Emotion tracking: Examining the emotional journeys of final-year design students

Emotion has been explored across various fields, but examining design students’ emotional experiences to uncover insights about their design journey creates new spaces for design research. This paper employs a mixed-method approach to explore design students’ emotional experiences by tracking their emotions throughout their final-year major design project. Two groups of design students participated in the study, with their design process tracked across two key dimensions: activity and achievement. Results reveal a significant imbalance in the distribution of emotions and design process stages, with higher concentrations occurring at the beginning and end of the project journey. Anger in design students’ design process is missing, and an emotionlessness state emerges while designing. The paper provides more details on the emotional patterns and suggests a need for more investment in employing emotions as influential motivators within students’ design processes to enhance their project management and emotional contribution to improve design education.