Danger to the Design Process: The Impact of Anchoring

Engineering Extension

By Jake Kimmerer

April 14, 2017

During the design process, an engineer is always making decisions that will shape how he
or she continues working towards a design goal. Whenever a decision is made, a certain amount
of risk is associated with taking one alternative over the other. It is part of the engineers job to
manage the risk they work with, in order to successfully achieve the goals of a design.

The idea of risk management was a significant

topic brought up in Praxis 2. The lectures on risk were
the first time I had been formally introduced to risk
management and given strategies to identify and
manage the risks I have to work with. One idea that I
became interested with from those lectures is the idea
of knowns and unknowns. More important was the idea
of unknown unknowns: risks that we dont know exist. Figuren1: Praxis 2, Lecture 10, Slide 24:
An illustration of risk categorization
This made me think back to Praxis 1 and the idea of
anchoring.

Anchoring is the cognitive tendency to fixate on the first piece of information that you are
presented with (Sapadin, 2013). In my opinion, this is a form of unknown unknown because it is
often hard to realize that you are anchored, which means it is impossible to manage the risk of
anchoring if you do not know you are anchored. This is something I wanted to try managing with
my group in Praxis 2. One method I tried to implement was a large mixture of system 1 and system
2 thinking, a similar method to the one outlined identified in a paper written by students at Harvard
Business School (Milkman, 2008). By reflecting on our actions at each stage of the design process,
I was hoping to help my team identify any anchoring we may have done and found ways to work
around this anchoring. For example, at one point we became fixed on the idea of using a mandoline
as the design to respond to the RFP for the Kohai Education Centre. For a long time we believed
that a mandoline that we found on Amazon completely accomplished all of the requirements from
the RFP. However, when we sat down and had a system 2 based discussion about the design (using
a Pugh chart to evaluate the mandoline and our other designs), we realized that it in fact did not
accomplish some of the goals of a design solution. If we had not had this discussion, we may not
have realized that we had become anchored to the mandoline design and adapted it in the ways we
needed to.

But this method did not

always work because at some points
we became so anchored that we did
not even realize we needed to do a
system 2 analysis of the situation.
For example, the final design of our
mandoline had large knobs that were
used to adjust the blade settings of
the mandoline. We had not considered Figure 2: Email of Validation from Vicki Komisar where
any other option beside knobs at this she suggested the use of levers instead of knobs

point in our design. We wanted to validate the design of the knobs, so we contacted Vicki Komisar.
Even though she did validate the design of our knobs, she suggested that we use levers instead
because they were easier for people with reduced grip ability to handle. We never even thought of
using levers, and thus it was revealed to us by Vicki that we had been anchored.

This is an example of how dangerous and hard to detect anchoring can be in the design
process. We did not even realize we had been anchored, even though we had a process in place to
help mitigate the risk of anchoring. Moving forward, this is something I want to continue to
manage in any design challenge I take on, as I have learned from personal experience that
anchoring can seriously limit the development of designing.
 References

Sapadin, Linda. "The Anchoring Effect: How it Impacts Your Everyday Life." World of
Psychology. N.p., 24 July 2013. Web. 14 Apr. 2017.

Milkman, K., Chugh, D., Bazerman, M. How Can Decision Making Be Improved? Harvard
Business School. 2008. Web 14 Apr, 2017.