Chinese cultural features for new product design development

Abstract

Cultural and creative industries are a growing and profitable sector in the UK. The industry blends historical culture with modern creative design to promote one's culture and to make profits. A cultural feature is the main characteristic of a cultural product; however most of the current cultural products are printed or decorated in a way that lacks any emotional or meaningful cultural link with consumers. Emotional engagement is the key factor when people make their decisions. Therefore, a design toolkit was created to assist designers to enhance an emotional connection between consumers and products. the research approaches involved a literature review to classify categories of cultural features, a questionnaire to measure emotional responses to Chinese cultural products, expert interviews to develop the toolkit, and workshops to validate the toolkit. This research is the first study to highlight emotional aspect of cultural products in order to enrich user experience. The contributions of the research are investigating human emotions of cultural products and developing a novel toolkit to support designers when creating cultural products.