What Does Design Ask People to Let Go Of, and What Does It Let Go Of? Unlearning Considered through a Broad View of Design

Where is discarding located in design?

Simon defined design, to show that engineers did not have a monopoly over it, as what anybody does when they try to change existing situations into preferred ones (Simon’s definition as cited by Tonkinwise 2018, p. 74). Under this definition, design is not limited to form-giving or screen design. Deciding the shape of services, organizations, institutions, and ways of living is also design. Changing an existing situation also means stopping something that already exists.

Much of the discussion in design research has been written from the side of making new things. As Sabie and colleagues wrote in the call for an HCI workshop, design is conventionally considered to be about making and creating new things, and unmaking what already exists remains under-investigated and under-theorized in HCI (Sabie et al. 2022b, abstract). How, then, has design treated letting go, stopping, and ending?

The companion note Can What Has Been Learned Be Let Go? Evidence on Unlearning from Research on Memory, Conceptual Change, Habits and Skills, and Correction examined, with literature from the learning sciences, whether individuals can let go of what they have learned. That note found that old knowledge is not so much erased as made harder to retrieve, and that it returns with context and time. It also found that habits change more when the situations in which their cues appear change than through resolve, and that there is little evidence that texts refuting errors remain effective beyond one month. This note brings those findings into the discussion of design. It asks three questions. How do designers let go of their own prior ideas and frames? What has design asked users and societies to let go of, and how? Who decides what is to be let go of?

Scope and method

• Scope: peer-reviewed articles, peer-reviewed conference papers, scholarly books, and doctoral theses (marked as not peer-reviewed) in design research, HCI, sustainability transitions research, organization studies, and higher education research that treat letting go, stopping, ending, or unlearning as part of the design process or as its object, plus one field experiment in environmental psychology on life transitions and habits. The period is 1991 to 2026. The psychology of memory, conceptual change, and habits was left to the learning sciences note.
• Collection: 100 candidates were gathered across scholarly databases (Crossref, OpenAlex, Open Library, DataCite), publishers, and institutional repositories, and retractions, corrections, and duplicates were checked with Crossref and OpenAlex (0 retractions, 1 correction).
• Verification: of the 50 references, the full text of 12 was obtained (author versions, institutional repositories, PMC, publisher open access; for van Oers et al. 2021 and 2023, the same articles as chapters of the doctoral thesis of van Oers 2024), and claims were checked against the relevant passages. For 37, the claims stay within the abstract (for books, the publisher’s description; for one book, the table of contents) and are attributed to the authors. For 1, neither the full text nor the abstract could be obtained, and its content was written from the description in another source whose full text was read.
• Writing: claims made by the literature and inferences made in this note are kept separate. Inferences are marked as inferences and are listed with their grounds in the table near the end.

Can designers move away from an idea they have already seen?

In design research, the phenomenon closest to unlearning is design fixation. According to Vasconcelos and Crilly (2016), Jansson and Smith (1991) showed that adding an example solution to the design brief reduced designers’ ability to move between the conceptual space of abstract ideas and the configuration space of potential solutions, and they described fixation as blind adherence to a limited set of ideas. Features of the example were incorporated into participants’ designs, sometimes even when they contradicted the brief, and this was taken as evidence that the repetition was blind and counterproductive (p. 3).

The phenomenon did not disappear with expertise. Linsey et al. (2010) divided engineering design faculty into a control group, a group shown an example, and a group that also received materials to mitigate fixation, and showed that the faculty fixated to a statistically significant degree, only partially perceived the effect, and that fixation could be mitigated (abstract). Viswanathan and Linsey (2013) replicated the experiment with novices and reported that novices and faculty fixated to the same extent, whereas the mitigation materials worked differently for the two groups (abstract). Expertise did not prevent fixation, and the effectiveness of the remedies varied with the level of expertise.

How, then, can designers move away from an example? Vasconcelos and Crilly (2016) reviewed 25 experiments in which participants generated ideas after being given examples, identified 14 manipulated variables, and criticized the large variation in methods and results (abstract). Their review cites a result that neither prohibiting participants from reproducing the examples nor explicitly telling them to diverge as much as possible from the examples reduced conformity to the examples (a result of Smith et al. 1993, p. 14). Other results showed that time away from the task produced more varied solutions and that switching tasks mitigated fixation (ibid., p. 14). Prototyping can mitigate fixation, but participants can also become attached to a model they invested effort in and fixate on their own initial solutions, so the direction of its effect is not settled (ibid., p. 15). Abstracting and rerepresenting increased original ideas, but not all of the added ideas fit the problem constraints (Zahner et al. 2010, abstract). The type of example also matters: in an experiment with 160 participants, the group exposed to examples within the fixation effect produced less original solutions than the group exposed to examples outside it (Agogué et al. 2014, abstract).

