Your first design idea is always the one you feel most confident about. It may not be your best one but you fixate on it anyway. Thirteen professionals from the United Kingdom were asked how to work their way around this “design fixation”, and below are the ideas that they had.

What Is “Design Fixation,” And How Can You Stop It?

Items that can make design fixation worse:

• Exposure to prior solutions that you may have had
• Always thinking that your earlier ideas are a better design
• Dealing with low budgets from your clients
• Being a part of a workforce that places blame on people for mistakes made
• Clients that have their own idea or like your first idea and push to stick with it

Items that help you avoid bad design ideas:

• Use your coworkers to brainstorm and ask them to review your work
• Morphological charts shouldn’t be your enemy (used to generate and organize potential solutions in your design)
• Always notice the problem before it becomes one to begin with
• Model making is your friend, especially in the design community, so don’t be afraid to make one or two or three or maybe a million

At some point though, you do have to realize your time will be better spent on coming up with the design, so don’t stay fixated too long…