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A Study On The Effects Of Example Familiarity And Modality On Design Fixation, Vimal Viswanathan, Megan Tomko, Julie Linsey

Faculty Publications, Mechanical Engineering

Design fixation is a factor that negatively influences the generation of novel design concepts (Jansson & Smith, 1991). When designers fixate, they tend to reproduce example features or features from their initial ideas. In order to mitigate design fixation, it is crucial to identify the factors that influence the extent of design fixation. This paper investigates two such factors: the modality of examples and the familiarity of designers with the example features. To investigate this, an experiment is conducted with mechanical engineering students who were asked to generate ideas to solve a peanut sheller design problem. The students generated ideas …