Mood Boards Research Articles

Curating in the Postdigital Age

Curating in the Postdigital Age

The Art of Graphics in Design Education

In addition to its indispensable role in presentation, graphic design could be designated as a powerful instrument especially in architectural education for students to develop a design idea at the very beginning of the process. That's why, mood boards provide a useful tool with which students respond their perceptions on the design problem and develop ideas about it. This paper discusses the role of graphics in design education as not only it is commonly accepted, a presentation tool; but also as rarely applied, a part of design process. The discussion is held through comparison of usage of art of graphics both on final presentations and on ‘mood boards’ linking the end of the process with the beginning. With these ideas in mind, the authors would like to share their experiences and define the contributions of usage of mood boards in 2013-2014 semester of the design studios in Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design at Akdeniz University FFA.

Designing a training program to develop the students' skills in building fashion design portfolios

A fashion designer needs to present his ideas, technical drawings (flats), mood boards, and promotional fashion illustrations in effective ways. Under the umbrella of fashion illustration, this research focuses on fundamentals of fashion drawings and presentation throughout the design process. As the student of fashion design must present fashion ideas in an effective portfolio, as well as, using it for job interviews or having acceptance to an internship. Fashion designer explores the skills required to create an effective portfolio, through learning, first, how to illustrate fashion ideas, second, how to represent garments technically, and finally how to compile mood boards. The best way to build a great portfolio is to focus on the content. It should showcase the designer's creativity, style, sketching ability, and knowledge of how to use colors, textile understanding, design development and problem solving skills. Mainly, the problem lays on taught fashion design courses in the specialized faculties, these don't emphasize on how to build effective portfolios. From that, the aim of the present research is to design a training program, where students' skills are developed, particularly, in the area of building fashion design portfolios. The resultant data from the program questionnaire reveals that most effective items of the program was the first item "The content of the training program achieves its aims", then the fifth item "The training strategies achieve the program aims " in the second, then both the fourth item "The training activities are enough to develop the fashion students' skills " and the sixth item "The evaluation of each section is suitable for its objectives" in third place, and then the third item "The training aids are enough to transfer skills to students " in fourth place, then both of the second item "The program duration is enough to achieve its aims" and the seventh item "The general form of the program " in the last rank.

Practitioner capability

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of creative activity and storytelling in assisting development of students’ reflective ability and critical thinking. Design/methodology/approach – Eight biomedical science students undertaking year-long work-based placements took part in this action research study. A coding scheme was designed to assess students’ reflections initially and at each stage of the study. Intervention activities involved students using mood boards, images and storytelling to assist development of creative learning spaces with a thematic approach employed to analyse both personal and collective reflections. Post-intervention evaluation considered possible long-term impact on students’ reflective ability. Findings – Students’ pre-intervention reports showed little reflection focusing mainly on competence demonstration and descriptive situation summaries. During the intervention workshops, all students demonstrated both identification of self as a practitioner and a critically reflective approach. However, this was not maintained long term as initial post-intervention reports tended to revert to a more descriptive style of writing suggesting longer-term support is required. Research limitations/implications – The importance of further research into the long-term usefulness of creative collaborative learning spaces in work-based programmes is suggested. Originality/value – This is the first study investigating the approach to supporting critical reflection during work placement in biomedical scientists. It is suggested that the current competence-based training programme provides limited opportunities for developing and embedding critical reflection. Where opportunities are provided, such as creative learning spaces, students’ critical reflection was greatly enhanced. However, it appears essential that this approach is maintained throughout training as critically reflective skills developed during collaborative learning have limited transferability to subsequent reflective report writing.

Agent-Based Modelling of Emotional Goals in Digital Media Design Projects

The authors promote agent-oriented models to identify, represent and evaluate high-level abstractions of digital media design projects. A major aspect is the introduction of emotional goals, in addition to functional goals and quality goals to describe feelings such as having fun, being engaged and feeling cared for. To establish emotional goals, digital media design methods and processes were employed including the development of emotional scripts, user profiles, mood boards and following an iterative participatory design process. This approach proved to be highly successful, not only to represent emotional goals such as fun, tension and empathy, but also to facilitate the ideation, creation and progressive evaluation of projects. The process supports communication between designers, developers and other stakeholders in large multidisciplinary development teams by providing a shared language and common artefact. The process is demonstrated in the development of a Multiplayer Online Role Play Game (MORPG) called Aspergion that promotes respect for people with Asperger's Syndrome.

