Abstract
Design fixation experiments often require participants to solve a design problem whilst being exposed to an example solution and instructions for how to treat that example. However, little is known about the influence of such instructions, leading to difficulties in interpreting results and understanding how the introduction of examples affects idea generation. In our experiment, participants were all provided with the same design problem and example solution, but were presented with different instructions, ranging from strongly encouraging copying the example to strongly discouraging copying. Analyses of participants’ work indicated that only the instructions encouraging copying had an effect. When encouraged to copy, participants tended to only copy the structural features of the example rather than the underlying concept. By contrast, the number of features copied was not reduced when participants were discouraged from copying. These findings suggest that there are subtle interactions between instructions and stimuli that influence design fixation.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Carlos Coimbra Cardoso for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper, to all the students for taking part in the experiment, and to the three DCC reviewers for improving this work with their feedback. This work was supported by the CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil, under grant/process: BEX 11468/13-0 and by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K008196/1). Research data supporting this publication is available from the DSpace@Cambridge repository at the web address given below. It contains data from the participants and from our analysis. The data from the participants consists of all the annotated sketches that participants generated in the experiment. The data from the analysis consists of the evaluation for all ideas generated by the participants in the experiment. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/254702
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Vasconcelos, L.A., Chen, CC., Taysom, E., Crilly, N. (2017). To Copy or Not to Copy: The Influence of Instructions in Design Fixation Experiments. In: Gero, J. (eds) Design Computing and Cognition '16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44989-0_20
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