How Culture Affects Design: Eastern and Western

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.