Free Association Versus Recognition: Sensitivity for Chance Discovery in Cross-Cultural Color Design

Abstract

Chance Discovery focuses on opportunities and risks for future decision making. This makes it suitable for cross-cultural color design. An on-going research program aims at developing a new method of deriving opportunities and risks for design frameworks from the semantic and context analysis of the culturally constrained use of color. As part of this program, this paper compares two experiments involving two groups of Korean and English participants. In the first qualitative experiment participants were presented with preferred English and Korean colors and were asked to describe the meaning of the colors in a free association format. In the second quantitative experiment two different groups of English and Korean participants were presented with the same colors combined with selected explanations from the first experiment. The participants had then to identify their preference on a Likert scale from 1 to 7. Although the differences between colors (p < 0.001) and between meanings (p < 0.001) were significant, the differences between Korean and English participants were not significant (p < 0.077). The difference in the experimental results suggests that both methods have different sensitivities for the discovery of new cross-cultural chances. Implications for e-commerce Web design will be discussed.KeywordsDiscovering Color Semantics as a ChanceFree associationRecognition taskCross-cultural meshing