Inspiration is an important stage in conceptual design, wherein designers interact with different stimuli to generate creative ideas. Various cognitive processes like analogical reasoning have been described in design inspiration scenarios and have also been mapped to ontologies of cognitive psychology. However, the emotional processes in design inspiration are not clearly explained through ontological frameworks. In studies which report the significance of emotion in design inspiration, various aspects of emotion tend to get conflated. This conflation may lead to inappropriate choices of methods to measure emotion. To address this gap, this paper adopts the core affect model of emotion to offer a constructivist understanding of emotion in design inspiration contexts. The components of the core affect model are mapped to aspects of emotion reported in design inspiration scenarios which involve the use of stimuli. The paper then briefly outlines the potential of this ontological approach to study emotion in design inspiration. For this, a specific inspiration scenario is taken wherein a design student, while perceiving stimuli, thinks aloud to denote an emotion. It is then shown that this utterance could instantiate a detailed multipronged analysis in the framework of the core affect model, which delineates various constituent parts of emotion such as core affect, affective quality and so on. These constituents of emotion are broadly linked to different methodological frameworks with which they can be captured and analysed. The implications of this approach for future design research is also discussed. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.