Collaborative Research: Learning Preferences and Domain Differences in Design Fixation

University Of North Carolina At Charlotte, Charlotte NC

Investigators

Abstract

Learning to design in formal engineering and design education often involves the study of existing designs as examples. Research has shown that the use of pictorial examples during the presentation of design problems can support the learning of engineering principles and design constraints. But it can also bias designers and engineering design students toward replicating the examples they were shown, even in the presence of explicit instructions not to do so, rather than seeking innovative alternative solutions. This phenomenon is known as design fixation—the tendency to adhere to elements of prior ideas or solutions to a problem. Design fixation is a significant barrier to the generation of new design ideas and creative problem solving. Intriguingly, preliminary research on engineering education has suggested there is a disciplinary difference in the tendency to show design fixation to pictorial examples, such that industrial designers are markedly less likely to fixate than are mechanical engineers. The goal of this project, a collaboration between cognitive neuroscience researchers at Drexel University and design scientists at the University of North Carolina, is to focus on this difference as a means of understanding the cognitive and neural processes underlying design fixation. The driving hypothesis is that, as a result of their training, mechanical engineering students are more likely to fixate because they are less apt to draw on abstract principles. The studies will involve a combination of behavioral and brain imaging studies of first year and fourth year undergraduate students in different design disciplines. The results of this project will have the potential to generalize across much of STEM education by informing the development of curricula to ward off design fixation. This award is made by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances the fundamental research literature on STEM learning. Drawing on the research literature in cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, engineering education, and design science, this project will examine the premise that there are differences between undergraduate industrial design and mechanical engineering students in their tendencies to show design fixation and that these differences are arise from instruction that emphasizes the of abstraction (rule-based) learning in the former discipline and exemplar-based learning in the latter. The project will examine whether differences between students during concept building, captured by both behavioral and neural measures, can predict design fixation patterns. The researchers will collect multimodal data from first year and senior industrial design and mechanical engineering students on a design fixation task and a control design task. They will quantify design fixation behaviorally through (a) the coding of sketches according to an established design categorization scheme, and (b) the coding of verbal protocols with the established Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) ontology for design. The FBS ontology segmentation and coding of verbal protocols will then be used in a novel attempt to analyze neural responses during the design fixation and control tasks. The behavioral and neural differences in learning tendencies – rule-based and exemplar based – between students in the two disciplines will then be used to predict behavioral and neural differences in design fixation. Ultimately, the investigators aim to put forth a mechanistic account of design fixation, grounded in cognitive neuroscience and design theory and practice, that will inform the development of instructional interventions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.