Abstract

How can we tell whether designers are being creative or stuck? Design fixation was initially defined as ‘a blind adherence to a set of ideas or concepts limiting the output of conceptual design’ (Jansson & Smith, Design Studies, 1991). Since its first appearance in the literature, design fixation has been a prolific research topic across different disciplines. Researchers have been following a similar solution- or output-oriented procedure when investigating it, although we can see slightly different methods and metrics used to report fixation. In this talk I will report two experiments we did in order to get insight into the topic and the main challenges we now face in research in design fixation. How can we study it differently? What are the methods to incorporate? What are the fields to get inspiration from? What are the things to take into account? The audience is kindly asked to help answering such questions!