A New Strategy to Reduce Design Fixation: The Middle Sketching Stage

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: Leyla, Alipour; Mohsen, Faizi
Series: ICDC
ISBN: 978-1-904670-82-7

Abstract

Design fixation is one of the obstacles to design creativity. In this study, we introduced the middle stage as a strategy to reduce design fixation. Investigating expert architects’ sketches demonstrated that there are signs of this stage in their drawings. The importance of the middle stage has been recognized in the analogy literature. The middle sketching is a drawing that stays between source and outcome and has some parts of both. In this study, the effect of educating designers with a middle sketching stage on the originality of design outcome was investigated. 31 undergraduate architecture students participated in an experiment and designed by analogy. The results indicated that higher design outcome originality score was obtained by the novice designers with the correct middle sketching stage, as compared to those with the false middle sketching stage. It is concluded that middle sketching stage is an effective strategy to reduce design fixation.

Keywords: design fixation, Middle stage, originality