Designing across cultures

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, sub-contracting 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