How to be Systematic with Mood Boards?

Abstract

This Innovative Practice Work in Progress Paper presents a strategy of how product design engineering students use mood boards in a systematic way, as a tool to enhance creativity and to gather visual coherence and aesthetic consistency during the concept design stage. In educational practice, mood boards help and improve an engineer's visual thinking. Currently there appears to be a very limited understanding by students on how to incorporate in their design, product features from visual theme boards; and students complain of the lack of precise instructions by teachers, making it difficult to conduct the design process. Being inspired by a perfume bottle for example helps create a systematic approach to mood boards by defining a visual framework to determine the styling outcomes. The findings suggested that the use of an inspiring element facilitates visual and aesthetic connections, resulting in a significantly more motivating process for students, as well as an encouraging guiding process for teachers that seek to achieve design accuracy.