Culture plays an important role in the field of design, and cultural design will become a key point in design evaluation in the future. Incorporating cultural features into the product design process will become a new design trend in the global market. Apparently, we need a better understanding of cultural communications not only for taking part in the global market, but also for developing local design.
The cultural product design is a process of rethinking or reviewing the cultural features and then redefining them in order to design a new product to fit into society and satisfy consumers through culture and esthetic [3]. Designing new products by adding unique cultural features would not only benefit economic growth, but also promote unique local culture in the global market. Therefore, transforming cultural features into a cultural product becomes a critical issue. In order to facilitate the understanding of the cultural product design process, the design framework and process are proposed for combining consumer attitudes, cultural levels, cultural attributes, transformation, product semantics and design features as shown in Fig. 2.
A good understanding of the cultural attributes will benefit articulating the context between the culture and product design and therefore accelerate concept development. Based on the cultural product design framework and process, the cultural product is designed using scenario and semantics approaches. In a practical design process four phases are used to design a cultural product, namely: identification (telling a situation), investigation (setting an objective), interaction (writing an analysis), and implementa- tion (designing a product) as shown in Fig. 2. And according to the literature review and expert opinions, design guidelines are developed based on the research of consumers’ needs, cultural content and design theories.