Mitigating Design Fixation: A Visualization Tool for Enhancing Situation Awareness

Abstract

External stimuli can stimulate a designer's creativity and improve the outcome of design ideation for product/service concept generation. A psychological phenomenon that may occur during such utilization of external stimuli is design fixation, which is widely believed to adversely affect the ideation outcome. One of the difficulties in preventing or alleviating design fixation is that the designer may not easily detect or predict its occurrence during the mentally demanding task of ideation. In an effort to address the problem of design fixation, the current study develops a situation awareness (SA) support system, which helps the novice designer perceive and predict the occurrences of design fixation. The situation awareness support system (SASS) is empirically evaluated in its utility in mitigating design fixation. The study result shows that the situation awareness support system can help the novice designer to mitigate design fixation, while not influencing significant impact on the ideation performance.