Conference article

Why do people tend to value an old product over a modern one? This study aims to explore cross-culturally; the conceptual basis of perceiving aesthetic values in product design characterized as being traditional and modern. To this end; a quasi-experiment was designed to evaluate the cognitive and affective richness in the aesthetic appreciation of both traditional and modern objects. For this experiment; 15 culturally inspired African products were pre-selected and classified into three categories; each class representing the different level of visibility of cultural elements in the sampled objects. 20 African subjects and 20 East-Asians including Japanese and Koreans studying at the University of Tsukuba participated in the survey test by doing a visual evaluation for the selected product samples using semantic differential and self-assessment manikin questionnaires. Having subjects from two distinct regional cultures provides a platform for cross-cultural comparison and discussion on the value perception style for typical traditional and modern products. The result outlines similarities and disparities of two cultural domains for the three product categories.

Product design evaluation; Visual perception; Aesthetics; Kansei value; Cross-cultural study