Placed next to the findings of the learning sciences note, these results show a similar pattern. Texts that only deny an error did not fully replace the old idea; a correct explanation and a delayed retest were needed. In design fixation, the instruction not to copy did not work, whereas time away from the task and switching tasks did. As an inference, the remedies for fixation resemble removing, for a while, the situation in which the old idea acts as a cue, more than forbidding the old idea in words. However, most fixation experiments ask students to generate ideas in about an hour (Vasconcelos and Crilly 2016, p. 4), and the review does not include studies that measured whether the old idea returned after a delay.

Should fixation always be let go of?

The assumption that fixation is always bad has been questioned from within design research. In the report of an international workshop on the future of fixation research, Crilly and Cardoso (2017) argued that, since experiments measure fixation as the repetition of features from a prior solution, researchers should ask whether that repetition is always bad (p. 14). Repeating features of prior solutions can bring benefits such as decreased time, increased confidence, and improved stakeholder acceptance (p. 14). In craft-based design practices, knowledge of how to shape a product is embedded in prior examples, and those attempting a redesign may not fully know the reasons behind features refined over many years (p. 15). In industries in which design change is costly, such as aerospace, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals, even the unknowing repetition of features can have positive consequences (p. 15).

Youmans and Arciszewski (2014) argued that increasingly broad definitions of fixation were undermining empirical and educational efforts, and recommended classifying fixation into unconscious adherence to the influence of prior designs, conscious blocks to change, and intentional resistance to new ideas (abstract). Under this classification, a designer who keeps a prior idea without seeing it and a designer who sees it and chooses it are showing different phenomena. In interviews with thirteen professional designers, Crilly (2015) reported that the experience of prior design failures was thought to encourage fixation, that the experience of varied solutions was thought to discourage it, and that recognizing and reflecting on fixation episodes was described as the means of guarding against future ones (abstract).

The unlearning of designers is not the uniform erasure of old ideas. What the literature describes is a state in which designers can choose, with awareness, whether to repeat a prior idea.

What happens to the old frame when a frame is changed?

Design has a deeper way of letting go than abandoning an idea: changing the way a problem is seen, or the frame. Dorst (2015a) stated that in design reasoning only the desired value is known, so that both what to create and how it will work must be found, and he called the proposal of such a way of seeing the problem “framing” (p. 24). In his example, meeting the goal of an energy rush before work with caffeine, a chemical stimulus, is one frame. This frame can be changed into one of social energizing through an inspiring conversation, or into one in which what is wanted is concentration rather than energy, which leads to meditation (p. 24). Dorst wrote that earlier empirical research has shown that designers spend much time reasoning from desired outcomes through frames to possible solutions and return to reframing the problem when they suspect that a solution is inadequate (p. 24). In expert design, the problem is not fixed before the search begins, and the formulation of the problem and the ideas for a solution develop together (p. 24).

Dorst (2015b) noted that when organizations apply old problem-solving methods to new kinds of problems, the result is often a temporary fix, and he presented frame creation, which creates new approaches to the problem situation itself rather than generating solutions, with steps and cases (publisher’s description).

In Dorst’s example, the old frame is not erased when the frame is changed. The caffeine frame remains as one candidate, compared alongside the conversation frame and the meditation frame. This is also an inference, but the pattern overlaps with the finding of the learning sciences note that old knowledge remains while conditions are arranged under which new knowledge becomes dominant. For designers, unlearning is closer to demoting an old frame to one frame among many than to forgetting it.

When design asks people to give up habits, what does it change?

The situations in which design asks users to let go of something have been discussed most extensively in sustainability research. Where to place the unit of design intervention became a point of contention there.

Shove (2010) argued that climate change policy relies on an “ABC” model that seeks to change individuals through attitude, behaviour, and choice, and that the theories of social change accumulated in the social sciences remain marginalized (abstract). The table of contents of Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012) treats practices through the elements of material, competence, and meaning, and devotes chapters to how links between elements are made and broken and how practices emerge, disappear, and persist (table of contents). Practice-oriented design carried this view into design. Kuijer and De Jong (2012) treated comfort as a social construct that varies, and argued that design should focus on everyday practices rather than on technologies or behaviors (abstract). A study of current practices of heating homes, placed in their historical and cultural context, revealed opportunities for (re-)introducing the heating of persons rather than whole spaces, and a “trigger-product” study had participants explore this in their own homes (abstract). Kuijer, de Jong, and van Eijk (2013) proposed three guidelines for taking practices as the unit of design: involve bodily performance, create crises of routine, and generate a variety of performances. They tested these in a study on bathing in which improvisation actors performed with low-fidelity prototypes (abstract).

