Fluency Results in Design Fixation Experiments: An Additional Explanation

DS 86: Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Design Creativity,Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

Year: 2016
Editor: Julie Linsey, Maria Yang, and Yukari Nagai
Author: Luis Arthur, Vasconcelos; Maria Adriana, Neroni; Nathan, Crilly
Series: ICDC
ISBN: 978-1-904670-82-7

Abstract

Some design fixation experiments report that participants exposed to an example solution generate fewer ideas than those who were not. This reduced ‘idea fluency’ is generally explained as participants’ creativity being constrained by the example they have seen. We here offer an additional explanation for these fluency results: the level of detail in the example encourages a similar level of detail in the participants’ representations of their ideas; because this detail is time consuming, participants in this condition record fewer ideas overall. We investigated this hypothesis experimentally and found that whereas participants exposed to an example (in the form of an annotated sketch) generated less ideas in general, they produced more sketches and more detailed representations than those not exposed to the example. This finding has implications for the interpretation of the fixation experiments reported to date and the design of future studies.

Keywords: design fixation, idea fluency, modality of the representation, level of detail