Work in progress — Understanding design fixation: A sunk cost perspective on innovation

In the current competitive world, engineers must be innovative to be competitive and these skills must be taught. Physical representation is a likely tool to assist in being innovative. Guidelines do not exist for when physical representation should be implemented in the design process. Past studies provide conflicting results on the effects of physical representations on cognition. An observational study of an industrial team shows that physical representations could cause design fixation. In contract, a controlled lab study conducted by the authors failed to reproduce this result. One possible explanation is the sunk cost theory from behavioral economics, which states that people show the tendency to continue with the chosen path based on the amount of time, money and effort already put in. The controlled lab experiment used a fairly simple design problem whereas the other study contained a more complex design problem, thus the observed differences in apparent design fixation could be due to the sunk cost effect. This work in progress paper investigates sunk cost as an explanation for the result differences. This paper proposes an experiment to test the sunk cost effect with physical representation and discusses the future work along with possible implications of the results.