‘Oh yeah, yeah you get a lot of love hearts. The Year 9s are
notorious for love hearts. Everything is love hearts.’ Fixation
in pupils’ design and technology work (11-16 years)  Bill
Nicholl, Ros McLellan 2007, Vol. 12, No. 1,   This paper focuses
on the design ideas generated by young people aged 11-16 years
when solving design and technology problems. A number of methods
including focus interviews with pupils and teachers, lesson
observations and analysis of documents and pupils portfolios are
used to help explain how pupils aged 11-16 years generate their
design and technology ideas. The findings indicate that a
significant number of pupils produced stereotypical design ideas
such as love hearts and sports logos. This was the case
regardless of their age and gender and happens at various stages
when designing. A review of the creative cognition literature
suggests that this occurs as a result of a normal way of
thinking and is referred to as fixation. Fixation, that is, what
it looks like and how it manife