Habits have also been overlooked in design for behaviour change. Pinder et al. (2018) argued that most digital behaviour change interventions fail to take habitual behavior into account, which limits their impact, and combined dual process theory, habit theory, and goal setting theory into a framework that explains how habits are formed and broken (abstract). In a review of design research promoting sustainable behavior, Coskun, Zimmerman, and Erbuğ (2015) identified gaps including a lack of detail on how target behaviors are selected, a concentration on electricity consumption and the domestic context, few strategies other than feedback, and a lack of longitudinal evaluations demonstrating lasting behavior change (abstract).

The guideline of creating crises of routine fits well with the findings of the learning sciences note. Habits are direct associations between context and response, and they broke down more readily when the situations in which their cues appear changed than through resolve or planning. Taking the inference one step further, what practice-oriented design changes is less what people think than the elements of a practice (material, competence, and meaning) and how they are linked, which amounts to rearranging the cue side of a habit. However, this collection found no study in practice-oriented design that measured, after a delay, whether old practices returned after an intervention.

Has ending been designed in societal transitions?

Transition design is a vision of changing bundles of everyday practices at the level of society. Irwin (2015) proposed transition design as a new area of design practice, study, and research that advocates design-led societal transition toward more sustainable futures in response to wicked problems such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity (abstract). This reconception extends to entire lifestyles, including infrastructures for energy, the economy and food, healthcare, and education (abstract). Irwin (2018) summarized the framework of this approach as five practices: mapping problems, situating them within large spatio-temporal contexts, bridging stakeholder conflicts, co-creating visions of desirable futures, and identifying leverage points for intervention (abstract). Design for sustainability as a whole has also expanded from the product level to product-service systems, the spatio-social level, and socio-technical systems (Ceschin and Gaziulusoy 2016, abstract).

In this body of work, adding the new and ending the old are treated differently. From transitions research, Heyen, Hermwille, and Wehnert (2017) noted that the promotion of renewable energy had been insufficient to push coal out of the energy market, and argued that the prevalent innovation bias should be complemented by research and policy on exnovation, the purposive termination of unsustainable technologies, products, and practices (abstract). Kivimaa and Kern (2016) argued that policy mixes for transitions should include both policies that create the new and policies that destabilize the old, and analyzed low-energy policy mixes in Finland and the UK (abstract). Both countries had policies covering the creation side, but fewer policies addressed destabilization (abstract). On the design side, Lockton and Coops (2025) wrote that designed visions of transitions focus on new possibilities and practices, and that breakdown and phase-out, although central to transition studies, have been underexplored in design and design education (abstract). They asked Master’s students to imagine visiting a museum in 2050 and encountering a cabinet of objects or practices that had disappeared from everyday life, and presented speculative design probes about coffee, marriage, and consumer choice (abstract).

The work of van Oers puts the term “unlearning” into the title and definition within transitions research. The doctoral thesis of van Oers (2024) argued that calls to transform the Dutch food system are mostly met with claims that new technologies and practices will eventually outcompete unsustainable ones, which obscures the need to let go (full text, Chapter 6 and abstract). It defined unlearning as the distancing or discarding of skills and practices; norms, values, and beliefs; and mindsets and worldviews that perpetuate unsustainability, and studied community-supported agriculture (CSA) and secondary vocational education (full text, Chapter 6 and abstract). The nine propositions it developed include that unlearning can be triggered by “forms of crises” or “forms of confrontation”; that it is a personal process that may be emotionally painful and hampered by socio-cultural dynamics; and that unlearning facilitators and unlearning spaces are important (full text, Chapter 6 and abstract). van Oers et al. (2023) combined organizational unlearning with pedagogical unlearning drawn from postcolonial and feminist approaches, and qualitatively documented the conversion of two CSA farms to solidarity payment, which increases access for low-income members (full text, Chapter 3 of van Oers 2024). The results indicated a generative function of unlearning during processes of change (full text, Chapter 3 of van Oers 2024).

In design terms, the unlearning spaces described here can be inferred to correspond to designing settings in which encounters with old assumptions are intentionally prepared. They can be read as the “change the context” remedy identified in the learning sciences note, built at the level of a collective initiative rather than an individual life.

Designing not making and stopping

A growing body of research places the object of design on the opposite side of making. Tonkinwise (2018) begins by rereading Simon’s definition. Designers do not change existing situations into preferred ones; they destroy what currently exists by replacing it with a preferable one, he wrote (p. 75). What resists new designs is not only existing products and the infrastructures that support them. The skills and habits of using existing products also resist, and choosing a new product is not merely additive but requires some unlearning (p. 76). People are prepared to unlearn and relearn because the new way is easier and more convenient, so these changes function like ratchets, and it is almost impossible to reverse them toward what is more difficult or inconvenient (p. 76).

