Product innovation in a cultural context: A method applied to Chinese product development.

摘要

Developing products with reference to traditional Chinese elements has become a common strategy of many local and international companies for their Chinese market. However, few have succeeded due to the complexity of Chinese culture. It is often believed that using traditions to inspire innovation is a task for talented and experienced individuals, but not for every designer or product development team. This research explores a formal culturally-based product development process with methods and tools to analyze both traditional Chinese artifacts and behaviors that are unique to Chinese, and to transfer the understood cultural knowledge into designs of contemporary products. The discussions will be supported with case studies. Although this research focused on Chinese cultural studies, the methods and tools are applicable to product development effort in other cultures.; Interpreting the traditions, understanding cultural behaviors and a synthesized product development process form the basis for this research. The interpretation of the traditions aims to understand the established culture, and to decode complex cultural meanings embedded in traditional artifacts. It introduces ICA (Interpreting Cultural Artifacts) as a tool for analyzing embedded cultural meanings of artifacts and SETIG (social, economic, technological, ideological and geographical) Factors for understanding the broader historical and cultural contexts of artifacts. Understanding of cultural behaviors proposes "Dominant, Emergent and Residual cultural behaviors" as a framework for understanding the dynamic relations between different kinds of behaviors, and uses ICB (Interpreting Cultural Behaviors) as a tool to explain cultural behaviors at three levels: observable behaviors, motivations and the influential cultural factors.; In the last section, the interpretation of traditional artifacts and the understanding of cultural behaviors are synthesized into a process for culturally based innovation. It defines cultural products as products that reflect certain visual, behavioral or philosophical elements of a culture. And, introduces the Cultural Product Positioning Matrix as a qualitative tool to benchmark and evaluate cultural products based on the levels of the reflections on those cultural elements. Finally, CPI (Cultural Product Initiatives) constructs all the tools into a formal process for creating products that are appropriate to their cultural contexts.