Eastern & Western Design: How Culture Rewires The Brain

Here's a little experiment. Does the hexagon in the middle look concave and indented, or is it convex and bumping out? If you think it's indented or concave, odds are you're from a Western culture or some other culture that reads from left to right. If you think it's bumping out or convex, you're more likely to be from a culture that reads from right to left, like Arabic. This is just one example of how culture can shape the way you see the world, but it goes way beyond just some quirky little optical illusions. Culture completely changes the way our brains process information. And because of that, various cultures design things very differently. It's why this Japanese rice cooker looks totally different from this American design. Same thing with traditional Japanese versus European joinery, or these movie posters. The list goes on. Answer in Progress and Cynthia Zhu made videos explaining why Western and Eastern cultures design websites so differently, and I found these videos really inspiring, and I wanted to dig even deeper into the topic of how culture affects not just website design, but all design. I learned that religious philosophy, local language, geographical quirks, and even local laws can dictate the trajectory of culture and design evolution. There's even one Harvard professor who wrote a 500-page book arguing that Western culture went in a completely different direction because the church made it illegal to marry your cousins about 1,500 years ago. More on that later. Throughout this video, you'll gain a deep understanding of how culture informs design decisions. The designed objects that surround you tell a story about culture. Just look at this Japanese joinery. Notice the intricacy and complexity of this joint. Why not just nail 2 pieces of wood together? It would be a lot simpler that way, right? But if we think about the cultural backdrop, these advanced joinery techniques actually make a lot of sense. In traditional Japan, all craftsmanship, and especially woodworking, was almost like a form of spiritual practice. The Japanese Shinto belief system places spiritual emphasis on nature, especially trees. The use of natural wood-to-wood joints is an extension of this philosophy where the wood itself and its natural qualities are respected. That's why traditional Japanese woodworkers didn't just simply nail 2 pieces of wood together. Another common theme in Japanese Shintoism and Buddhism is the acceptance that nothing is permanent. Eventually, these wooden joints will rot away and need to be replaced or repaired. That's why the traditional joints are often designed to be taken apart and reassembled. This relates to the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, which appreciates the beauty in imperfection. Infection and aging. Well-designed wooden joints age more gracefully and they're easier to replace, but design and culture is also heavily driven by geography and climate. Japan is prone to earthquakes and wooden buildings with this kind of joinery can flex and bend a bit better than 2 pieces of wood simply nailed together. Plus, Japan has a humid climate and wood tends to expand and contract with changes in humidity. Moisture can actually seep in through the hole that the nail creates and deeper into the wood, causing it to rot. Sooner. Being an isolated island nation, Japanese woodworkers also didn't always have access to metal, and when they did, the metal usually had impurities and was low quality. Geography, climate, and resource availability all played a major role in how this joinery was designed. But it gets even crazier when you realize that your culture can often dictate the way your brain processes information. Even the language you speak can literally change how you see the world. Isn't that fucking crazy? Anyway, Eastern and Western people see the world in a totally different way. By the way, when I say Western cultures, I'm talking about Northwestern Europe and the countries that branched out from them. When I say Eastern cultures, I'm talking mostly about East Asia. In one study, psychologists asked Japanese and American subjects to analyze an underwater scene like this and describe what they see. The American test subjects would say something like, I saw 3 big fish to the right. They were white and green with pink fins. The Japanese participants would start with the context. They'd say that it looks like a pond, there were rocks and shells and plants on the bottom, and then there were 3 big fish to the right. Eye-tracking technology revealed that the Americans were searching for the main object or focal point, and Eastern cultures were taking in the overall vibe. They look at the context first and then look at the focal points. What you're seeing here is actually even more information dense than it looks. That's because many East Asian languages use compact characters that allow for more information to fit in less space when compared with Western languages. As we delve deeper into the intricacies of Eastern and Western cultures in design, it's crucial to remember that the lens through which we view the world can significantly shape our understanding and perceptions. This brings me to the role of the media and how, in a world teeming with sensationalism, it's becoming challenging to discern the full, unbiased picture. It's akin to observing a complex design but only acknowledging one element of it. That's where Ground News comes in. This app and website consolidates media from across the globe, allowing readers to compare coverage and gain a comprehensive perspective on what's being reported. It's an invaluable tool for seeing how different cultures and political leanings interpret events, right