Tonkinwise proposed directing this destructive power against unsustainable ways of living and working. When disasters or blackouts make routine practices impossible, people are exposed to other ways of living (p. 79). He described life transitions that require reorganizing everyday life, such as leaving home for university, relocation, a new job, a death, or a divorce, which consumer theory calls “innovation junctions.” Markets try to identify these moments as early as possible, and he argued that they should be sites of intervention for designers intent on being productively destructive (pp. 79–80). One example is to have ready-to-try experiments in different ways of living, or living labs, for each common life transition, such as trying car-free living in the city of a new job (p. 80). He also called the identification and amplification of past practices that have sustained us all along, but have gone unacknowledged, “undestroying” (p. 82).

This argument and the findings of the learning sciences fit together at two points. The first is intervention at life transitions. The finding that transfer students whose locations or companions changed did not continue their previous habits (learning sciences note, entry on Wood and Neal 2007) gives empirical support to Tonkinwise’s proposal. The second is recovery. If old knowledge is not erased but only made harder to retrieve, past ways of doing that are thought to have been discarded may also be recalled when cues are arranged. That changes in life circumstances such as relocation and job loss were among the reasons for abandoning self-tracking tools (Epstein et al. 2016, discussed below) also indicates that life transitions are times when patterns of use switch. Both points are inferences. For interventions at life transitions, there is a field experiment in environmental psychology. Verplanken and Roy (2016) delivered an intervention promoting sustainable behaviors to 800 participants in households that had recently relocated and in households that had not, and measured the self-reported frequencies of 25 environment-related behaviors eight weeks later (full text, abstract). The intervention was more effective among recently relocated participants, and its effect was significant only for those who had relocated within the previous three months (full text, Section 3.2). The authors noted as a limitation that behaviors were assessed by self-report (full text, limitations in the discussion). This intervention consisted of a personal interview and an information booklet, not designed objects or settings (full text, Section 2). This collection found no study that placed design interventions at life transitions and measured whether old habits decreased.

In HCI, frameworks have been developed that make reducing technology an object of design. Pierce (2012) argued that the negation of technology should be an explicit aspect of design research in HCI and articulated a framework for the undesign of technology, ranging from the inhibition of particular uses to the total erasure or foreclosure of technology (abstract). Its range includes self-inhibition, exclusion, removal, replacement, restoration, and safeguarding (abstract). In an ethnography of a six-week youth design internship at an urban senior center, Sabie et al. (2022a) reported that proposals that used unmaking raised conflictual discussion, whereas proposals centered on making received favorable feedback but did not raise the same discussions (abstract). Sabie et al. (2023) reread Luddism, the movement of nineteenth-century English textile makers who destroyed machines, as emancipatory unmaking that undoes oppressive structures, and identified six of its characteristics: practical and symbolic, community-engaged, emancipatory, selective, antagonistic, and enduring (abstract).

Not using has also become an object of design. Satchell and Dourish (2009) pointed out that for many, an interest in HCI is equivalent to an interest in usability, and called for examining the meanings and forms of non-use as seriously as use (abstract). In a questionnaire of over 400 Internet users, including people who had left Facebook, Baumer et al. (2013) showed that there is no clear binary distinction between use and non-use, and that various practices enable diverse ways and degrees of engagement, including limiting, leaving, and relapsing (abstract). Baumer et al. (2015) analyzed reversion among people who volunteered to stay off Facebook for 99 days but in some cases returned earlier, and reported that prior use, experiences of perceived addiction, privacy and surveillance, use of other social media, and friends’ reactions were associated with the likelihood of reversion (abstract). From a survey of 193 people and interviews with 12 people who had stopped using self-tracking tools, Epstein et al. (2016) identified six reasons for stopping and five perspectives on life after tracking, and showed that designs continue to influence people after abandonment (full text). One of the reasons for stopping was a change in life circumstances, including relocation, pregnancy, injury, job loss, divorce, and entering graduate school (full text, section “Why People Stop Tracking”).

Some participants continued to apply the habits and knowledge they had gained through tracking after they stopped. One participant compared tracking software to training wheels that come off once balance has been developed (full text, section “Life After Tracking”). The authors treated abandonment as neither necessarily a failure nor the successful end of a process, and discussed designs that support happy abandonment and help people who want to return (full text, Discussion).

Lechelt et al. (2020) noted that even while an IoT object remains functional, a company may shut down its servers, and made designing for the end of life of such objects from the beginning of the design process the theme of a workshop (full text, p. 2).

The learning sciences note confirmed that extinguished responses return with context and time. That reversion appears as one pattern in non-use research points in the same direction. What can be inferred from this is that design that supports stopping should not end at the moment of stopping, and needs to anticipate the times and situations in which people are likely to return.

