How Do You Create Ideas When You Are Excited, Calm, Upset or Fatigued? – The Relationship between Mood State and Creativity

Abstract

Design process is a process an engineer goes through in devising a solution of a problem. The process requires both knowledge and creativity. Idea generation during the conceptualization stage of design process is the process in which creativity is most utilized by designers. Many factors affect the creativity of the created ideas including the mood states of the designers. The aim of this study is to identify how the creative nature of designers at the beginning stage of design in which the process of ideation is applied, is affected by their mood states. For that purpose, a number of student designers are first induced into several mood states before given a design task. The task applied is on designing a solution for improving the use of a commonly used artefact. The creativity of the idea is evaluated based on the fluency, originality, and expansion. As the result, the ‘positive activating mood’ is found to be effective for higher level of creativity.