Involving Cultural Sensitivity in the Design Process: a Design Toolkit for Chinese Cultural Products

Cultural and creative industries have become prosperous, and successful examples in the UK have inspired many countries to commercialize their own cultures by integrating their cultural values into art and design production. Inspired by this trend, the aim of this project is to increase awareness of traditional Chinese cultural aesthetics in modern product development as well as to highlight the role of cultural sensitivity in the product design process. This study focuses on industrial cultural products and examines the meanings and values of cultural products. Through the examination of the user experience of current cultural products with questionnaires and interviews with product designers, a design toolkit for Chinese cultural products was developed and applied in design practice. Design majors from various cultural backgrounds were recruited to participate in workshops to evaluate the usability of the toolkit and to validate whether the toolkit helped in their design processes. The findings of the research revealed that users’ experiences, particularly users’ emotional engagement with the products, could be enriched when the design toolkit was applied in the design process. This design toolkit is designed for use by international designers in the initial stage of the design process when idea generation, brainstorming and sketching occur. The toolkit could be applied not only in product design but also in visual communication design, interior design, and digital content design.