The depression and creativity of design-major students

Abstract

In Taiwan, the rise of design industry recently has greatly increased the demand of design professionals. The design related departments has also been increased gradually. A designer's emotion can directly affect the design output, and designers with negative emotion may unconsciously project their negative emotion onto the design. The objective of the study is to discuss the association between design-major students with depressive tendency (DT) and their creativity. In this study, ten works from creators with DT and ten from creators without depressive tendency (NoDT) were examined by 123 subjects (as the audience) to explore the association between the creative works and emotional projection from the perspective of the audience. The result suggests that audience's preference and feeling of happiness of the 20 works are positively correlated. Those works making the audience happy are also liked, while those making the audience unhappy are disliked. Whether the audience has depression or not is not a factor affecting their perception of the works, but for creators, they would produce less liked works because of their depressive tendency.