The idea exposure paradigm in design idea generation

摘要

This paper presents a design experiment that was conducted to study the effects of idea exposure in design idea generation. Earlier studies have shown that idea exposure can stimulate and interfere with cognitive processes relating to succeeding idea generation, which in turn results in either process gains or losses concerning design outcome. However, fairly little is known about the network and interplay between supplementary effects of idea exposure. Perhaps the most relevant form of cognitive interference in creative design problem-solving is design fixation. Designers may become influenced by presented solutions, so that they reproduce features or principles instead of finding new ways to fulfill functional requirements. In the experiment, subjects were exposed to different amounts and types of examples prior to idea generation. Idea generation performance was measured by the amount of new concepts produced by each subject. The results showed that positive design outcome was correlated with the commonality of examples presented, whereas the amount of examples did not show a respective effect. Fixating effects were measured by analysing genealogical links between examples and generated solutions using a weighted link density metric, also presented in this paper. Presenting common instead of unusual examples led to a higher genealogical linkage between examples and generated ideas; this indicates that common examples cause more fixation than novel ones.