Fixation and Creativity in Data Visualization Design: Experiences and Perspectives of Practitioners

All participants reported experiencing fixation in their professional work and were able to describe a project they had worked on in which fixation was an issue. Many participants described fixation as being a common issue in their own practice. In describing fixation, participants made references to getting ‘stuck’, ‘hitting a wall’, having difficulty ‘letting go’, having a ‘blockage’, and hitting a ‘dead end’. Some participants described the feeling of being fixated. P10, describing an instance of fixation, stated “I certainly felt like I was throwing myself at a brick wall over and over and over again until I had some notion of how to get over that wall.” P1 described the feeling of fixation as needing to “get my head out of that focused, that super-focused state, where I can’t consider other things.” P7 described the attachment people feel towards their design ideas, noting the solution as “you have to kill your darlings.”

Some participants described fixation as getting stuck on an initial idea. For example, when asked if they experience fixation, P6 replied “No question about it—and I’ve experienced in two different ways. One is I come up with an idea like immediately during the phone call with the client, and then I’m sort of fixated on that initial idea and can’t veer away from it or just sort of tend not to. And I’ve also had the experience […] where maybe the client says, ‘Oh, we were thinking of doing X, Y, Z’—and now I’m stuck with their idea.”

Other participants interpreted fixation more broadly. P14 described fixation as not being able to find a better solution than one they currently have: “I have cases where I never find a good solution. I find that I’m never totally happy with it and I just stick with the least bad version.” P15 described an instance of fixation as being about “the story and the structure of the story I wanted to tell”, going on to describe the effect of re-framing the problem “finally I found an angle […] the framing, that was really the angle I needed to build a story. And that was kind of a breakthrough. Before that I was really a bit lost until I found that angle.”

Chart Recommendations Multiple participants noted the existence of chart recommendations from software as promoting premature adherence to a design idea. For instance, P15 noted “a lot of the people making visualizations are constrained by the chart types they have in their software […] by the all the chart types that Excel can offer, for example, and they don’t know how to break out of this constraint of the software they’re using.” Similarly, P7 stated “ I think if you invest in a charting tool and it shows a visualization type, then you have like these borders to other visualization types because you need to completely start your visualization from scratch when you choose another visualization type.” P13 noted that “[…] like excel, these are the 10 types of charts that you can use. I think those can sometimes be bad because then people feel limited to them and you don’t think about the 20 types of targets that excel doesn’t do. And so anything that’s sort of like limits your possibility of tools in general.[People say] Oh, I have to use Tableau I have to use, I can only design within this framework.”

Missing the Big Picture. Participants mentioned being too focused on details and not the ‘big picture’. P12 described being “so deeply involved in the details, and the pieces and parts that you—for whatever reason—have a hard time sitting back and looking at the whole thing in a more relaxed way. That will get people stuck.” P11 described a strategy he uses to avoid getting stuck in the details: “Sometimes I’ve just taken the biggest marker I have and done designs with that. I mean the overly huge one that doesn’t let you do any details, because if you are kind of stuck in the details, then you need to kind of somehow dig yourself out of it.” P14 mentioned getting stuck on details while programming: “in the programming phase […] that’s where it usually gets stuck on the details.”

Effort and Attachment Participants described the amount of effort required for creativity in design as potentially encouraging fixation. P14 described this as being due to emotional investment in their work “I’d have definitely have a lot more emotional difficulty to letting go of something that you’ve worked out for a while and are fixated on.” P6 described experiencing the phenomenon of sunk cost, where “You get invested in this thing you’ve invested time in and you just don’t want to let go of it.” Related to the issue of chart recommendations above, P13 emphasized the ease of selecting from predetermined chart types “Here are your suggested chart types okay, I can point and click and like, change it. And that’s super easy.”

