Inspiration and fixation: Questions, methods, findings, and challenges
Luis A. Vasconcelos
Research into inspiration and fixation has produced a complex web of questions, methods, and findings, making it difficult to know what has already been investigated and learnt, and what to investigate next and how. To address this, we review the literature, focussing on 25 studies that adopt a similar experimental approach. This reveals 14 manipulated variables, relating to properties of the inspiration source and features of the design process. However, whilst these studies follow a similar approach, when scrutinised and compared, they show great variety in the methods used and the results obtained. We discuss this diversity, offering a methodological critique of inspiration and fixation research and providing recommendations for how future studies might be conducted and reported.
Assessing the performance of styling activities: An interview study with industry professionals in style-sensitive companies
Oscar Person
In this paper, we study the design activity of styling and its performance assessment within style-sensitive manufacturing companies. Based on interviews with industry professionals at such companies, we analyze how the contribution of styling and expressive products is perceived and assessed. We delineate how these companies stimulate sales and profits, enhance their brand visibility and promote the wider acknowledgment of their capabilities in the market through styling. We also describe how press coverage and design awards function as performance measures for styling activities alongside product sales. In addition, we describe how the perceived contribution of styling activities and its assessment are codependent on how the companies and their designers operate and make decisions on the expressiveness of products.
Visual divergence in humans and computers
Ricardo Sosa
Studies of design creativity have underlined the importance of divergent reasoning and visual reasoning in idea generation. Connecting these two key design skills, this paper presents a model of divergent visual reasoning for the study of creativity. A visual divergence task called ShapeStorm is demonstrated for the study of creative ideation that can be applied to humans as well as computational systems. The model is examined in a study with human subjects, a computational stochastic generator, and a geometrical analysis of the solution space. The main significance of this task is that it offers a straightforward means to define a simple design task that can be used across research studies. Several scenarios for the application of ShapeStorm for the study of creativity are advanced.
Uncertainty, reflection, and designer identity development
Monica W. Tracey
Uncertainty is a defining quality of the design space and it stands to reason that designers' personal attitudes toward uncertainty may influence design processes and outcomes via cognitive, affective, and/or behavioral channels. Individual attitudes and behavior patterns related to uncertainty may constitute a critical element of designer identity, which represents the synthesis of knowledge, action, and being. This qualitative study examined how graduate students in an instructional design course reflected on their experiences and beliefs regarding uncertainty. Participants were more reflective when discussing a general experience with uncertainty than their current attitudes toward uncertainty in design. Findings support the use of narrated reflection in design education related to uncertainty and identity. Implications for design education interventions and design are discussed.
The effects of representation on idea generation and design fixation: A study comparing sketches and function trees
Olufunmilola Atilola, Megan Tomko, Julie S. Linsey
Representations in engineering design can be hand sketches, photographs, CAD, functional models, physical models, or text. Using representations allows engineers to gain a clearer picture of how a design works. We present an experiment that compares the influence of representations on fixation and creativity. This experiment presents designers with an example solution represented as a function tree and a sketch, we compare how these different external representations influence design fixation as they complete a design task. Results show that function trees do not cause fixation to ideas compared to a control group, and that function trees reduce fixation when compared to sketches. Results from this experiment show that function tree representations offer advantages for reducing fixation during idea generation.