Nathaniel Crilly

‘Fixation’ and ‘the pivot’: balancing persistence with flexibility in design and entrepreneurship

Abstract ‘Design fixation’ occurs when exploration of the solution space is unintentionally constrained by designers’ knowledge of prior solutions. The study of fixation is well established in design research but there has been little discussion of what might be learned about fixation from studying related phenomena in other creative practices. To address this, a series of interviews were conducted with technology entrepreneurs and the advisors who guide them. Analysis of the interview data was informed by concepts of creative fixation, cognitive entrenchment and psychological ownership, but also concepts of entrepreneurial pivoting, strategic change and business model innovation. The study shows that entrepreneurs must actively balance persistence with flexibility, a task that is influenced by (i) the entrepreneurs’ commitment to their ideas, (ii) the expertise that they have developed, (iii) the information that they seek or are exposed to, (iv) the resources available to them, and (v) their orientation towards either the product or the market. Collectively, these findings can be applied to design research as proposals for new topics to study when investigating fixation. They also hold implications for design practice by suggesting what designers (and their managers) should reflect on when identifying opportunities to change design direction.

'There were more wires than him': the potential for wireless patient monitoring in neonatal intensive care.

Background The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) can be one of the most stressful hospital environments. Alongside providing intensive clinical care, it is important that parents have the opportunity for regular physical contact with their babies because the neonatal period is critical for parent–child bonding. At present, monitoring technology in the NICU requires multiple wired sensors to track each babys vital signs. This study describes the experiences that parents and nurses have with the current monitoring methods, and reports on their responses to the concept of a wireless monitoring system. Methods Semistructured interviews were conducted with six parents, each of whom had babies on the unit, and seven nurses who cared for those babies. The interviews initially focused on the participants’ experiences of the current wired system and then on their responses to the concept of a wireless system. The transcripts were analysed using a general inductive approach to identify relevant themes. Results Participants reported on physical and psychological barriers to parental care, the ways in which the current system obstructed the efficient delivery of clinical care and the perceived benefits and risks of a wireless system. The parents and nurses identified that the wires impeded baby–parent bonding; physically and psychologically. While a wireless system was viewed as potentially enabling greater interaction, staff and parents highlighted potential concerns, including the size, weight and battery life of any new device. Conclusions The many wires required to safely monitor babies within the NICU creates a negative environment for parents at a critical developmental period, in terms of physical and psychological interactions. Nurses also experience challenges with the existing system, which could negatively impact the clinical care delivery. Developing a wireless system could overcome these barriers, but there remain challenges in designing a device suitable for this unique environment.

Maximum effect for minimum means: The aesthetics of efficiency

The aesthetic judgment of an artifact is usually interpreted as an assessment of the artifacts sensory properties. But an artifact can also be appreciated, and still aesthetically, for the way it fulfills its purpose. Existing design theory does not provide the concepts required for describing this aspect of aesthetic appreciation and so cannot fully explain what people mean when they say a product is beautiful. In this paper, we develop an understanding of the aesthetic judgment based on the principle of maximum effect for minimum means. We explain how a means–effect relationship can be established between a product and its purpose or effect, and how the product and the effect can be perceived to be minimal and maximal. We also explain how the appreciation of this relationship depends on a set of assumed alternatives for both the product or means and the effect. Finally, we provide some directions for future research into design aesthetics.

What’s the benefit of problem exploration?

Models of the design process often start with activities of problem exploration before generating ideas, but the benefits of exploration have not been properly investigated. We did an experiment with undergraduate industrial designers during a design course. Except for the exploration methods, all teams had to follow the same design process. We observed that exploration methods increased the design teams’ perceived knowledge about the problem, but no impact on the quality of their final designs was seen. This challenges a widely held assumption about the value of problem exploration in design.

Idea representation and elaboration in design inspiration and fixation experiments

Abstract Design fixation experiments often report that participants exposed to an example solution generate fewer ideas than those who were not. This reduced ‘idea fluency’ is generally explained as participants’ creativity being constrained by the example they have seen. However, the inclusion of an example also introduces other factors that might affect idea fluency in the experiments. We here offer an additional explanation for these results: participants not exposed to the example tend to generate ideas with little elaboration, while the level of detail in the example encourages a similar level of elaboration among stimulated participants. Because idea elaboration is time consuming, non-stimulated participants record more ideas overall. We investigated this hypothesis by reanalyzing data from three different studies; in two of them we found that non-stimulated participants generated more ideas and more ideas containing only text, whilst stimulated participants generated ideas that were more elaborated. Based on the creativity literature, we provide several explanations for the differences in results found across studies. Our findings and explanations have implications for the interpretation of creativity experiments reported to date and for the design of future studies.

Research data supporting "Computer-Based "Mental Set Tasks": An Alternative Approach to Studying Design Fixation".

This is an excel file containing the numerical data resulting from the scoring of the videos recorded during each experimental session. The videos are not available for ethical reasons. The excel file includes several spreadsheets, whose naming corresponds to the various set of results reported in the publication (Open-ended ‘mental set’ tasks: An alternative approach to studying design fixation). In each spreadsheet, the column headings are self-explanatory, provided you also have the corresponding publication given above as a reference. The data was collected from July to October 2016 from 40 undergraduate and postgraduate students with an engineering background at the University of Cambridge, UK. Participants were tested individually and received £10 for your participation. They were initially told that the study aimed at investigating how people played computer games. The real aim of the study was revealed to the participants at the end of each experimental session, during the debriefing phase. Demographic data was collected from the participants and are reported in the first spreadsheet of the file. The study was approved by the local Ethical Committee and the participants signed a Consent Form before starting with the experiment.

Research data supporting "Studying design fixation with a computer-based task"

This is an excel file containing the numerical data resulting from the scoring of the videos recorded during each experimental session. The videos are not available for ethical reasons. The excel file includes several spreadsheets, whose naming corresponds to the various set of results reported in the publication (Open-ended ‘mental set’ tasks: An alternative approach to studying design fixation). In each spreadsheet, the column headings are self-explanatory, provided you also have the corresponding publication given above as a reference. The data was collected from July to October 2016 from 40 undergraduate and postgraduate students with an engineering background at the University of Cambridge, UK. Participants were tested individually and received £10 for your participation. They were initially told that the study aimed at investigating how people played computer games. The real aim of the study was revealed to the participants at the end of each experimental session, during the debriefing phase. Demographic data was collected from the participants and are reported in the first spreadsheet of the file. The study was approved by the local Ethical Committee and the participants signed a Consent Form before starting with the experiment.

Research data supporting "Idea representation and elaboration in design inspiration and fixation experiments"

Data from three separate small-scale experiments (N = 55; 30; 58) conducted with students from the University of Cambridge (Engineering Department) and from Delft University of Technology (Industrial Design Engineering). The data consists of participants ideas (scans) and the assessment done by judges (spreadsheets).