In organization studies, the discarding of knowledge by organizations was discussed early. Tsang and Zahra (2008) noted that organizational unlearning is widely considered a condition for adapting to environmental change yet has received scant attention, and they defined it, distinguished it from organizational learning, articulated its dimensions, and discussed how organizations can unlearn (abstract). From an exploratory multiple-case study of international strategic alliances, Martin de Holan and Phillips (2004) developed a theory of how and why organizations forget and a typology of organizational forgetting (abstract). Klammer and Gueldenberg (2019) systematically reviewed 63 works on organizational unlearning and forgetting and identified levels, scopes, antecedents, and consequences (abstract). They developed a framework that positions research by the intentionality and the depth of knowledge loss (abstract). However, as the learning sciences note showed, the definition of unlearning as discarding knowledge, said to have been imported into organization studies from psychology, has been criticized as lacking support in the psychological literature (Howells and Scholderer 2016, entry in the learning sciences note).

When learners are asked to let go, what does design education do?

In design education as well, letting go of assumptions has been treated as part of learning. Meyer and Land (2005) discussed threshold concepts, which transform the internal view of a subject, and the related troublesome knowledge as defining critical moments of irreversible conceptual transformation in the educational experiences of learners and teachers, and developed the notion of liminality, the in-between state during such transformation (abstract).

The word “irreversible” stands in tension with the findings of the learning sciences. In the learning sciences note, adults who had studied science retained naive theories, and the intrusion of old ideas appeared in reaction times. The inference of this note is that the irreversibility of threshold concepts connects more easily to the learning sciences literature if it is read narrowly as meaning that it becomes difficult to return to seeing the world through the old view, rather than that the old view disappears. This collection found no study that examined this.

On what is given up and what is acquired in design education, there is research on critique. Dannels and Martin (2008) developed a typology of feedback in critiques across design studios from novice to expert levels and found that the feedback socialized students into egalitarian relationships and autonomous decision-making identities that were perhaps more reflective of academic developmental stages or idealized workplace contexts than of actual professional settings (abstract). Fixation research shows that novices fixate to the same extent as faculty (Viswanathan and Linsey 2013, abstract). Students’ fixation cannot be attributed only to their lack of experience.

In sustainability education, the limits of adding have been pointed out. Boehnert and Dewberry (2023) argued that educational institutions have responded by adding sustainability ideals to existing ways of working, with ineffective outcomes, and that the unlearning of unsustainability and its associated structures, processes, and outcomes is required (abstract). From their experience of undergraduate design education in the UK, Boehnert, Sinclair, and Dewberry (2022) identified constraints such as disciplinary fragility, appropriation, and power dynamics in the design school (abstract). Here too, the asymmetry between adding the new and letting go of the old appears in the same form as in transitions research.

Who decides what is let go of?

The literature reviewed so far assumes that letting go is good. However, what is let go of is not decided neutrally.

van Oers, Feola, Moors, and Runhaar (2021) bridged research on the political economy of sustainability transitions with research on the deliberate destabilization of unsustainable regimes, and analyzed the history of the phase-out of hen battery cages in the Netherlands (full text, Chapter 2 of van Oers 2024). They argued that because political and economic interests are intertwined, deliberate destabilization may reproduce, rather than transform, unsustainable and unjust socio-technical regimes (full text, Chapter 2 of van Oers 2024). The characteristics “selective” and “antagonistic” that Sabie et al. (2023) found in Luddism also indicate that unmaking involves choosing whose things are destroyed (abstract).

Design methods themselves can also displace the practices of some people. Akama, Hagen, and Whaanga-Schollum (2019) argued that when design enters through popular methods such as the Double Diamond or human-centered design (HCD) toolkits, it carries the legacies of industrialized, Eurocentric origins that emphasize problem-solving, replicable methods and outcomes, and simplicity and efficiency, and risks perpetuating colonialism by inadvertently displacing Indigenous practices, knowledges, and worldviews (abstract). Based on two series of community-based participatory design workshops in the United States, Harrington, Erete, and Piper (2019) argued that participatory design in the workshop form is an affluent and privileged activity that often neglects the historical context of the research environment, community access, perceptions of materials and activities, and unintentional harm (abstract). Keshavarz and Mazé (2013) questioned participatory approaches based on consensus and used “dissensus,” as theorized in political philosophy, as a lens to reflect on their practice with women activists in Iran and Sweden (abstract).