down to the language used in headlines, which can often frame our interpretation of issues. For every story, Ground News offers a visual breakdown of the reporting outlets, revealing their political biases, factual reliability, ownership, and the countries covering the story. It's a tool that empowers you to stay informed on breaking news, design trends, and cultural shifts without falling prey to media bias. Embrace a broader perspective and enrich your understanding by visiting round.news/designtheory. The link is in the description below. But let's continue our exploration into cultural design elements. The differences in visual processing between East and West happens at a very young age. Just look at this study comparing drawings and collages done by Japanese children and Canadian children. The Japanese children place far more detail throughout the frame, but the compositions by the Canadian children have more of a central focus. You see this contrast in This is similar to traditional East Asian art that has less of a focus and creates more of an overall vibe, whereas Western art tends to have more of a focal point. In another experiment, Asians and Western children were shown 3 things: a rabbit, a cat, and a carrot. When asked to group them, American kids paired the rabbit and the cat together. Asian children, however, grouped the rabbit and the carrot together because rabbits eat carrots. So what's the deal? If participants match the rabbit with the cat, they're likely using rule-based analytic reasoning, placing the rabbit and the cat both in the animal category. But if they match the rabbit with a carrot, it reveals a more holistic way of thinking, emphasizing the functional relationship between rabbits and carrots. Once again, rabbits eat carrots. With over 3,000 participants from 30 countries, the results clearly indicated that Western populations leaned more towards analytic thinking, while the rest of the world, especially East Asia, showcased more holistic reasoning. People raised in societies with intense relationship connections are predisposed to think in holistic terms, prioritizing relationships and broader contexts, and this manifests itself in design in some very interesting ways. I mean, just look at these popular Japanese phone designs from the mid-2000s. They flip out, they rotate 90 degrees, they have insanely intricate button layouts, little holes for charms, and completely insane blobby designs. And it's not just the physical designs. I mean, just look at the web design. People actually browse the internet on this tiny screen stuffed with more text and information than a turkey on Thanksgiving. To my Western sensibilities, it's like reading a novel on a postage stamp. But apparently these sold very well in the Asian market, which is absolutely insane to me. For comparison, this was one of the best-selling phones designed for the Western market. Just look at how all of the lines follow the same visual shape. Everything's far more organized and clean. Just a couple of years after these phones were launched, Apple came around with possibly the most pared-down design imaginable, totally stealing the show in the Western market. The iPhone really didn't catch on in Japan until they literally started giving them away for free when you signed up for a new carrier plan. This is actually fairly common now, but it was very unusual in the late 2000s. Before getting further into the differences between Eastern and Western cultures, I want to clarify that the terms East and West don't even come close to representing the diversity of culture found within these 2 regions. Japan and China are completely different from each other, and even within China, different parts of the country have totally different subcultures. There are many individuals who are holistic thinkers in the West and many analytical thinkers in the East. Plus, as culture and markets become more consolidated and globalized, the differences between designs are slowly becoming less pronounced in some product categories. But using these broad categories still helps us better understand global design variations and cross-cultural collaboration. The bigger point here is that there are very real psychological and processing differences between different cultures, and it has a major impact on which designs will be successful in their respective regions. Being born in a certain culture is like always wearing a pair of pink glasses. You can You completely forget that you're looking at everything through a cultural filter until you meet someone else with blue glasses, for example, and they try to show you how they see things. Broadly speaking, Westerners think in a linear fashion. To us, everything is a series of step-by-step causal relationships that can be broken down into smaller and smaller parts. It's kind of like the line you see here. This was drawn by Richard Nisbett, a psychology professor at University of Michigan. Then on the right, you have the same diagram made by one of Nisbett's Chinese-American students. This is how East Asians tend to see things. It's a series of interrelated pieces that all fit within each other. Once again, these generalizations don't apply to every single individual in the culture. I interviewed several Asian designers for this video, and some of them have much more linear thought processes and traits than I do. Your preferences and thought process can even change throughout the day depending on your mood. But on average, these differences in thought process between East and West are pretty stark. Western thinking and culture are actually very new and highly unusual compared to other cultures. So how did the West get so weird? There are many reasons, but here are a few of the major