Cross-Cultural Differences in Creative Ideation: A Comparison between Singaporean and Portuguese Students

Abstract

AbstractThe purpose of this work is to compare the creative outcome in the educational context of students belonging to two different cultures, namely Singaporean and Portuguese and determine whether they respond differently to the same design brief. The participants from both samples equal 121 student designers and span from 18–25 years old. Students were randomly distributed within a uniform, standard of student performance, which allowed for fair comparison between groups. Expert judges were employed to judge the creativity of concept sketches generated during a Collaborative Sketching exercise. To evaluate the creative outcome, we employed the Consensual Assessment Technique based on a rubric-based system developed in our earlier works. The analysis of variance procedure revealed no statistically significant difference between the averaged total scores of the two groups on the appropriateness measure. However, the student designers from both samples showed statistically significant differences when provided with a baseline brief in the novelty measure. In consideration of the overall creativity scores, a relatively equivalent performance is observed across the two universities.