The discussion of decolonizing design asks what designers themselves should let go of. Tlostanova (2017) regarded design as an ontological instrument that transforms social and cultural reality, brought together Fry’s understanding of ontological design and the decolonial interpretation of modernity and coloniality, and attempted to distinguish defuturing ontological designs from those that rebuild other ways of existing (abstract). Escobar (2018) noted that most design currently serves capitalist ends and argued for an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of collaborative and place-based approaches (publisher’s description). Costanza-Chock (2020) called design that is led by marginalized communities and aims to challenge rather than reproduce structural inequalities “design justice,” and argued that universalist design principles and practices erase people who are intersectionally disadvantaged (publisher’s description). The combination of pedagogical unlearning from postcolonial and feminist approaches by van Oers et al. (2023) also belongs to this line (full text, Chapter 3 of van Oers 2024).

As an inference, those who ask others to let go and those who are asked to let go are not symmetrical when unlearning is designed. The criticisms above apply directly to the situation in which those who hold design knowledge and resources ask other people to give up their old practices. Conversely, the discussion of decolonization asks designers to let go of their own methods and assumptions.

What the literature supports and what is inferred

Taken together, the inferential rows suggest that unlearning in design is designed not as an operation that erases the old but as an operation that rearranges the situations in which the old prevails. Who carries out that rearrangement, and for whom, is what makes unlearning a question of design.

Gaps

• Design fixation research mostly measures whether prior features are repeated within a task of about an hour (Vasconcelos and Crilly 2016), and this collection found no study that measured whether old ideas or frames returned days or weeks after fixation had been resolved.
• Few studies in practice-oriented design and design for behaviour change have followed whether old practices returned after an intervention over a long period (Coskun et al. 2015 identified a lack of long-term evaluation).
• No study was found that measured whether design interventions placed at life transitions (relocation, a new job, entering university) reduced old habits. For an information-based intervention, a field experiment found effects confined to the three months after relocation (Verplanken and Roy 2016), but behaviors were self-reported and measured only up to eight weeks later. Tonkinwise’s (2018) proposal remains conceptual.
• Few peer-reviewed articles evaluate phase-out and exnovation as design methods, and the main studies are in transitions research and doctoral theses (van Oers 2024).
• No study was found in design education that examined the relationship between the “irreversible transformation” of threshold concepts and the learning sciences finding that old concepts persist.

Unverified items

• No major claim remains unverified. Inferences are marked as such and listed with their grounds.
• 37 references were handled within the scope of their abstracts (for books, the publisher’s description; for Shove et al. 2012, the table of contents) because their full text could not be obtained. In the text, these are attributed to the authors with “abstract,” “publisher’s description,” or “table of contents.”
• For Jansson and Smith (1991), neither the full text nor the abstract could be obtained, and its content was written from the description in Vasconcelos and Crilly (2016), whose full text was read. The result of Smith et al. (1993) also comes from that source (it is not listed in the references).
• For Lockton and Coops (2025), the Crossref record (two authors, 2025) was followed. The record in the institutional repository lists one author and 2026, and the discrepancy remains.
• van Oers (2024) is a doctoral thesis that has not been peer-reviewed, and its full text was read in the version held by the institutional repository. van Oers et al. (2021, 2023) were checked against the same articles included as Chapters 2 and 3 of this thesis.
• The findings on the learning sciences side (Wood and Neal 2007, Howells and Scholderer 2016, and others) rely on the verification in Can What Has Been Learned Be Let Go? Evidence on Unlearning from Research on Memory, Conceptual Change, Habits and Skills, and Correction.

References

All URLs were accessed on 2026-11-13.

Designers’ fixation and frame change

• Jansson, D. G., & Smith, S. M. (1991). Design fixation. Design Studies, 12(1), 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/0142-694X%2891%2990003-F
• Linsey, J. S., Tseng, I., Fu, K., Cagan, J., Wood, K. L., & Schunn, C. (2010). A study of design fixation, its mitigation and perception in engineering design faculty. Journal of Mechanical Design, 132(4), 041003. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4001110
• Viswanathan, V. K., & Linsey, J. S. (2013). Design fixation and its mitigation: A study on the role of expertise. Journal of Mechanical Design, 135(5), 051008. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4024123
• Youmans, R. J., & Arciszewski, T. (2014). Design fixation: Classifications and modern methods of prevention. AI EDAM, 28(2), 129–137. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0890060414000043
• Zahner, D., Nickerson, J. V., Tversky, B., Corter, J. E., & Ma, J. (2010). A fix for fixation? Rerepresenting and abstracting as creative processes in the design of information systems. AI EDAM, 24(2), 231–244. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0890060410000077
• Agogué, M., Kazakçi, A., Hatchuel, A., Le Masson, P., Weil, B., Poirel, N., & Cassotti, M. (2014). The impact of type of examples on originality: Explaining fixation and stimulation effects. Journal of Creative Behavior, 48(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1002/jocb.37
• Crilly, N. (2015). Fixation and creativity in concept development: The attitudes and practices of expert designers. Design Studies, 38, 54–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2015.01.002
• Vasconcelos, L. A., & Crilly, N. (2016). Inspiration and fixation: Questions, methods, findings, and challenges. Design Studies, 42, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2015.11.001
• Crilly, N., & Cardoso, C. (2017). Where next for research on fixation, inspiration and creativity in design? Design Studies, 50, 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2017.02.001
• Dorst, K. (2015a). Frame creation and design in the expanded field. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 1(1), 22–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2015.07.003
• Dorst, K. (2015b). Frame innovation: Create new thinking by design. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10096.001.0001

