Fixation and creativity in concept development: The attitudes and practices of expert designers

Abstract

Interviews were conducted with thirteen professional designers to understand their attitudes towards fixation and the practices they adopt to address it. Fixation was thought to be encouraged and discouraged by a wide range of factors related to the project, the client, the design team, the organisational culture and the design activities employed. The experiences that designers accumulate during their professional lives were associated with fixation in different ways. The experience of prior design failures was thought to encourage fixation whilst the experience of varied solutions was thought to discourage fixation. Recognising fixation episodes and reflecting on them was described as the means by which designers could guard against such episodes in the future and thus be more creative.