Understanding fixation effects in creativity : a design-theory approach.

TL;DRAbstract

Despite diverse studies grasping at different aspects of fixation in creativity and design reasoning, the underlying mechanisms of fixation, i.e. the processes that lead to being fixed on a small number of unvaried solutions, are still unclear. We propose a theoretical framework to model fixation based on C-K design theory, in which fixation is characterized as a set of restrictive heuristics activated in a creative reasoning. Thus, a restrictive heuristic is a design reasoning that uses only spontaneously activated knowledge in the K space and restrictive partitions in the C space. Any expansion in the design reasoning will then lead to explore solutions outside of fixation, characterizing expansive reasoning. We then use a creative task to test our framework. We apply our theoretical frame on this task to characterize the fixation effects that can occur and we confront this model with a set of experiments, where 142 participants where asked to generate solutions to this task. We show

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