PI: Professor Pamela Hinds

Abstract

As a continuation to our 2008-2009 study, we propose to advance our investigation of the relationship between culture and design thinking. We broadly conceptualize culture as attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors shared by a group of people and propose to explore the relationship between national, disciplinary, and corporate culture and creative design innovation.
We propose to complete the second phase of a detailed ethnographic study of product designers in culturally diverse countries based on the learnings from our “prototype” in 2008-2009. We also propose a complimentary investigation of product design education to better understand how education molds design practice in different regions around the world. Our results promise to characterize the practice associated with design thinking in multiple settings and stretch the current view of design thinking by incorporating a multi-cultural perspective. In an effort to influence design practice, scholarly research, and education, our deliverables range from scholarly papers, to workshops, to integration of our findings back into design education.