Uncovering early indicators of fixation during the concept development stage of children’s design processes

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the early indicators of design fixation occurring during the concept development stage of children's design processes. This type of fixation, which we named: concept fixation, causes a blind adherence to the current (possibly unfavourable) state of a design idea. Its occurrence hampers the creative thinking processes present in a design process, which in turn stagnates the development of initial design ideas into final designs. Until now, research on design fixation has mainly focussed on creative idea generation in the early phases of the design process through analysing (intermediate) design ideas and completed artefacts. However, children's fixation behaviours might be identified at an earlier moment through the conversations that take place in the classroom about their design ideas. To this end, we present a case study in which we explored early indicators of concept fixation of a group of 24 primary school children (ages 9-11) carrying out a co-design project. Fixation was observed through the manner in which the design teams responded to questions and comments from their peers and the client. Four categories of response behaviours indicating concept fixation emerged from the verbal data, namely: 'band-aids', 'already-in-there', 'question-not-relevant' and 'it's-not-possible'. We expect that the indicators will be helpful in identifying concept fixation during the design process, especially in an educational context. The process of identification of fixation, and reflecting on it, creates awareness. This is considered as an important step by professional designers towards guarding oneself from fixation episodes in future projects, and thus being more creative.A. Schut et al.

Towards constructive design feedback dialogues: guiding peer and client feedback to stimulate children’s creative thinking

“…Although favouring convergent feedback is an understandable strategy when wanting to eliminate ambiguity and encourage reflection and evaluation, these results show that students' convergent thinking processes are not always that easily triggered. At a primary school level, Schut et al (2019b) also observed that the high level of convergent design feedback did not always promote constructive dialogue. Similar to the studies at a university level, it was observed that the convergent feedback did not automatically trigger reflection and evaluation with the young novice designers.…”

“…Thus far, little is known about design feedback in the context of primary education (Schut et al 2019b). However, feedback interventions are a common educational practice within the context of design disciplines at a university level and are known as design critiques (crits) or design reviews (Anthony 1991;Healy 2016).…”

“…This entails that convergent feedback does not necessarily spark the evaluation of possible shortcomings and divergent feedback does not necessarily spark the generation of new additions and solutions. For example, Schut et al (2019b) observed how convergent feedback was often met with defensive behaviour, resulting in the young novice designers trying to prove their design already met the design criteria (Schut et al 2019b). This discrepancy between the direction the design feedback drives towards and the actual thinking processes that take place appears to occur at all educational levels.…”

“…As a result, the instructors expected a level of reflection and evaluation of the students. However, the students were often found to become too descriptive (Cardoso et al 2014) or even defensive, which, similar to the young novice designers (Schut et al 2019b), led them to trying even harder to convince everyone of the quality of their design (Cardella et al 2014;Cummings et al 2015). Although favouring convergent feedback is an understandable strategy when wanting to eliminate ambiguity and encourage reflection and evaluation, these results show that students' convergent thinking processes are not always that easily triggered.…”

“…Instead, they showed resistance to the feedback of their peers and the client by rejecting or ignoring it. Especially the convergent feedback of the peers, which actively asked the young novice designers to reflect and evaluate their past, present, and future design decisions, was often met with resistance (Schut et al 2019b).…”