Mood Boards as a Tool for Studying Emotions as Building Blocks of the Collective Unconscious

We conducted an empirical study to answer the research question whether designers could generate richer affective content through mood boards when they are primed by archetypal media content, comparing to non-archetypal media content. Mood board making may stimulate more feedback from target users and help designers discover deeper insights about user needs and aspiration towards products. Today, mood board making has become an essential skill for designers. However, this technique did not gain adequate credits in terms of scientific evidence. It is necessary to assess the validity of mood boards to be an effective tool for studying unconscious emotions in design research. Four professional designers were asked to make mood boards for four different TV commercials (2× without archetypal content; 2× with archetypal content). All 16 mood boards are made online available to a group of 141 raters. In a random order all raters had to click on each mood board to view the full-size and give a rating of ‘attractiveness’ [0–100 score]. The GLM results of all ratings indicate that the attractiveness of the mood boards for archetypal media content and non-archetypal media content are significantly different (F = 15.674, df = 1, p < 0.001). The mood boards primed by archetypal media content (Mean = 54.42, SE = 1.55) are significantly more attractive than the mood boards primed by non-archetypal media content (Mean = 51.37, SE = 1.47). We conclude that mood boards are a enough good tool to investigate and use unconscious emotions what is relevant for addressing design challenges in different contexts.