6/25/2021 Dongwook Hwang, Byunghyun Choi, Soonho Bae, Woojin Park
J. Mech. Des. Jun 2021, 143(6): 061402 (9 pages)
Paper No: MD-20-1438 https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4048814

​External stimuli can fuel a designer’s creativity and improve the outcome of design ideation. Yet, the psychological phenomenon of design fixation may also occur in the presence of external stimuli. A difficulty in preventing or alleviating design fixation is that the designer may not easily detect or predict its occurrence during the mentally demanding task of ideation. This paper introduces an information acquisition and display system called the Situation Awareness Support System (SASS) that delivers real-time information about the use of available external stimuli. This information allows the user to quickly perceive and comprehend their stimulus usage pattern and form a good projection for their ideation. The study presented in this paper assesses whether the information on the SASS (i.e., the number of ideas that have resulted from each stimulus, elapsed time for ideation, etc.) helps the user gain situational awareness on their stimuli usage pattern and mitigate the occurrences of design fixation. Results from the study highlight that using SASS can help novice designers mitigate the repeated use of specific external stimuli and, thereby, forestall the occurrences of design fixation, while not having significant impacts on the ideation performance.

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