Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. Introduction Fostering innovation in early design phases is a rarely discussed topic in research. Theories and studies into innovation usually schematize o...

During the 1940s-1970s, the leftist intelligentsia played a prominent role in constructing a vibrant Iraqi culture, contributed greatly to the flourishing of literature and the arts, and exerted a great impact in the cultural and political spheres. This article focuses primarily on the 1960s, when, despite two Ba’thist coups, the cultural ambience was pronouncedly leftist. The second half of th...

Axelrod’s model describes the dissemination of a set of cultural traits in a society constituted by individual agents. In a social context, nevertheless, individual choices toward a specific attitude are also at the basis of the formation of communities, groups and parties. The membership in a group changes completely the behavior of single agents who start acting according to a social identity...

Does local context (e.g., city of residence) matter for self and well-being? We theorized that it does because local contexts diverge in prevalent historically-derived ideas, norms, and products. Through historical analysis, studies of norms (tightness-looseness; Study 1) and cultural products (content analyses of newspaper headlines, venture capital firm websites, hospital websites; Studies 2-...

This study uses Trauth’s (2000) Influence-Impact Model as a sensitizing device to examine the influence of four key socio-cultural factors —policy, infrastructure, economy, and culture—on information economy development efforts in Thailand. Our assessment shows that progress has been made but gaps remain. Thailand’s infrastructure challenges include unequal development across regions, a small s...

This paper describes a method to obtain quantitatively discriminating cultural interaction indicators and their values for cross-cultural Human Computer Interaction (HCI) design as preparatory work for cross-cultural adaptive navigation and multi-media systems. The method has been implemented in a tool for cross-cultural HCI analysis. Two online studies temporally displaced by one year using th...

This paper investigates the influence of culture on product design in Botswana, a topic on which there little previous research. It is argued that product innovation should be assimilated within the context of Botswana’s own culture but it has been observed that designers have not yet been able to encode cultural phenomena to the same extent as physical ones. The basis of this paper is that the...

In this paper we seek to build on existing mathematical studies of cultural change by exploring how the diversity of adaptive cultural traits evolves by innovation and cultural transmission when the payoff from adopting traits is both uncertain and frequency dependent. The model is particularly aimed at understanding the evolution of subsistence trait diversity, since the payoff from exploiting...