Abstract

The refinement of aesthetic quality in product design and development still holds great promise with respect to user-product experience today. Among fundamental factors related to aesthetic information processing of product semantics are the product’s trendiness and other design attributes leading to individual preferences. This study aims to investigate, cross-culturally, the effect of perceptual style and preferential attitude in the evaluation of a selected range of traditional and modern products with African and Japanese cultural origins. A subject pool composed of university students from Africa and Asia voluntarily participated in visual evaluation tasks using a Semantic Differential (SD) technique. Having subjects from two distinct regional cultures provided a basis for cross-cultural comparison and identification of aesthetic value cognition for familiar and unfamiliar traditional and modern products. The result outlines the similarities and disparities of two cultural domains for the range of selected products and “kansei” (affective) characteristics of the participants. The understanding of aesthetic sensibility towards product design based on converging values can play a crucial role in enriching the design process for surviving local crafts as well as serving to promote culturally inspired values in contemporary product design.