Episode 3 - Design Fixation

Nathan Crilly has written a lot about the phenomena of design fixation that is discussed in the podcast. Two very recent publications of his, in volume 64 of the journal Design Studies, are a good place to start. One is of case studies of creative discovery, and the other summarises the theory of design fixation to date. The key early work he refers to, that first identified the design fixation phenomena in 1991, is by David Jansson and Stephen Smith in Volume 12 of Design Studies.

The Six Hats Method is a method, devised by the famous creative guru Edward de Bono in his 1985 book Six Thinking Hats: An Essential Approach to Business Management, which helps people to think in different ways about a problem. Each hat represents a thinking style – for example ‘gut reaction’, ‘opinions of others’, ‘planning and objectives’ – that you adopt for a fixed period to make progress in a complex problem-solving process.

Project Implicit is an international collaboration between researchers who are interested in implicit social cognition - thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control. The goal is to educate the public about hidden biases and to provide a “virtual laboratory” for collecting data on the Internet. You can take an ‘implicit association test’ to see where your biases might lie at the following link:

The 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman summarises the work of two key psychologists – Kahneman and his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky – who have spent their careers looking at the many different ways that human decision-making can be biased, and the poor outcomes that result. Their work has been hugely influential in many areas, including ‘nudge’ theory.