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Cross-Cultural Differences in Creative Ideation: A Comparison between Singaporean and Portuguese Students

Part of: Collaborative Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Georgios Koronis ,
Rianne Wally Meurzec ,
Arlindo Silva ,
Marco Leite ,
Elsa Henriques  and
Christine Yogiaman
Georgios Koronis*
Affiliation:
Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore;
Rianne Wally Meurzec
Affiliation:
Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore;
Arlindo Silva
Affiliation:
Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore;
Marco Leite
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, Portugal;
Elsa Henriques
Affiliation:
Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Christine Yogiaman
Affiliation:
Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore;
*
Contact: Koronis, Georgios, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, georgios_koronis@sutd.edu.sg

Abstract

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The purpose of this work is to compare the creative outcome in the educational context of students belonging to two different cultures, namely Singaporean and Portuguese and determine whether they respond differently to the same design brief. The participants from both samples equal 121 student designers and span from 18–25 years old. Students were randomly distributed within a uniform, standard of student performance, which allowed for fair comparison between groups. Expert judges were employed to judge the creativity of concept sketches generated during a Collaborative Sketching exercise. To evaluate the creative outcome, we employed the Consensual Assessment Technique based on a rubric-based system developed in our earlier works. The analysis of variance procedure revealed no statistically significant difference between the averaged total scores of the two groups on the appropriateness measure. However, the student designers from both samples showed statistically significant differences when provided with a baseline brief in the novelty measure. In consideration of the overall creativity scores, a relatively equivalent performance is observed across the two universities.

Keywords

CreativityDesign engineeringCollaborative design
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 89 - 98
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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