Practices of users and societies, and transitions

• Shove, E. (2010). Beyond the ABC: Climate change policy and theories of social change. Environment and Planning A, 42(6), 1273–1285. https://doi.org/10.1068/a42282
• Shove, E., Pantzar, M., & Watson, M. (2012). The dynamics of social practice: Everyday life and how it changes. SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446250655
• Kuijer, L., & De Jong, A. (2012). Identifying design opportunities for reduced household resource consumption: Exploring practices of thermal comfort. Journal of Design Research, 10(1/2), 67–85. https://doi.org/10.1504/jdr.2012.046140
• Kuijer, L., de Jong, A., & van Eijk, D. (2013). Practices as a unit of design: An exploration of theoretical guidelines in a study on bathing. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 20(4), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/2493382
• Pinder, C., Vermeulen, J., Cowan, B. R., & Beale, R. (2018). Digital behaviour change interventions to break and form habits. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 25(3), 1–66. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196830
• Coskun, A., Zimmerman, J., & Erbuğ, Ç. (2015). Promoting sustainability through behavior change: A review. Design Studies, 41(Part B), 183–204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2015.08.008
• Verplanken, B., & Roy, D. (2016). Empowering interventions to promote sustainable lifestyles: Testing the habit discontinuity hypothesis in a field experiment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 45, 127–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.11.008
• Irwin, T. (2015). Transition design: A proposal for a new area of design practice, study, and research. Design and Culture, 7(2), 229–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2015.1051829
• Irwin, T. (2018). The emerging transition design approach. In Proceedings of DRS2018: Catalyst. Design Research Society. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.210
• Ceschin, F., & Gaziulusoy, İ. (2016). Evolution of design for sustainability: From product design to design for system innovations and transitions. Design Studies, 47, 118–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2016.09.002
• Heyen, D. A., Hermwille, L., & Wehnert, T. (2017). Out of the comfort zone! Governing the exnovation of unsustainable technologies and practices. GAIA, 26(4), 326–331. https://doi.org/10.14512/gaia.26.4.9
• Kivimaa, P., & Kern, F. (2016). Creative destruction or mere niche support? Innovation policy mixes for sustainability transitions. Research Policy, 45(1), 205–217. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2015.09.008
• Lockton, D., & Coops, F. (2025). What doesn’t have a place in the future? Exploring imaginaries of systemic transitions through speculative design probes. Contexts: The Systemic Design Journal, 3. https://doi.org/10.58279/v3004
• van Oers, L., Feola, G., Moors, E., & Runhaar, H. (2021). The politics of deliberate destabilisation for sustainability transitions. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 40, 159–171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2021.06.003
• van Oers, L., Feola, G., Runhaar, H., & Moors, E. (2023). Unlearning in sustainability transitions: Insight from two Dutch community-supported agriculture farms. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 46, 100693. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2023.100693
• van Oers, L. M. (2024). Unlearning unsustainability: Facilitating phase-out in sustainability transitions in the Dutch food system [Doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University]. https://doi.org/10.33540/2379

