Visual boards: Mood board, style board or concept board?

Abstract

In this paper, we research the usage of visual boards. Visual boards are an important part of navigating a design process. The two most known visual boards are mood boards and style boards, which are well described in literature [3]. However specific for industrial design practice are concept boards. While these boards are commonly used in practice, where they serve as central tools for developing and communicating concept ideas, they have received proportionally less attention in literature. Even though the theory recognises the existence of concept boards, knowledge of the content, development and use of these is still limited. Through case studies at two industrial design consultancies, we scrutinize 33 different visual boards made by design students and analyse the feedback they get from professional senior designers. In the analysis, we find concept boards are the most frequent and most central type of boards used, yet knowledge of them compared to style and mood board is scarce [2]. By scrutinizing the process of creating and receiving feedback on concepts boards in industrial design, we find three key elements and considerations for creating a productive concept board. For practice, we provide key considerations important for creating useful concept boards. We believe these may be valuable for both students and instructors of industrial design, that needs to understand or teach how to develop concept boards.