Concept-based indexing of annotated images using semantic DNA

One of the challenges in image retrieval is dealing with concepts which have no visual appearance in the images or are not used as keywords in their annotations. To address this problem, this paper proposes an unsupervised concept-based image indexing technique which uses a lexical ontology to extract semantic signatures called ‘semantic chromosomes’ from image annotations. A semantic chromosome is an information structure, which carries the semantic information of an image; it is the semantic signature of an image in a collection expressed through a set of semantic DNA (SDNA), each of them representing a concept. Central to the concept-based indexing technique discussed is the concept disambiguation algorithm developed, which identifies the most relevant ‘semantic DNA’ (SDNA) by measuring the semantic importance of each word/phrase in the annotation. The concept disambiguation algorithm is evaluated using crowdsourcing. The experiments show that the algorithm has better accuracy (79.4%) than the accuracy demonstrated by other unsupervised algorithms (73%) in the 2007 Semeval competition. It is also comparable with the accuracy achieved in the same competition by the supervised algorithms (82–83%) which contrary to the approach proposed in this paper have to be trained with large corpora. The approach is currently applied to the automated generation of mood boards used as an inspirational tool in concept design.

The Mood Board Process Modeled and Understood as a Qualitative Design Research Tool

Mood boards are fundamental tools used in design industries. The term mood board is often used generically to cover a wide range of board types, each having specific uses. The types of boards considered to be a vital part of the design process that facilitate creative and innovative thinking and application, as opposed to those associated with marketing to merely present and communicate product to an audience, are the focus of this study. The creation of mood boards involves a recognizable process coupled with creativity. The creative process used to develop mood boards can be seen to have three fundamental stages that offer the creator opportunities for deep levels of engagement to take place in order to develop creative and innovative design solutions. This study explores and models this process uncovering the underlying principles in relation to working methodologies and problem-solving theories. Further system models conceptualize the working methodologies of thirteen individuals in case studies using observation techniques and think-aloud methods. An evaluation of the participants’ levels of engagement with the process stages enriches the analysis, drawing conclusions for best practice approaches to the task and the understanding of mood boards as qualitative research tools.

Transgenerational communication through affective imagery in mood boards

Hedonomic design aims to make products not just easy to use, but pleasurable. Toward this goal, designers often use mood boards of abstract visual images to represent the aesthetic and affective response they would like their designs to evoke. We studied the effect of aging on viewers' ability to understand the meanings of abstract images selected by designers to express specific affective concepts. Young adult and older adult participants made visual judgment on the affective images. Data showed no age-related differences in the judgment accuracy. Results suggest that elderly adults can extract emotional meanings from young designers' mood boards as well as do young adults, and that affective product semantics may communicate similar meanings to users of different age group.

In Search of Design Inspiration: A Semantic-Based Approach

Sources of inspiration help designers to define the context of their designs and reflect on the emotional impact of their new products. By observing and interpreting sources of inspiration, designers form vocabularies of terms, pallets of colors, or mood boards with images, which express their feelings, inspire their creativity and help them communicate design concepts. These ideas are the motivation behind the EU-funded project TRENDS, which aimed at developing a software tool that supports the inspirational stage of design by providing designers of concept cars with various sources of inspiration. This paper concentrates on OntoTag, the semantic-based image retrieval algorithm developed within the TRENDS project, and its evaluation. OntoTag uses concepts from a general-purpose lexical ontology called OntoRo, and semantic adjectives from a domain-specific ontology for designers called CTA, to index the images in the TRENDS database in a way which provides designers with a degree of serendipity and stimulates their creativity. The semantic-based algorithm involves the following four steps: (i) creating a collection of documents and images retrieved from the web, (ii) for each document, identifying the most frequently used keywords and phrases in the text around the image, (iii) identifying the most powerful concepts represented in each document, and (iv) ranking the concepts identified and linking them to the images in the collection. OntoTag differs significantly from earlier approaches as it does not rely on machine learning and the availability of tagged corpuses. Its main innovation is in the use of the words’ monosemy and polysemy as a measure of their probability to belong to a certain concept. The proposed approach is illustrated with examples based on the software tool developed for the needs of two of the industrial collaborators involved in the TRENDS project.

Mood boards: Current practice in learning and teaching strategies and students' understanding of the process

Mood boards are design and marketing tools used extensively in areas of industry where information is better communicated in a visual manner. It is considered important for the study of creative subject areas for students to understand the processes of mood board development and how to improve their own skills in order to produce effective or successful boards of a high standard and quality as they are an implicit part of assessment for creative modules and a fundamental tool used in industry. This study concentrates upon the teaching of mood board creation and development, and how students engaged with the learning process in order to produce visual boards. The primary research was achieved through case studies and questionnaires. The findings form a substantial foundation for understanding the learning and teaching methods currently used in higher education where visual boards are a part of the assessment requirement.