Designing not making and stopping, and organizational forgetting

• Tonkinwise, C. (2018). ‘I prefer not to’: Anti-progressive designing. In G. Coombs, A. McNamara, & G. Sade (Eds.), Undesign: Critical practices at the intersection of art and design (pp. 74–84). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315526379-7
• Pierce, J. (2012). Undesigning technology: Considering the negation of design by design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘12) (pp. 957–966). https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208540
• Sabie, S., Jackson, S. J., Ju, W., & Parikh, T. (2022a). Unmaking as agonism: Using participatory design with youth to surface difference in an intergenerational urban context. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501930
• Sabie, S., Song, K. W., Parikh, T., Jackson, S., Paulos, E., Lindström, K., Ståhl, Å., Sabie, D., Andersen, K., & Wakkary, R. (2022b). Unmaking@CHI: Concretizing the material and epistemological practices of unmaking in HCI. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3503721
• Sabie, S., Soden, R., Jackson, S. J., & Parikh, T. (2023). Unmaking as emancipation: Lessons and reflections from Luddism. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581412
• Satchell, C., & Dourish, P. (2009). Beyond the user: Use and non-use in HCI. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (OZCHI ‘09) (pp. 9–16). https://doi.org/10.1145/1738826.1738829
• Baumer, E. P. S., Adams, P., Khovanskaya, V. D., Liao, T. C., Smith, M. E., Schwanda Sosik, V., & Williams, K. (2013). Limiting, leaving, and (re)lapsing: An exploration of Facebook non-use practices and experiences. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘13) (pp. 3257–3266). https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466446
• Baumer, E. P. S., Guha, S., Quan, E., Mimno, D., & Gay, G. K. (2015). Missing photos, suffering withdrawal, or finding freedom? How experiences of social media non-use influence the likelihood of reversion. Social Media + Society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115614851
• Epstein, D. A., Caraway, M., Johnston, C., Ping, A., Fogarty, J., & Munson, S. A. (2016). Beyond abandonment to next steps: Understanding and designing for life after personal informatics tool use. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1109–1113). https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858045
• Lechelt, S., Gorkovenko, K., Soares, L. L., Speed, C., Thorp, J. K., & Stead, M. (2020). Designing for the end of life of IoT objects. In Companion Publication of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 417–420). https://doi.org/10.1145/3393914.3395918
• Tsang, E. W. K., & Zahra, S. A. (2008). Organizational unlearning. Human Relations, 61(10), 1435–1462. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726708095710
• Martin de Holan, P., & Phillips, N. (2004). Remembrance of things past? The dynamics of organizational forgetting. Management Science, 50(11), 1603–1613. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1040.0273
• Klammer, A., & Gueldenberg, S. (2019). Unlearning and forgetting in organizations: A systematic review of literature. Journal of Knowledge Management, 23(5), 860–888. https://doi.org/10.1108/jkm-05-2018-0277

Design education

• Meyer, J. H. F., & Land, R. (2005). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): Epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning. Higher Education, 49(3), 373–388. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-004-6779-5
• Dannels, D. P., & Martin, K. N. (2008). Critiquing critiques: A genre analysis of feedback across novice to expert design studios. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 22(2), 135–159. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651907311923
• Boehnert, J., & Dewberry, E. (2023). Unlearning unsustainability in design education. In Learn X Design 2023. Design Research Society. https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2024.091
• Boehnert, J., Sinclair, M., & Dewberry, E. (2022). Sustainable and responsible design education: Tensions in transitions. Sustainability, 14(11), 6397. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14116397

Who decides (justice, participation, decolonization)

• Akama, Y., Hagen, P., & Whaanga-Schollum, D. (2019). Problematizing replicable design to practice respectful, reciprocal, and relational co-designing with Indigenous people. Design and Culture, 11(1), 59–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2019.1571306
• Harrington, C., Erete, S., & Piper, A. M. (2019). Deconstructing community-based collaborative design: Towards more equitable participatory design engagements. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359318
• Keshavarz, M., & Mazé, R. (2013). Design and dissensus: Framing and staging participation in design research. Design Philosophy Papers, 11(1), 7–29. https://doi.org/10.2752/089279313X13968799815994
• Tlostanova, M. (2017). On decolonizing design. Design Philosophy Papers, 15(1), 51–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/14487136.2017.1301017
• Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822371816
• Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001

Related notes

• Can What Has Been Learned Be Let Go? Evidence on Unlearning from Research on Memory, Conceptual Change, Habits and Skills, and Correction: the companion note that examined the same question with literature from the learning sciences. This note used its findings (old knowledge is made harder to retrieve rather than erased, habits change more when the context changes, and the effects of refutation persist weakly) to bridge into the discussion of design.
• Is Expertise a One-Way Street? Unlearning and the Blind Spot of Reversible Mastery: an essay that questions the assumption that expertise is a one-way ascent through the hypothesis that unlearning is a process symmetrical to learning. It reads design fixation as material for the hypothesis.
• The Creativity of Subtraction: The Additive Bias, and the Hypothesis of Designing Absence: an essay that inverts the bias that treats only addition as generative and proposes the hypothesis of designing subtraction and absence. It approaches the side of design that does not make from creativity theory.
• What Has Design Education Carried So Far? (Academic Research): a note on what studios and critiques have done in design education. It shares the literature on socialization through critique.
• Does Prototyping Widen Design Exploration? Fixation on Early Examples, Parallel Prototyping, Rapid Prototyping with Generative AI, and Documentation in Research through Design: examines the routes by which prototyping mitigates or strengthens fixation on the first example. It reads the same literature as the design fixation section of this note (Vasconcelos and Crilly 2016 and others) from the side of the breadth of exploration.
• What Is the Philosophy of Design? (Academic Research): covers ontological design, transition design, and design justice as currents in the philosophy of design.