The use of a reduced verbal system as ELF English as a lingua franca in the sciences does not appear to be a perfectly adequate way of expressing cultural identities. A modern society should instead enforce, through instruction, the understanding of several national cultural scripts, one’s own and others, and the understanding of the way communication and languages works. Multilingualism and in...

Service design is considered to be one of the pivotal components in cultural and creative design industries which has a significant impact on consumer perception of innovation. Despite service design’s recognized importance, cultural and creative industries lack a systematic approach to it. Therefore, based on the “Taiwan experience”, this paper proposes a service innovation design model and pr...

This paper outlines research towards strengthening our understanding of the representation of cultural artifacts in video games. The approach described outlines steps towards utilising a framework using dimensions of cultural heritage as reference points for games analysis. This framework is then used as a mechanism to analyse two games: Assassin’s Creed I and Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta. T...

The emergence of language and culture is one of the major transitions in evolution (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995), and the key to the cumulative nature of cultural transmission in Homo sapiens as contrasted with other species is the digital nature of language, which permits semi-understood designed entities to be preserved and transmitted. Phonemes are not the only systems of self-correctin...

We examined whether Japanese culture has become more individualistic by investigating how the practice of naming babies has changed over time. Cultural psychology has revealed substantial cultural variation in human psychology and behavior, emphasizing the mutual construction of socio-cultural environment and mind. However, much of the past research did not account for the fact that culture is ...

Pyrolysis of agricultural/forestry processed wastes (AFPW) is one approach that has been investigated to develop materials into products of higher value. This paper describes a concept of multi-utilization with pyrolysis under various conditions which has been extensively prepared for related bio-functional materials like biochar, charcoal and activated carbon (AC). The prepared materials were ...

In Europe, interest in wild forest products is increasing. Such products may be interpreted in a biological sense as deriving from autonomously growing forest species or in a biocultural sense as reflecting dynamics in human living with biodiversity through re-wilding of earlier domesticated species. In this article I elaborate the idea that the new interests reflect biocultural dynamics. First...

This article examines the influence of socio-cultural background and product value on different outcomes of usability tests. A study was conducted in two different socio-cultural regions, Switzerland and East Germany, which differed in a number of aspects (e.g. economic power, price sensitivity and culture). Product value (high vs. low) was varied by manipulating the price of the product. Sixty...