Design the Future with Emotion: Crucial Cultural Perspectives

No one universal affective route leads to creative ideas. Rather, the designers’ affective experience is influenced by the cultural contexts they are in. However, scant research has examined how culture shapes designers’ emotion in creative problem-solving activities. We present two survey studies that explore the interplay between affect, culture, and idea generation. The findings suggest that people tend to associate low-arousal, positive emotion with idea generation in Japanese contexts, compared with high-arousal, positive emotion in American contexts. We also found that Japanese participants expressed more socially engaging emotions, had higher levels of emotional fluctuation, and reported lower levels of emotional expressiveness than their American counterparts. This research contributes to the emerging field of emotion research in design by examining the cultural shaping of affect in idea generation. We call for more cultural research to enable designers to provide insights into the profound roles of affective experience and expression in creative processes and how it may vary across cultures. In doing so, we hope to offer new vistas for enhancing creative performance and enabling cross-cultural collaboration in creative work.