Influence of cultural characteristics on designers’ approaches – an empirical study (original) (raw)
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CoDesign
Culture is a broad term encompassing the customary beliefs, traditions, social norms, social habits and values as reflected in human practices and behaviours as well as in religion and art. Culture reflects the expected or correct way to think and act, and determines what is acceptable or unacceptable, important or unimportant and right or wrong. It is generally acknowledged that cultural differences pose challenges, as well as opportunities, for the way people interact with each other and that such differences may lead to misunderstanding as well as conflicts. Such cross-cultural challenges and opportunities also apply to collaborative design. Internationalisation of society in general and of the design industry specifically, in terms of outsourcing, subcontracting and cross-continent branches, poses new challenges due to physical distance and time zone differences, but importantly also due to cultural differences. Cultural differences are reflected in design tools and materials, as well as immaterial aspects such as social organisation, power relations and politics in organisations. Two pertinent cross-cultural issues frequently arising in collaborative design relates to design team cultural heterogeneity, and designing for a cross-border audience. Often products and services are designed in one country, but marketed and traded in another, and in this new international marketplace, the adequate understanding of cultural characteristics of users have become increasingly important (Plocher, Rau, and Choong 2012). Furthermore, in large corporate settings, collaborative designing very frequently takes place in culturally heterogeneous teams, which may lead to new team perspectives, but also challenges with respect to collaboration and mutual understanding. The papers in the current special issue stem from the 11th Design Thinking Research Symposium, (DTRS11) and relate directly to issues with respect to cross-cultural design, as they are all based on analyses of a video-based data-set that covered a Scandinavian design team working for a European car manufacturer designing for the Chinese market. Centrally, the case included co-creation sessions with Chinese users, and company collaborations between a core Scandinavian design team and Asian consultants. From the literature on cross-cultural collaboration, we know that perception of hierarchy is one of the main differences between cultures as people relate to their superiors quite differently in Scandinavia than in parts of Asia, for instance, Japan, India and China. Likewise, certain cultures value independence and initiative whereas others do not. Such differences may account for how certain design activities, for instance, workshops, operate in a cross-cultural context with respect to who takes the initiative or whether and how participants reflect on and critique each other's ideas. Based on a global survey in the IT industry and theoretical studies, Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov (2010) argued that thinking, feeling and acting vary by cultural context, and developed a culture profile model consisting of value scores along six dimensions, which offer the opportunity to compare value scores between nations. The six dimensions are (1) Power Distance (high versus low), (2) Individualism (versus Collectivism), (3) Masculinity, (4) Uncertainty Avoidance, (5) Long-Term Orientation and (6) Indulgence. Based on the comparison tool available at
How Culture Affects Design: Eastern And Western
Online Journal of Art and Design, 2025
Research on cultural differences from various perspectives, including linguistics, cultural patterns, models of cultures, and cognitive style, has contributed to cross-cultural design. Culture is a way of life, whereas design implies planning to develop products for ease of living. Culture and design can't be separated and are moving collectively from ancient human civilizations to the current world. Over the past several decades, there has been a growing interest in how culture is shaping the design research and the making of things. Culture includes a shared set of values, which comprises human behavior, material culture and social conditions which encourages the designers to build products with sensitivity to people's lived experience. It is a known fact that, culture completely changes the way our brains process information. Hence, various cultures design things very differently. In this article, it is discussed how the culture influences the design of both in the prospect of Eastern and Western culture. Also, the purpose of this paper is to gain some insights from a leading scholar of the cross-cultural cognitive social psychology field on how cultural differences are viewed, understood, and dealt with, and thus to contribute to enrich the way cultural differences are framed in cross-cultural management research.
Approaches to a Cross-Cultural Engineering Design Theory
Engineering Design Theory as an integral part of design education serves the purpose of structuring actions and thinking processes in order to increase the efficiency of development processes and the quality of developed products. In many institutions in Europe and the U.S.A., problem-oriented process models based on the approach of functional decomposition have complemented teaching approaches that rely on studying standard solutions such as machine elements. If one assumes that these models have been designed to suit the thought habits and educational traditions in the cultural spheres of their origin, their validity in the context of the globalization of engineering education must be discussed. Especially with regards to "Western" and "Asian" cultures, Nisbett [1] substantiates the existence of profound cognitive differences that might be relevant for design education and practice. Summarizing some of Nisbett's assertions, Westerners are more likely to rely on categorizing and individualizing objects and applying formal logic in any situation, whereas Asians prefer not to disentangle objects from their context in favour of a more holistic view of the world. This paper explores the consequences of such cultural differences in the context of product design and development to add plausibility to the authors' own observations from teaching practice with students from China, Germany, South Korea, Thailand and the United Kingdom. The discussion focuses on the applicability of the established model of the Engineering Design Process, narrowing the scope of Design Theory but broadening on the view that different design practices are attributed solely to differences in social interactions.
Unveiling the Process of Cross-cultural Design: Making the Implicit Explicit
2022
Dynamics of globalization and cultural diversity have enriched our world. Thus, new conditions for the practice of design have emerged and the number of designers designing for cultures other than their own has increased. This study aims to understand the effect of difference between designers' and users' cultural backgrounds on the design process as well as the challenges and opportunities created by this difference. Grounded theory was employed as the methodological framework. Data were collected from interviewing ten geographically dispersed designers who have experience in cross-cultural design processes. Results emerged from three levels of coding and reflective journaling.
DS 95: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education (E&PDE 2019), University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. 12th -13th September 2019, 2019
The objective of this article is to analyse the relationship between the use of methods and processes used in the local mobility projects of Global Studio 2018. The Global Studio is an annual project that promotes the exchange between groups with different cultures and that covers different countries. In 2018, the proposed theme was solutions for local mobility and the countries involved are Brazil, Italy, Japan and Turkey. For this, projects developed in the disciplines of the design course were analysed with graduates of design courses of different universities. The methodology includes analysis of the records of the processes and methods used, stories in the blogs and analysis of the proposals developed by the students. The data obtained was analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Based on parameters adopted for this study it was possible to generate a score that represents the level that each team fulfilled the tasks to reach its design solution. Comparing the teams scores it was possible to identify a pattern that suggests that interactions between teams have relevant effects on each team performance.
Culture-orientated product design
International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2010
"There is little in-depth research that can assist designers to use culture as a catalyst for designing innovative products within Botswana’s context. The concept of culture and design are intertwined, thus modifications stemming from cultural evolution both reflect and determine developments in design. The paper discusses an experimental design approach conducted at the University of Botswana and participants challenge was to transform and encode socio-cultural factors into product design features. The paper concludes by discussing a model which has shown one way concerning how to consciously specify, analyse and integrate socio-cultural factors in the design process."
Cross Cultural Design Attitude
The essay describe the work done during the Final Design Studio (3rd year, BSc in Interior Design at Politecnico di Milano) held in the academic year 2012/2013 within the research framework of "DeCA - Design Culture Accoglienza". The text is a part of a wider publication "Design in Action" edited by Maggioli for GIDE - Group of International Design Education