Projective techniques for brand image research

PurposeSince it is hard for consumers to express their feelings and views regarding brand images, market researchers increasingly use projective and enabling techniques to collect rich and meaningful data. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and use of two methods of brand image research based on personification. Both methods were used to investigate the personality of four beer brands.Design/methodology/approachThe first method was based on mood boards: participants were asked to make collages of celebrity photographs representing the beer brands (n=16). The second method used a job‐sorting task: participants were asked to connect jobs with the beer brands (n=100). The results of both methods were related to a list of brand personality traits.FindingsHolistic interpretations of the mood boards and the jobs associated with the beer brands reveal highly similar results among the two methods, which strongly discriminate between the four beer brands. A translation of these findings to scores on personality dimensions further underlines the similarity of the two methods used, but does not convincingly distinguish between the four beer brands.Research limitations/implicationsThe similarities in the results underline the congruent validity of the two methods. The observation that the two methods lose their discriminating value when holistic impressions are translated to personality dimensions scores calls for more research into the way projective research data may be interpreted and used.Originality/valueThis study is a first attempt to compare the results of two different but related projective techniques for brand image research. It demonstrates the importance of methodological research in this area.

Exploring the degree to which individual students share a common perception of specific mood boards: observations relating to teaching, learning and team-based design

Mood boards offer a visual and sensorial channel of communication and inspiration for design research and development, which could be considered to be more logical and empathic within a design context than traditional verbo-centric approaches. This paper explores individuals' perceptions of images through a sample of mood boards. Gender was chosen as a bipolar attribute and was explored through the specific mood boards. A sample of 62 design students' responses was captured via a rating scale and key words. The paper reflects on the results obtained and attempts to translate findings into suggestions for other academic staff involved in undergraduate industrial design education.

Mood Boards as a Design Catalyst and Resource: Researching an Under-Researched Area

Mood boards are one method that can improve inspiration and communication during a design process. These mood boards are typically a collection of abstract media which the designer uses for personal inspiration and also to discuss and communicate with the client and possibly other stakeholders including users. The authors' experience as both designers and educators indicates that mood boards are a ‘love it or hate it’ issue. Some claim mood boards can inspire creativity and aid communication. Others dismiss them as of no value. The literature is curiously limited on the subject, possibly due to the subjective nature of the issue. This paper starts to explore the potential of mood boards as design research and support tools by looking at both practising and student industrial designers' attitudes to and use of mood boards. The authors conducted a scoping study that is discussed in this paper. The findings revealed that design practitioners valued mood boards as a tool for communication with non-designers and as an instrument to inspire lateral thinking. However, mood boards were undervalued and misunderstood by the sample group of industrial design undergraduate students.

Visual product evaluation: exploring users’ emotional relationships with products

This paper discusses an industrial designer's approach to eliciting user perceptions and emotional responses to products through visual evaluation and stimuli. Whilst the authors accept that product functionality is crucial for product success, the appearance, use of materials, shape and form provide the most immediate product data for the user. Less tangible issues such as emotional bonding of users with products, cultural perceptions and social value systems, provide valuable insights for the product developer to help expand knowledge and understanding of the users’ need beyond the functional. This paper presents product personality profiling as a new technique for design researchers/designers, and discusses it alongside other emerging approaches such as mood boards and visual product evaluation. The authors have used these techniques during focus group sessions with users to elicit individuals’ needs and aspirations towards products. Such a user-centred approach is fundamental to applied ergonomics. Experiences, benefits, and limitations of these techniques are outlined as well as the opportunities for further development.

Problem Interpretation and Resolution via Visual Stimuli: The Use of ‘Mood Boards’ in Design Education

This paper defines and discusses ‘mood boards’– those assemblages of images and, less frequently, objects, which are used to assist analysis, creativity and idea development in design activity. There is need for discussion since little published information currently exists to guide students and tutors. The paper proposes that mood boards can assist problem finding as well as problem solving. Primarily, mood boards provide a mechanism for students and practising designers to respond to perceptions about the brief, the problem as it emerges and the ideas as they develop. The construction of mood boards potentially stimulates the perception and interpretation of more ephemeral phenomena such as colour, texture, form, image and status. They are, like Debono's lateral thinking techniques, partly responses to an inner dialogue and partly provocation to become engaged in such a dialogue. Examples are drawn from recent work in the field of industrial design at Loughborough University.