factors that I learned about from Richard Nisbet and Joseph Henrich. Remember what I said about the pink glasses analogy? Well, you've been wearing them all your life, so now it's time to put on the blue shades. Probably some opportunity for some shitty Matrix analogy. Take the red pill and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. It all started in ancient Greece. Greeks had a systematic drive to categorize the world around them and dissect it into isolated, digestible chunks. This obsession with categorization wasn't just an intellectual exercise, it was a reflection of how they saw themselves: as singular units. The concept of individuality was as Greek as olive oil. The Greeks even boldly separated themselves from nature. In fact, you could argue that they invented the concept of nature. We take this distinction for granted now, but this was totally unprecedented in the ancient world. Unlike Eastern philosophies, which viewed humans and the world around them as harmoniously connected, the Greeks made the separation between man and nature. Some argue that this separation set the stage for scientific inquiry. Scientific study and formal logic is pretty much entirely about stripping away context and just getting down to the basic structure of an argument. Once again, isolated, digestible chunks. Now, our modern Western world still carries the Greek legacy, not just in philosophy or science, but even in design. Think of the minimalist trends that strip objects down to their bare essentials. Leaving just a skeleton of form, devoid of context or information. But you might be asking, what does ancient Greece have to do with the West? A lot of the concepts surrounding Greek individualist thinking were adopted by the Romans and eventually Christian thinkers, especially Saint Augustine, which allowed these ideals to spread throughout Europe. Just to be clear, some Asian civilizations, especially China, were literally centuries ahead of Greece in terms of technological advancements. They just didn't concern themselves with formal logic and the scientific method in the same way. the way that the Greeks did. So that was the first factor in Western culture branching out from the rest of the world. But the Western push towards individualist thinking got even more pronounced through one thing: banning cousin marriage. Yep, that's right. I know this sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but I promise the Church's ban on cousin marriage is very relevant to Western design principles. If you don't trust me, trust Joseph Henrich. He's a Harvard professor who spent the last several decades researching the phenomenon around how Western culture became so And I read his 500-page book so you don't have to. Let's get into this little accident that changed the course of history. It's important to note that in most parts of the world, marrying your cousins is actually not that unusual. Most societies were organized around robust kinship-based systems and strategic marriages to relatives. In Europe and most of the world, wealth and land was passed down from generation to generation through inheritance. Marriage played a pivotal role in solidifying these social ties and inheritance rights. If a If a man died, his widow often married his brother, ensuring that wealth and assets remained within the family. That's ridiculous. But something happened around the Middle Ages that began to unravel this tight social fabric. The church outlawed marrying even distant relatives, and marrying close family carried severe penalties, including the stripping away of inheritance rights. Now, this wasn't some grand design to topple kinship-based societies. It was largely an unintended consequence. And so we observe one of the most fascinating shifts in societal evolution. With weaker family chains came stronger individual links. Loyalties once directed towards family and kin groups began to scatter, redirecting towards the church and later to things like charter towns, universities, and guilds. It's as if the social gravitational pull had fundamentally shifted and suddenly we see the rise of individualism. You had more of a say around who you wanted to be as an individual and who you wanted to associate with. And it's all because the church didn't want you to kiss your cousin, dammit! I don't think I should say dammit. Sometimes history's most transformative forces happen completely by accident. If you liked hearing that story as much as I liked telling it, you should subscribe. But anyway, back to the video. Most other cultures adopted the Western model of marriage, but it happened much later. China didn't even outlaw marrying first cousins until 1980. I know it probably sounds crazy, but if you read the data yourself, it's hard to deny. I can't really go into too much more detail, otherwise this is gonna be a video about cousin marriage rather than a video about how culture affects design. So we've basically gone through the first 2 filters for individualism. First, it was ancient Greek thought, and then it was the ban on cousin marriage. But Western thought became even more individualistic with the beginning of Protestantism. