Manipulating the graphic design process can be a stressful learning experience for design students. They usually have difficulties completing their graphic design projects. These difficulties can arise for various reasons, such as a lack of experience and insufficient practical and managerial skills. The students generally find the graphic design process complicated and confusing. In other words, the difficulties are obstacle to them to enjoy a positive or happy graphic design learning experience. Although they have learned about various fundamental subjects in the graphic design process and preliminarily developed their own design thinking, they do not yet possess much experience in handling graphic design projects independently.
To overcome students’ difficulties in adapting to the graphic design process, some scholars have focused on developing techniques and strategies for managing the design process based on the working processes used in the design industry. Some of researchers have explored how the decisions made by designers affect the organisation of their work, planning tasks and conflict management, etc. Most of these design management studies advocate rational teaching approaches and most tutors guide students in manipulating the graphic design process in a successive manner. Even so, many design students are still unable to successively resolve their design problems in their graphic design process. This suggests that there are other hidden factors that hinder the students’ practice. Therefore, identifying these hidden factors could help design students’ decision making and, hence, make them happy and enjoy the design process. At the same time, while some design scholars have investigated ways of helping students, they were forced to engage in cross-disciplinary research as there were insufficient references to the subject in the existing design studies literature. Some scholars drew from psychological studies, and proposed that designers also use emotional feeling when make decisions as well as the emotion of the designer. Accordingly, emotion may also affect how design students make decisions and handle their design processes. Therefore, this study explored how educators can help design students to manage the graphic design process by investigating the relationship between design and emotion and hence realise how to control the emotion for happiness. A qualitative research was conducted to explore the influence of emotion on the design students’ design process of their graphic design process and also how emotion influences their graphic design outcomes.