Existing Practices and Habits. Some participants described the role of prior experience and existing practices or habits in influencing fixation in design. P4 described the influence of reusable components in adopting ideas too early “We’ve got some reusable components, and that makes you kind of go to those first. Like, let’s go to our library and see—so certainly I think that’s something that, you know, I’ve experienced and our team has experienced.” P13 mentioned the role of having solved similar problems previously as leading to fixation: “Because you think you’ve solved this problem before, you think it’s the same problem. P4 described experiencing fixation as a result of relying on prior success, “ Everything we do is sort of building on what we’ve already done. You know, we would make one app and it goes out there, it’s popular, so they’re like, hey, make another, make one like that for this other survey because you’ve already got your original thing. It is very easy to get stuck on.” P1 described the role of rigid ‘best practices’ in influencing the adoption of ideas as “A lot of people get stuck on best practices and that being the stop of it, like this is the best practice […] I think best practices can hold people back if they see it as like they have to do this.”

Precedent. Many participants described the role of existing visualizations in encouraging fixation. Participants were aware of their own propensity to be influenced by prior visualization designs and described strategies they had developed. P15 described their strategy as “I don’t want to look too closely at their [other visualization designers] stuff because I don’t want to get stuck just building that.” P6 noted that looking at existing visualizations can encourage fixation: “Yeah. You might get fixated on this cool thing on D3 and it’s just not the best idea.” P3 described a similar strategy as “ I made a conscious decision when I started a new project not to look at other people’s work to get some inspiration. So right now, I’m not looking so much on a site anymore when I do projects because I did notice that you tend to come up with similar solutions.”

Client Influence. Some participants described fixation arising from client influences, largely due to clients changing their mind, sharing their own ideas about the design, and brand guidelines that need to be applied. P6 described clients’ early ideas as encouraging fixation, and a strategy of avoiding visual content from clients to prevent fixation: “Oh, we were thinking of doing X, Y, Z, and now I’m stuck with their idea. And actually actively try to avoid that when clients have a visual content, I usually try to encourage them to not share it and let’s not talk about that.” P4 mentioned the role of client expectations as “something that we hear a lot is like, well our clients are used to looking at it this way, and so that’s certainly something that enforces that kind of fixation.” P6 also shared their experience of clients promoting adherence to an idea they’ve seen somewhere else: “What might lead to it [fixation] in datavis specifically is—8 times out of 10—is charts, it’s like, ‘oh, I think we should do a bar chart. I was thinking we should do a pie chart’ […] or they saw this really cool thing in the New York times or wherever else and they say, ‘Oh, I saw this wonderful thing over here. Can we do that with this data?”

Incubation. Participants discussed how putting the problem aside for a while could help overcome fixation. P7 puts it as “Taking a break, looking at other stuff. Even sometimes just taking, if I can, a couple days away, not thinking about it. And then somewhere in my subconscious something will click. And I will be able to like, oh, this was the problem. Let’s try it this way instead.”. P2 highlighted the importance of diverting the mind from the problem and says the “only thing I do when I know that I’ve gone down a path that’s ineffective, or that I’m too fixated, is I just take a break—and that could be like I step away and do something for a few hours, or do a completely different project for weeks and come back with a fresh perspective.” Some participants talked about unconscious moments of insight, even in states of sleep, as P9 describes: “I dunno, sometimes with things where I’m sleeping in the middle of the night, wake up and like, oh, I know exactly how to redo this.”

Experimenting and Creative Exercises. Participants shared various strategies they employ to avoid or overcome fixation and promote creativity. Some participants described experimenting with different visual encodings as a creative exercise to overcome being fixated on one encoding. For instance, P3 described “these kind of ‘what if’ questions, like what if I would show it as line instead of circles or whatever. Because I think one of the characteristics of data visualization is that, especially because of this very iterative approach and exploratory approach at the small scale, you can try things and then you see things happen again. And sometimes, or often, these could be things that you didn’t expect and these kinds of things can generate new ideas that you could try out.” Similarly, P1 described their strategy as “pick two encoding and mash them together to see what sort of thing you can create from that.”

