Influence of environmental information on creativity

The positive effect of having environmental information is generally taken for granted in design for sustainability and ecodesign. Research in the field of creativity, however, has shown that the exposure to examples can provoke fixation and reduce the overall creativity of the idea-generation process. Different sorts and levels of information – commonly available for designers – was delivered to 56 people, all of whom were asked to generate different design ideas. Results prove that having detailed information – be it of previous models or of competing products – significantly reduces the creativity of the design ideas. Soft information, on the other hand, does not present this effect. Successful tools in the future must deliver relevant information avoiding this fixation effect.