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century was a major moment in history that put the final stamp Basically, Martin Luther was a priest who was tired of the church abusing its power. He wanted Christianity to be more about a personal relationship with the divine, rather than something that was filtered through what he considered to be a corrupt institution. The thing that made Protestantism so unusual was that the spirituality became an intensely personal journey, a direct line between the individual and the divine. The core belief of Protestantism was that everyone should read the Bible for themselves. The church was a corrupt institution, The truth was in the scripture, not in any sort of larger institution that was potentially corrupt. You can't understand scripture unless you can read, so this led to a huge spike in literacy rates, first in Europe and then globally. And widespread literacy didn't just mean more people reading, it transformed human cognition. Memory improved, visual processing took a leap, and problem-solving skills sharpened. Protestantism placed individuals' personal commitments at the core of their life. Okay, so we just went through about 2,000 years of world history in 5 Here's the payoff. With all 3 of these factors, the West was primed for the rise of individualized products and brands. In a world focused on the self, the things that you buy signal what you value. Expressing who we are through the things we buy is a very Western concept. The sensibility still exists in the East, but studies show that it's not nearly as pronounced. In hunter-gatherer societies such as the Hadza tribe, this impulse to express individuality through the things that you own literally does not exist. In fact, the concept of ownership barely even exists in those cultures. Possibly one of the best examples of buying products to reflect what was valued in Europe were pocket watches. The pocket watch was invented within a few years of the Protestant Reformation, and I don't think that's a coincidence. These watches symbolize diligence, punctuality, and wealth. They also represent the Western analytical perspective on time. Before the Middle Ages in Europe, having a precise measure of time really wasn't that The watch signifies a broader transition towards analytical efficiency, and this mentality still persists today with high-end wristwatches costing tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, we've gone over Western individualism, but what about the East? Where do their design sensibilities stem from? The main doctrines of East Asian culture began in ancient China. Chinese social life was interdependent and harmony was critically important. It was about the balance between yourself, your community, and with nature. It was a world that looks beyond the individual and towards the collective. The primary moral system of ancient China was Confucianism. It was less focused on metaphysics or religion and more focused on common sense, practical ethics. Many Confucian ideals were focused on obligations to other people in your community. It was about avoiding friction within the family, the village, and ultimately to align with the higher callings of the emperor. Everyone knew their role, their mutual responsibilities, and where they fit into the larger system. The world was complicated, events were interrelated, and people were connected not as pieces of the pie, but as ropes in a net. This was in stark contrast to the Greek idea that everything was straightforward and knowable. Philosophy in China was less about finding truth and more about practical action. Now, to be clear, this social harmony should not be confused with conformity. Confucian ideals still encouraged people to distinguish themselves But it was to be done in a way that was harmonious rather than being arrogant or showing off. A key theme in Eastern cultures is resonance. When you pluck a string on an instrument, you produce a resonance or vibration on all the other strings. Man, heaven, and earth create resonance in each other. If the emperor does something wrong, it throws the universe out of kilter. It was all about context, and in this fascinating society, your life Your thoughts and your deeds are never just yours; they're part of an interconnected reality. It's not about individual liberty; it's about collective harmony. Even opposing forces reached an equilibrium or harmonious balance. Probably the best visual representation of this ideal, which almost all of you have seen, is the yin yang symbol, also known as the Taiji Tu. The Taiji Tu is an ancient Chinese symbol that describes duality in all things. It represents the interconnectedness. and interdependent forces where opposite elements are not in conflict but are complementary. When yin grows too strong, yang rises to restore equilibrium. Notice the dots. In every yin, there's a seed of yang and vice versa. This is a philosophical nod to the ancient Chinese concept that every force or thing contains a flicker of its opposite. Light is defined by darkness. Pleasure is shaped by pain. These dots represent dynamic balance. No single element ever truly dominates. The Taijitu stands as a timeless symbol of balance and harmony in natural systems. This balance is manifested in many ways throughout Eastern culture, but perhaps most explicitly in the practice of Feng Shui. This ancient Chinese practice involves arranging the environment to create harmony and balance and to promote the flow of positive energy, or qi. Feng Shui and other Eastern design philosophies try to consider the broader picture A lot of it is very practical, like how to place furniture and other elements in a room to maximize flow and energy through the space. This means allowing light to pour into the rooms more efficiently, making it easier to move through a space, and being able to see what's going on around you while sitting down. This channel called Dear Modern actually has some awesome videos that show how to apply feng shui design principles. Sometimes feng shui even gets into the metaphysical aspects of design. It's why this Hong Kong skyline has several These are gates to allow dragons to pass through. Pretty wild stuff. But this holistic approach isn't just exclusive to China. Korea has similar practices, and even Japanese design principles focus on