Many researchers focus on the relationship between culture and creativity, often analyzing the influence of culture on design creativity. However, most studies only draw conclusions about the positive or negative effects of culture on creativity, rather than providing solutions to mitigate the adverse impact or magnify the positive impact. Therefore, in the current study, we first developed a dedicated framework to explain the influence of culture on design creativity based on the 4Ps model of creativity (person, process, product, and press). Then, we analyzed the influence of culture on design creativity based on Hofstede’s dimensions of culture. Following this, we identified the methods and solutions that can be adopted to mitigate negative cultural influences and prime positive cultural influences on design creativity. Finally, we proposed possible solutions to mitigate the negative cultural influences and prime the positive cultural influences by applying innovative technology to design creativity. Our study will inspire researchers to mitigate the negative influences of culture, magnify the positive effects, and apply new technology to enhance creativity.

Human creativity generates novel ideas to solve real-world problems. This thereby grants us the power to transform the surrounding world and extend our human attributes beyond what is currently possible. Creative ideas are not just new and unexpected, but are also successful in providing solutions that are useful, efficient and valuable. Thus, creativity optimizes the use of available resources and increases wealth. The origin of human creativity, however, is poorly understood, and semantic measures that could predict the success of generated ideas are currently unknown. Here, we analyze a dataset of design problem-solving conversations in real-world settings by using 49 semantic measures based on WordNet 3.1 and demonstrate that a divergence of semantic similarity, an increased information content, and a decreased polysemy predict the success of generated ideas. The first feedback from clients also enhances information content and leads to a divergence of successful ideas in creative problem solving. These results advance cognitive science by identifying real-world processes in human problem solving that are relevant to the success of produced solutions and provide tools for real-time monitoring of problem solving, student training and skill acquisition. A selected subset of information content (IC Sánchez–Batet) and semantic similarity (Lin/Sánchez–Batet) measures, which are both statistically powerful and computationally fast, could support the development of technologies for computer-assisted enhancements of human creativity or for the implementation of creativity in machines endowed with general artificial intelligence.

Here we propose an interactive system to augment creative design thinking using networks of concepts in a virtual reality environment. We discuss how to augment the human capacity to be creative through dynamic suggestions providing new and original ideas, based on specific semantic network characteristics. We outline directions to explore the structures of the concept network and their connection to creative concept generation. It is expected that augmented creative thinking will allow the user to have more original ideas and thus be more innovative.

Criticism is important for cultivating creativity. In this paper, we propose a method to enhance feedback to creators of creative works. We separate the explicit evaluation from the implicit evaluation. We pay particular attention to cases in which the viewer expresses a positive evaluation of a work but the actual implicit evaluation is rather negative. In such cases, the feedback of the implicit criticism is important for creativity. We describe a prototype system designed to deliver such feedback to the creator. The feedback interface is represented by the taste of green tea, directly delivered to the creator, thus motivating the creator.