Influence of cultural characteristics on designers’ approaches – an empirical study

Abstract

In globally operating companies, designers with different cultural backgrounds work together, normally not co-located, to develop products. Literature shows that so far the influences of the designers’ cultural background on the design approaches have not been investigated. As a consequence, there is a lack of support for design processes which are performed in intercultural teams. This dissertation intends to address this deficit by presenting the results of a study into the influence of cultural characteristics on designers’ approaches. The focus was on designers in Germany, India and China. In a detailed literature study six cultural characteristics were identified, which could be expected to influence the design approach depending on the cultural background of the designers. To investigate how the design processes of designers from different cultures differ, an empirical study was conducted under participation of designers drawn from industrial practice in Germany (four cases), India (four cases) and China (six cases). The designers were observed while solving a given design problem in a laboratory setting. All design processes were recorded on video, transcribed, analysed and compared. The findings present a mixed picture. The influence of the cultural characteristics, which were derived from the literature, on the design approaches varies clearly. The influence of the characteristic “paying attention either to objects or to relationships when deriving selection criteria” was observed for each cultural group. The influence of further three characteristics was observed, however, not for each cultural group. These are: “addressing or not addressing situational influences in predicting user needs when analysing problem and requirements”, “treating functions analytically or holistically when finding solutions” and “giving formal or intuitive reasoning when evaluating solutions”. The influence of two of the characteristics was observed to deviate from that what was expected based on the literature. These are: “avoiding or accepting a contradiction when improving solutions and embodiments” and “working on functions in a monochronic or polychronic way”. Despite the limitations, the first three mentioned cultural characteristics had clear or at least some influence on the design approaches. A comparison of the order in which design activities were performed showed different tendencies – the designers from China worked ‘from the outside inwards’, from Germany worked ‘from the inside outwards’ and from India shared both tendencies. The findings show that the cultural characteristics have a significant influence on the designers’ approaches. Based on the findings, initial suggestions for design in multi-cultural teams were derived.