the interconnectedness of all life, which is a common theme in both Buddhist and Shinto customs, as I mentioned at the beginning of the video. So how did this happen? Well, it's more than just philosophy or religion. It's also about the land we inhabit. Southern China, with its rolling fields, fields emphasized rice cultivation as their main crop. Rice paddies require cooperation between many people, and this reliance on community influenced the holistic approach intrinsic to East Asian culture. In contrast, about 85% of Greece is covered by mountains, which were less conducive to farming but ideal for herding, trading, and fishing, which required less cooperative effort. Greece's major port cities were melting pots where people from over the world would come to trade. Greeks were exposed to diverse customs, cultures, and beliefs, fostering curiosity and individualism. Richard Nisbet is quoted saying that ancient Athens would have been like a Star Wars cantina almost. Contrast this with eastern China, where at least 95% of people were ethnically Han Chinese, and they were culturally very similar to each other. Remember, there's still significant diversity in thought within all countries. Regions dominated by paddy rice cultivation, like southern China, tend to have more holistic thinking patterns, but areas suitable for wheat and corn cultivation like northern China tend to favor more analytical thinking. It's all about the level of cooperation needed to survive. The more the land is dedicated to paddy rice or other cooperative efforts, the stronger the collectivist thinking. Geography and philosophy can impact culture and design, but there's another thing that takes it even further: language. Language isn't just a tool for communication. It's a lens through which we interpret and shape our reality. Recently, a designer friend of mine who happens to be a native German speaker gave me a great example. She used the example of the word for vacuum cleaner in German, which is Staubsauger. This literally translates to dust sucker. Now imagine you're a designer and someone asks you to create a dust sucker. The terminology alone has narrowed your creative horizon. The word itself leaves little room for interpretation or reinvention. In Turkish, a vacuum cleaner is called an elektrik süpürgesi. Elektrik süpürgesi. Elektrik süpürgesi. Elektrik süpürgesi. The literal translation is electrical broom. Imagine being a designer tasked with crafting an electrical broom versus a dust sucker. The different words already plant the seeds for two very distinct products. The concept that I'm describing is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This theory suggests that the language you speak can influence how you see the world. While the extent of this impact is still up for debate, it's intriguing to think that the very words you use can shape your worldview. One thing I can say with certainty is that the way you frame a problem can completely change the way you design things. What if I threw out the rulebook and just said, design a way to clean dirt off the carpet? Just like that, the floodgates are open. You're no longer confined to an appliance. Perhaps you've now ventured into the realm of other solutions that might not be a product at all. Maybe it's a cleaning service. Donald Trump here. You know, nobody sucks like me. So introducing the iSuck, the newest in automated cleaning technology. This is a very common design thinking tool that demonstrates how a simple change of phrasing can completely change the scope of a problem. But could the sounds of the words we use also impact our design decisions? Well, there's no proof of this, but I can't help but believe that it does. I mean, consider the word butterfly in English. In French, it's papillon, or in Italian, it's farfalla. And then there's German. Schmetterling. Schmetterling. This does relate to the difference between East and Western culture as well. Richard Nisbett, a cognitive psychologist, points out that topic-prominent languages like Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese focus more on the overall topic or theme rather than the subject of a sentence. In these languages, you might describe a scenario by saying, at this place, skiing is good, where the context— the place— is established before we even get to what's good about The skiing. Now contrast this with English or other Indo-European languages. We would say, the skiing is good at this place. You put the subject front and center, and then the context follows. Remember those tests that asked people to describe a scene featuring fish? American subjects zeroed in on the fish themselves, sometimes barely referencing the surrounding context. The Japanese subjects set the scene first, describing the environment, and only then did they get into the details about the fish. This is a reflection of how language can channel our perceptions and thought patterns. But it's not just the structure of the sentence that matters, sometimes it's the very words themselves. When Mercedes-Benz was marketing their cars in China, they found out that the pronunciation of Benz, at least in Chinese, sounded kind of like the phrase for rush to your death. Unsurprisingly, they opted for a quick rebrand. Even our perception of color can be influenced by this. The Himba tribe in Namibia, for example, has no word for the color blue. In their language, blue is just another shade of green. When they're shown colors with green and then what we would call blue, they have a hard time distinguishing between the 2 colors. Even though the Himba tribe struggled, English-speaking people, or other people who have a word for blue, were able to easily distinguish the 2 colors. Now here's where it gets really