Journal of Creative Behavior 101 ROBERT J. YOUMANS Design Fixation in the Wild: Design Environments and Their Influence on Fixation ABSTRACT Many studies of design fixation ask designers to work in controlled laboratory or classroom environments, but innovative design work frequently occurs in dynamic, social environments. The two studies reviewed in this paper investigated how three independent variables likely to be present in many design environments affect design fixation. The first study found that working with physical prototypes significantly reduced fixation effects, and that working in groups can reduce fixa- tion effects under certain conditions. The second study found that brief interrup- tions in designers’ thought processes during the initial states of the design process also reduce fixation effects. I conclude by discussing what the data from both studies may indicate about the theoretical causes of fixation effects, and what designers might do to prevent fixation from affecting their creative output. THE EFFECTS OF PHYSICAL PROTOTYPING AND GROUP WORK ON DESIGN FIXATION One of the now-recognized impediments to development of innovative solu- tions for ill-defined problems is the finding that people, including designers and engineers, tend to fixate on features of preexisting designs by generating new designs with features that are similar or the same as the prior example (Goldschmidt, 1995; Jansson & Smith, 1991; Purcell & Gero, 1996; Smith, Ward, & Schumacher, 1993). The work reported here outlines the principle findings of two recent studies that examined how a design environment can influence fixa- tion effects. The first experiment examined how fixation is affected when design- ers work in physically interactive environments that may be rich with models or prototypes, the type of environment that might be found in a university wood or metal shop. Another equally important goal of this experiment was to examine how fixation effects changed when designers worked alone or in small groups. The second experiment outlined here investigated how distractions that occur Volume 45 Number 2 Second Quarter 2011