Using the Digital Context to Overcome Design Fixation: A Strategy to Expand Students’ Design Thinking

Abstract

KeywordsAbstract design fixation; design thinking; digital context; design education; design strategy. Copyright © 2018 | Copyrights are granted to author(s), Archnet-IJAR, and Archnet @ MIT under the terms of the "CC-BY-NC-ND" License. Design fixation has been described as a lack of flexibility in relation to 229 INTRODUCTIONKnow-how and flexibility accumulated from extensive experience are indigenous competences in humans. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) systems have begun to use large data to absorb humans' know-how and flexibility and, consequently, begun to replace humans in many domains. Although the world transforms to a digital world emphasising AI everywhere, 'creativity' continues to have great significance in design as the ultimate indigenous thinking realm of human beings. Before this research, several design experiments were conducted in which abstract tasks were used as a strategy to enhance the creativity of student participants. It was found that while abstract tasks encouraged participants to engage in inferential thinking (e.g., using metaphors and analogies) several forms of design fixation (e.g., memory and conceptual fixation, and knowledge and functional fixation) still occurred. Design fixation occurred from the problem analysis phase to the ideation phase of the design process, and was found to hinder thinking expansion and have negative effect on participants' creative output. This study was designed to provide students with strategic approaches to overcome design fixation. Students have acquired know-how through their education and experiences. The usefulness of the established strategies would be analysed by observing changes in students over a long period of time. Specifically, a design studio (programmed as a design experiment) was taught for one term (i.e., over a period of 16 weeks) at a university.Numerous limitations (i.e., construction, material, spatial scale, human scale and reliance on known information or knowledge) exist when a physical space is designed. However, a digital world has no such physical limitations and thus was selected as a thinking expansion motif to surmount design fixation and encourage participants to be imaginative. It was anticipated that combining limitlessness (e.g., zero gravity, nought objects, no time and nil scale) with an abstract design task would eliminate design fixation, leading to the creative design process. Further, it was anticipated that understanding the digital context from a cognitive perspective and using a digital world in the design of a space would provide participants with an opportunity to engage in unlimited thinking expansion.The entire process was built on Team Based Learning (TBL). 'Solving an abstract design task in a digital context' was a new attempt to students who had not experienced it before. It was anticipated that forcibly combining TBL and an 'abstract design task in the digital context' would lead to natural brainstorming, the most substantial strategy in any problemsolving process. Further, 'creative' is o...

A Systematic Review of Design Creativity in the Architectural Design Studio

“…Choi and Kim [54] describe fixation as a persistent problem in creative design, and argue that a means to break this kind of limitation is to bypass normal physical and mental constraints, freeing imagination through the use of digital worlds and abstract design tasks. Weekly diaries kept by architectural design students supported these assertions.…”

“…As for the models relating to problems and processes, this encompasses the use and adaptation of stimuli. Choi and Kim [54] describe the utilization of team-based learning (TBL) in a shared "digital world" to provide a conduit for the delivery of stimuli and scope for consistent reflection. This involves exposure to shared stimuli and set activities to ensure the co-evolution of ideation through the design process.…”

Visual Communication for Students’ Creative Thinking in the Design Studio: Translating Filmic Spaces into Spatial Design

“…The initial definition of problems may be related to work contexts that are similar to those in which previous problems have been defined; thus, to avoid a fixation effect associated with existing solutions, design problems need to be redefined outside a designer's typical work situation [38]. For example, Choi and Kim [39] conducted an empirical study that used a digital world as a design strategic approach to negating design fixation.…”

“…An analysis framework was developed to investigate the translation of filmic spaces into spatial design, emphasizing the creativity of visual communication. The analysis framework was derived from the research of Choi and Kim [39] and extended by factors associated with the characteristics of the creative design process (see Table 3). [49].…”

Recent Discourse and the Promise for Global Networks on Architecture and Urbanism

“…Utilizing experimental and empirical approaches, the work of Han Hee Choi and Mi Jeong Kim explores different strategies to overcome design fixation, which is defined as a lack of flexibility in relation to a limited set of design ideas. They call for introducing the digital context as one of the promising strategies that enhance design thinking while promoting creativity (Choi and Kim, 2018). Discussing the studio learning environment, Mohd Zairul (2018) reports on the initial results of the exploratory research related to student-centered learning (SCL) in final year architecture studio education at the UPM-University Putra Malaysia, which offers an additional capacity for a dynamic reconstruction of knowledge.…”