Sometimes, your first idea is not your best one. But you might fixate on it, especially if the idea has worked for you before. In academic terms, this phenomenon is called design fixation. In layman’s terms, we might call it getting set in your ways, experiencing tunnel vision, regurgitating old ideas, or being blinded to alternatives.

As part of research published in the journal Design Studies, Nathan Crilly (who teaches engineering design at the University of Cambridge) anonymously asked 13 professional designers who work in U.K. consultancies how they deal with design fixation. These designers had an average of 21 years of experience in the field, and had plenty of ideas for getting around this common affliction. Their various approaches suggest that the tendency to get stuck on one idea, while prevalent among designers, isn’t an unfixable trait.





First, here are a few things that make this fixation worse, according to these designers.

If solutions to the problem the designers were trying to tackle already existed in the market, they found it difficult to walk the line between researching these precedents and copying older old ideas. “You’ve got the advantage of seeing what people have already done so that you know that these are potentially robust solutions,” one interviewee said. “But then you’ve got the risk that you actually may have cut off some other ideas you might have come up with.”

“I think there quite often is a feeling that people have that they actually know the best combination of solutions pretty early on,” an interviewee argued. “And most of their effort will be going to prove that that works, rather than exploring the full range of options.”

Thorough exploration comes at a price. Designs that take a lot of research and iterations to perfect are more expensive than firing off the first prototype you come up with, whether that comes from billing the client for extra hours or incurring the cost of delaying the product’s launch. As one designer describes it:

You think of an idea. A week later you think of a better way of doing it, so you scrap the original idea. You never get anywhere. It often takes you three or four times longer to [get to] market. And the cost involved in bringing that product to market at a later date can sometimes be horrific. I don’t think there is any product [of mine] where there wasn’t a better way of doing it.





At some design firms, mistakes are a welcome part of the process. When they’re not, designers can be afraid to pitch out-of-the-box ideas. “If you’re allowed to make mistakes, you’ll be very creative, you’ll be prepared to take risks,” as one designer puts it. “And if you don’t have that, if there’s fear there that you’re going to get blamed, you won’t take those risks, you won’t be creative, you won’t be innovative, or you’ll be limited, you’ll be self-limiting.”