Mood boards as a tool for the “in-discipline” of design

Annie Gentes (1) , Frédéric Valentin (1) , Emeline Brulé (1)

1 Télécom ParisTech

This paper analyses the use of mood boards in design education not only as a means of conception and communication but also as a method that brings interdiciplinarity into play. It presents a longitudinal study of two use cases in two different educational contexts: a design school and an engineering school. After analyzing mood boards, their production and presentation, the authors suggest that mood boards actually help practitioners to draw pertinent questions and responses because they organize three conceptual activities: discretization, coherence, and relevance. The discretization of fields, objects, facts, deconstructs the disciplines as such, but also organizes the interplay of disciplines. This interplay could be dismissed as undisciplined. But we suggest that the format―i.e. the formal meaning of the media―shapes the process and organizes a rationally and efficiently constructed space of conception. After Rancière, we suggest that the concept of “indiscipline” covers not only the deconstruction and the stepping out of disciplines, necessary to the process of conception, but also that it reflects the rigorous framing of this process through formal and practical meaning making.

Mots clés: Interdisciplinarity; Indiscipline; Mood - Board; Design; Design Education; Discretization

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Art et histoire de l'art

Annie Gentes, Frédéric Valentin, Emeline Brulé. Mood boards as a tool for the “in-discipline” of design. IASDR, Nov 2015, Brisbane, Australia. ⟨hal-01246049⟩