This paper describes a study designed to investigate the effect of concept representation types on the use of abductive reasoning by decision makers when selecting early stage innovation concepts for further development. According to prior research, abductive reasoning can be instrumental to decision makers in terms of generating testable hypotheses about an innovation concept's future developments into concrete, viable product or service offerings. It has furthermore been linked with an increase in project acceptance rates. Here, an experiment is described testing whether visual concept representations promotes higher levels of abductive reasoning than textual concept representations or a combination of visuals and text. The results show that when purely visual concept representations were used, the participants showed a significant higher level of abductive reasoning than when this visual representation was complemented with text. This has managerial implications pertaining to how innovation concepts could/should be presented to selection committees or individuals in companies seeking to increase the amount of innovation projects that pass through a first screening process.

This is a report from an international workshop focused on the future of design fixation research within the broader context of work on creativity and inspiration. Fixation studies have already generated many useful results but there are clear opportunities to better connect with work done on other related concepts and work done in other disciplines. This would allow fixation research to broaden and strengthen its methodological approaches, offering richer insights into how design ideas originate and how they subsequently evolve. Such knowledge could then be applied to influence the development of design education, training and tools. In this way, fixation research would maximize its potential to provide insights into the creative process, improve design practice and thereby support innovation.

In this study, we investigated how questions influence problem (re)framing and idea shaping in design discourse. We analysed the question-asking behaviour of a multidisciplinary group of students who were tasked with designing new birthday celebration concepts. We focused on the sessions that took place during the idea generation phase of the project. Our analysis showed that high-level questions facilitated the emergence of inflection moments during idea generation. It also illustrated that, prior to the inflection moments, reflection built the basis on which high-level questions were formulated. We interpreted that type of reflection as resistance to design fixation. Based on our findings, we proposed a model of how design inquiry facilitates inflection moments during idea generation and counteracts design fixation.

Time and budget constraints frequently prevent designers from consulting with end-users while assessing the ease of use of the products they create. This has resulted in solutions that are difficult to use by a wide range of users, especially the growing older adult population and people with different types of impairments. To help designers with this problem, capability-loss simulators have been developed with the aim of temporarily representing users who are otherwise difficult to access. This paper questions the reliability of existing tools in providing designers with meaningful information about the users' capabilities. Consequently, a new capability-loss simulation toolkit is presented, followed by its empirical evaluation. The new toolkit proved to be significantly helpful for a group of designers identifying real usability problems with everyday devices.