Abstract
Design fixation experiments often 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. However, the inclusion of an example also introduces other factors that might affect idea fluency in the experiments. We here offer an additional explanation for these results: participants not exposed to the example tend to generate ideas with little elaboration, while the level of detail in the example encourages a similar level of elaboration among stimulated participants. Because idea elaboration is time consuming, non-stimulated participants record more ideas overall. We investigated this hypothesis by reanalyzing data from three different studies; in two of them we found that non-stimulated participants generated more ideas and more ideas containing only text, whilst stimulated participants generated ideas that were more elaborated. Based on the creativity literature, we provide several explanations for the differences in results found across studies. Our findings and explanations have implications for the interpretation of creativity experiments reported to date and for the design of future studies.
Highlights
For over twenty-five years, fixation has been a crucial research topic for those interested in design creativity and innovation
Idea fluency A Student’s t-test with the total number of ideas as the dependent variable revealed a significant difference in the quantity of ideas generated between the two groups, t(37.4) = 3.35, p = .002, d = .895, with participants in the baseline group generating more ideas on average (M = 2.39, SD = 1.32) than the stimulated group (M = 1.48, SD = .580). These results reveal that the idea fluency was influenced by the presence of an example solution, and that designing without exposure to the stimulus resulted in more ideas being generated, which can be interpreted as a beneficial isolation from examples (Vasconcelos, Cardoso et al, 2017)
It is possible that having more time for idea generation contributed to this result, research has shown that the idea generation rate decreases asymptotically towards a steady flow over time (Tsenn, Atilola, McAdams, & Linsey, 2014) and that this decline is more evident in the first forty minutes (Liikkanen, Björklund, Hämäläinen, & Koskinen, 2009)
Summary
For over twenty-five years, fixation has been a crucial research topic for those interested in design creativity and innovation. Fixation is known to limit the creative output of individuals and to reduce the chances of developing innovative products. Design fixation was first observed experimentally when students were asked to generate ideas in response to a design problem while being exposed to an example solution. The exposure to the example was found to constrain the students’ idea generation and to block the successful completion of the problem (Jansson & Smith, 1991). Design fixation has been the subject of many studies and has been characterized in many different ways. Fixation studies typically require that participants generate multiple solutions to a given problem in a controlled environment and over a short time period. The inspiration effects in these groups are compared through metrics that are similar to
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