weird. The Himba tribe is very good at distinguishing between slightly different shades of green, way better than any Westerners are. It's just the blue that they have trouble with, probably because there's no word for the color in their language. Behind every design is a series of linguistic influences, all subtly shaping what you see, how you see it, and even how it was created. Okay, so I think I set up a pretty clear case that culture heavily influences design and even the way that you see the world, but one of the most important aspects of design is the Process. The process determines the result as much as anything else. It's like making a recipe. You can have the exact same ingredients, but if you pan fry one burger and boil another identical burger, you're going to end up with very different results. That's a burger that I'm heating up. A boiled. Yeah. The process dictates the results as much as anything else. And please don't ever boil a burger. Yeah. So let's talk about Western design processes. As you know, Western thought has been heavily influenced by the Greek philosophers. Like Aristotle. Aristotle hated contradiction, and so do most Westerners. They're very uncomfortable with it. I mean, just take Aristotle's Law of Non-Contradiction, for instance. Notice the wording there. It's not just a guideline, it's a law. In Western culture, this quest for clarity and singularity is found in everything from management strategies to design practices. I mean, you've heard all the maxims before: less is more, good design is as little design as possible. The goal is to keep things direct, clear, and concise. The thing is, in context-rich Asian cultures, this design philosophy just doesn't apply at all. I guess Dieter Rams' ideas of good design is as little design as possible could work in an Eastern culture. Eastern designers and customers might have a very, very different idea of what constitutes as little design as possible, especially when you consider the fact that people from Eastern cultures can process so much more visual information. I mean, look at this Black& Decker Rice cooker next to this Zojirushi rice cooker. While Dieter Rams didn't design the Black+Decker rice cooker, it definitely embodies his minimalist principles. The Zojirushi design is apparently a great design, but the forms are very elliptical and blobby. Plus, I mean, look at the buttons. They're all laid out in a strange way. It doesn't really make sense, at least to Western sensibilities. The point is, this is definitely not as little design as possible by Western standards, but it's a best-selling design in Japan. Japan, and a great product overall. It's important to note that minimalist design is found in both Western countries and throughout East Asia, but their underlying motivations and expressions are very different. Japanese minimalism has its roots in philosophies like wabi-sabi and ma, which value the beauty of imperfection and the importance of negative space. The wabi-sabi design style has its roots in Zen Buddhist principles and aims to create a serene, contemplative space. Environment. It's also important to note that while this Japanese design philosophy is over 1,000 years old, it only gained popularity in the West in the early 20th century. I'm pretty sure that the modern minimalist design philosophy you see in Japanese design today is actually more of a response to Western tastes, although I can't prove this. But one thing I can say is that while Western audiences often associate Japanese design with minimalism, many traditional Japanese designs are intricate and functionally very complex. European minimalism, on the other hand, leans heavily on functionalism and rationalism, with influences from the Bauhaus and Scandinavian design movements. Geometric forms, industrial materials like metal and glass, and a monochromatic color palette characterize this style. While Japanese minimalism seeks to provide a space for spiritual, holistic contemplation, European minimalism aims for efficiency and clarity. Interestingly, the The context-prominent nature of Japanese language may mirror its designs focused on the broader context, while the subject-prominent structure of European languages might align with a more object-centric approach to minimalism. This avoidance of contradiction bleeds into the tools Westerners use for analysis and problem-solving as well. If you're from a Western culture, you're probably nodding your head thinking, yeah, of course, who could argue with the Law of Non-Contradiction? But it's not so simple. Consider the SWOT analysis commonly used in business and design settings. It categorizes product features as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, or threats. Simple enough, right? But what if something is both a strength and a weakness? An edge-to-edge display on a phone creates a great viewing experience, but the device is more fragile and can crack more easily. Western models like SWOT, or even design methodologies that emphasize clear goals and personas, often sacrifice nuance for the sake of For example, journey maps are a design strategy used to create a linear narrative of user experience, overlooking the messiness and unpredictability of real life. These models aren't without merit, but they can be very narrow in their scope and should be used as part of a broader context for making decisions. They work well in a Western context, but their utility can diminish in cultures with different conceptual foundations. A mind map is an example of a more holistic tool, and maybe it would work better in an Eastern context, I'm not really sure. I'm not saying that these tools are good or bad, I'm just saying that we shouldn't assume that these tools and processes are the