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Designers, Emotions, And Ideas: How Graphic Designers Understand Their Emotional Experiences Around Ideation, Alisa Hutchinson

Wayne State University Dissertations

Research on the role of designers’ own emotions as an influence on design processes, outcomes, and professional identity is limited but indicates that these experiences may play a meaningful role in design, particularly around ideation processes. This phenomenographic study sought to investigate and identify critical variations in the ways that graphic designers understand their emotional experiences around ideation. Based on interviews with 15 graphic designers, seven distinct categories of understanding emerged. These included (1) goodness-of-fit between designer and project sets an emotional tone for ideation; (2) high arousal emotions are present during ideation but incidental; (3) high arousal emotions are …