Research on the Influence Factors of Designer’s Emotion in the Design Process

The emotional change of a designer may lead to a different design decision and therefore affect the outcome of the design. This paper aims to explore factors that affect the emotions of designers during the design process. To be specific, through the method of multi-level screening, three experiments were performed, including the preliminary screening of 435 emotional words, the study on the relevance of designer emotions to the design process, and the semantic similarity analysis of emotional words, after which the set of 29 frequently-used words concerning designer emotions was constructed. Further, the factors and conditions that affect the emotional state of designers were summarized based on 1069 textual messages of emotional experience in a retrospective interview. The results show that the five major factors that cause the emotional change of designers are the state and capacity of designers themselves, interpersonal interaction and evaluation, external resources and environment, progress and content of the project, and the performance and innovation of tools, while 15 minor influencing factors were identified as well. Finally, four strategies were proposed to promote positive emotions during the design process from the perspective of design organizations and designers. By studying reasons for emotional state changes of the designer, the paper proposes a new perspective of self-understanding and self-examination for designers and the achievement of this research may offer valuable guidance for the practice of emotion management in design organization.