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Individual Differences in Tendency for Design Fixation

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Design Computing and Cognition '16

Abstract

Not all individuals may be equally susceptible to design fixation. We sought to identify characteristics that could predict individual tendency for design fixation, and explored the use of Kruglanski’s Need for Closure Scale for this purpose. We devised an experiment to determine whether correlations exist between participants’ score on this scale and the degree of fixation in concepts elicited. Specifically, engineering-student participants were asked to complete the Need for Closure Scale as well as develop concepts for which an example solution was provided. Two statistical techniques, the Mann-Whitney U test and ordinal logistic regression, showed that participants’ Need for Closure scores correlated significantly with degree of fixation in generated concepts.

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Acknowledgements

We thank our participants for consenting and contributing to our study, and Professor Birsen Donmez for her assistance in our statistical analyses. We appreciate the guidance and approval from the University of Toronto Research Ethics Board. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    Song Liang Lai & L. H. Shu

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  1. Song Liang Lai
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  2. L. H. Shu
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Correspondence to L. H. Shu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and School of Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

    John. S Gero

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Lai, S.L., Shu, L.H. (2017). Individual Differences in Tendency for Design Fixation. In: Gero, J. (eds) Design Computing and Cognition '16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44989-0_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44989-0_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-44988-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-44989-0

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