go-to solution. Even something as foundational as the Law of Contradiction can be worth questioning in the right context. As we move to Eastern cultural sensibilities, we find a completely different cultural comfort with contradiction. Think about the philosophy of yin and yang again, where opposites coexist within a harmonious circle. In East It's common to find designs that juggle multiple themes or even conflicting elements. I mean, just look at this phone, for example. You've got some stripes, then you got some more stripes, then these stripes sort of curve around this giant black circular camera array. Then they put the flash over here to the side, but it doesn't quite line up right. Wait till you see this thing, it's wild. The black camera array isn't even symmetrical. They decided to put some text underneath one of the lenses, so this one is just bumped up further than the others. Then they put what I believe are Chinese characters on the side here, but it's in between the 2 stripes, which make the 2 elements visually clash, like, in a really strange way. And then you've got the English tagline where technology is spelled wrong. It's like a typo. I mean, if I'm being honest, from a Western perspective, this design is a disaster. But at the same time, this isn't really like any phone I've seen in the Western market where everybody just tries to copy Apple. It's not my personal cultural taste, but at least they have a fresh approach. If you've embraced Western design principles your entire life, it's tempting to believe that a singular vision is the only way to make a masterpiece, and I've even said this before, but maybe that's not universally true. Maybe a variety of ideas can enrich a design rather than muddle it. Take a cue from Kai-Ping Peng's research, which found that East Asians often perceive both positive and negative emotions in the same exact facial expression. Now apply this to design. Imagine a design that invites contradictory feelings— calmness and excitement, nostalgia and futurism all at once. This is almost certainly too chaotic for Western design sensibilities, but it could be really interesting in certain contexts. It should be noted that East Asians don't have any problem with formal logic. It's not like they don't understand the law of non-contradiction. It's just that they don't use it in their daily life as often as Westerners. While this probably does lead to logical errors, it's not like the Western fear of contradiction doesn't also produce errors. The need for consistency and non-contradiction in Western cultures can lead to oversimplification or outright dismissal of complex, nuanced issues. Now, you really can't talk about design in the East without mentioning the fact that China has been known to copy Western intellectual property. Some people argue that maybe it's an Eastern cultural thing, and to be fair, the importance of giving credit to individuals is actually a very Western concept after all. And maybe that's a part of it, but I really don't think that's telling the whole story. The theft of intellectual properties from more developed countries is unfortunately very common. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the United States was still a developing nation and would sometimes steal intellectual property from Britain. Samuel Slater, famously known as Slater the Traitor by the British, memorized designs of textile machinery before copying the designs and moving to the US. Britain had strict laws against exporting this technology. Germany was also known for taking technological and scientific knowledge from Britain and other industrialized countries. But now, a couple hundred years later, both Germany and the United States are well established in generating their own intellectual property. And I do think that intellectual property theft is a legitimate problem in a lot of countries, especially China. The bigger point I'm trying to make is that a lot of people try to It's easy to chalk it up as an East Asian thing, but it really is more of a developing country thing. Looking towards the future, we have an exciting opportunity to blend the best of all cultural perspectives to tackle the challenges we face. It's not easy. It means moving past our deep-seated beliefs and values, but it's absolutely worth it. By adjusting our approaches, questioning our own understandings, and opening our minds to others' experiences, we're shaping a unified world. world, rich in shared knowledge and endless potential. Together, let's build a world that's interconnected, enlightened, and stronger than ever before. And that starts by understanding each other. I hope you learned as much from watching this video as I did making it. Every time I launch one of these videos, it absolutely destroys me. Encapsulating these really convoluted and multifaceted concepts is mentally exhausting. So your support is appreciated. Please consider subscribing. or supporting me on Patreon by clicking the link down below. Or you can check out Ground News, that helps me out a lot too. If you want to see the full 100 pages of notes from this video, it's on Patreon. Big shout out to my existing patrons. If we manage to get enough new patrons, I can start making videos that are tailored to exactly what you want to learn about. A lot of you asked me to bring back my design analysis series, but I can't really do that because they just don't get enough views, for better or for For better or worse, the views are what pay for these videos. But if I have enough Patreon support, we can talk about exactly what we want to talk about. If you can't afford it or you don't want to pay, that's totally okay. There's no pressure here. But as always, have a great day, and I hope you learned something.