The Cultural Construction of Creative Problem-Solving: A Critical Reflection on Creative Design Thinking, Teaching, and Learning

While people around the world constantly come up with ingenious ideas to solve problems, the expressions of their ingenuity and their underlying motivations and experiences may vary greatly across cultures. Currently, the role of culture is often overlooked in research and practice aimed at understanding and promoting creativity. The lack of understanding of cultural variations in creative processes hinders cross-cultural collaboration in problem-solving and innovation. We challenge the unexamined American perspectives of creativity through a systematic analysis of how ideas, policies, norms, practices, and individual tendencies around creative problem-solving are shaped in American and East Asian cultural contexts, using the culture cycle framework. We share initial findings from several pilot studies that challenge the popular view that only agentic change-makers are seen as creative problem solvers. In the context of design, designers are culturally shaped shapers who are motivated to solve problems in creative ways that resonate with their cultural values. Our research seeks to empower designers from non-Western societies. We urge design educators and practitioners to explicitly incorporate culturally varied ideas about creative problem-solving into their design processes. Our ultimate goal is to ground the theories and practices of design thinking in cultural contexts around the world.