Participants described other creative exercises, such as P4’s “Coming up with 10 solutions to something […] eventually you start coming up with stuff that’s weirder and that might lead off into something.” P6 described sketching as a way to keep early ideas flexible and avoid fixation, stating that “I try not to do it [look at existing visualizations] until after I got my initial sketches out.” P3 described a training exercise of asking people to create intentionally bad designs, reflecting that “it’s very interesting to see that once people start doing this exercise, they sometimes cannot stop working on it because they have so many ideas, and sometimes people are laughing at themselves because they come up with nice ideas. And so this is really one of the most fun exercises because people come up with the most crazy ideas.”. P9 described an exercise of trying to do the opposite of an existing visualization for a similar problem that they were working on “what if I showed the opposite of this? So instead of being like ‘what are the most words that the candidates used?’ I’d be like, ‘what words didn’t they use?’” P11 described a way to avoid early attachment to ideas as “flipping the brief”—referring to a strategy for challenging the initial client request and adjust the framing of the problem.

Inspiration. Participants highlighted various ways they get inspired for their design work. One method was to look for inspiration in existing visualizations. P12 described a situation where a client wanted an ‘ugly’ dashboard to become ‘visually appealing’. P12 was not sure what to do, so “went into a sort of hysterical, ‘inspire me’ mode” and stumbled across a waffle chart. P12 then described the result: “so that [the waffle chart], combined with a better color palette than they had before, turned into pretty compelling results that they liked—and that got me out of the woods.” However, this is one of the trickiest strategies to follow with respect to fixation, as some participants indicated becoming fixated as a result of looking at existing work. Participants acknowledged this and discussed strategies for looking at existing work that was not too similar to the current problem they were working on. As P9 said “I wouldn’t look at any of their [a direct competitor] stuff because then I would feel like I was going to create something like what they were doing.” P3 noted that they will “still look at other people’s work, not related to a specific project that I’m working on.” P4 described a strategy of looking broadly at existing visualizations “I’ll go to a few different sites like Flowing Data or Xenographics that just have lots of examples of different visualizations, different chart types, and just browse that for half an hour. And that can help me kind of jog out of being stuck on something.”

Some participants, especially P2 and P9, went beyond data visualization examples to look for inspiration in art and nature. P9 described “going to the art museum and seeing a renaissance painting, or like this 1970s weird something. I went to this conspiracy UFO exhibit, but it’s just like …it [the solution] can be a shape—it could just be like a weird shape. I see. And I’m like, ‘oh like that’s a connection I can make’.” P2 described getting inspiration as “a lot of the inspiration is just kind of like the world around me—nature, other people’s art. Especially, I like taking inspiration from art—not other people’s datavis–but other people’s art.” P2 described a project where they were trying to create a visual encoding using a flower metaphor, but were getting stuck on the idea: “I just couldn’t lay it out in a pleasing way. And then, I was in Tokyo at the time, and I stepped out and took a walk. And it was April, so there was a bunch of cherry blossoms and, as I was staring out at the cherry blossom, I’m like: ‘Oh yeah, flowers grow on trees’. And so if I just organize them as tree branches, it would look much more aesthetically pleasing—and then it just unblocked me immediately.”

External Input. Many participants described the value of external input in overcoming fixation. P7 noted “having a co-worker discussing this with me, and basically the question that they ask always gets me out of it [fixation].” P6 spoke about seeking informal input from their spouse whenever being stuck creatively. P5 includes feedback as a part of their process and says, “in my process, what helps me avoid it [fixation] is getting others’ input—that’s input from users, input from coworkers—getting a sense of what other people are thinking and how they respond to something helps prevent me from getting locked into the idea that my idea is the only solution.”

Changing Perspective. Some practitioners advocated for deliberately thinking in a different way or changing their literal or mental perspective. P6 described their strategy of trying to think from a beginners’ perspective: “try to remember what it was like to not know anything, and try to walk into every client engagement as though you don’t know anything about what they’re doing or about even almost data visualization..” Some participants described a literal change of perspective, such as P12 suggesting to “Take an image and look at it upside down to get a sense of it from a compositional perspective outside of the details of what it’s actually a picture of […] one of the things you need to do is cock your head or go away and come back or look at it from across the room.” P2 speculated about the value of a technique that’s often used in art education, where “one of the things that you would do is flip your artwork upside down. You really give yourself a different perspective.”