity and Design Environment on Design Fixation

Design fixation: Classifications and modern methods of prevention

“…Some preliminary evidence for this position has been established in eye-tracking studies of design fixation, which demonstrated that participants spend much of their time looking at the features of a prior design that they dislike, then fixate on the remaining features that they rarely looked at (see Smith et al, 2013). Another possible explanation is that designers who are in the conceptual stage of design make conscious comparisons between products or systems, but because of the heavy load on working memory during a design task (see Bellows et al, 2012), knowledge that a feature came from a prior design is not encoded in long-term memory (i.e., the designer forgets about these comparisons). While this new evidence appears to be leading to some answers about how and why designers unconsciously fixate, more research is clearly required before the mechanisms underlying unconscious adherence are fully understood.…”

“…Jansson and Smith (1991) highlighted to participants how previous designs were poor. Other groups of researchers have tried direct warnings to participants to not use features from the examples in their studies (e.g., Smith et al, 1993;Bellows et al, 2012;Viswanathan, Esposito, & Linsey, 2012). Youmans (2010) showed participants examples of designs that were failures, physically demonstrated why they failed, and pointed out that copying some of these failing features could even disqualify participants from winning cash prizes.…”

Mitigating Design Fixation With Evolving Extended Reality Technology: An Emerging Opportunity

“…Individual differences are reported to play a role in design fixation. Bellow and colleagues found that people characterised by low working memory capacity dealing with tasks under quiet and interruptive conditions, tend to present more design fixation than those with higher working memory capacity (Bellows et al, 2012). They proposed that working memory capacity is related to the ability to filter irrelevant features from stored information (Bellows et al, 2012).…”

“…Bellow and colleagues found that people characterised by low working memory capacity dealing with tasks under quiet and interruptive conditions, tend to present more design fixation than those with higher working memory capacity (Bellows et al, 2012). They proposed that working memory capacity is related to the ability to filter irrelevant features from stored information (Bellows et al, 2012). Another individual-based factor was 'Need for Closure', with reference to the psychological need of bringing an ongoing process to an end and to rush to a conclusion.…”