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The Effectiveness of Scene-Based Icons Inspired by the Oracle Bone Script in Cross-Cultural Communication

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Cross-Cultural Design. Experience and Product Design Across Cultures (HCII 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12771))

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Abstract

Oracle bone script is an ancient form of writing character used by ancient Chinese. It takes advantage of static pictographic elements to shape scenes, thus conveying dynamic and prosperous messages. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that scene-based icons inspired by the oracle bone script can be effectively recognized and understood by people from different cultures and thus used to help in cross-cultural communication scenarios. An experiment was conducted with a sample of 16 people from different cultural backgrounds to determine the icons’ recognizability. The result indicates that these icons have relatively high recognizability in a cross-cultural context.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The cognitive associative compounds are compounds of two or more pictographic elements to suggest the meaning of the word to be represented.

  2. 2.

    Chinese characters were firstly divided into 6 categories by Shen Xu in ShuoWenJieZi according to construction rules. The pictograms and simple ideograms are two of them.

  3. 3.

    Ibid.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Xiaohua Sun, Lin Bao, Weiwei Guo, Yifei Liao & Xuanye Lu

Authors
  1. Xiaohua Sun
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  2. Lin Bao
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  3. Weiwei Guo
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  4. Yifei Liao
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  5. Xuanye Lu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiaohua Sun .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Pei-Luen Patrick Rau

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Sun, X., Bao, L., Guo, W., Liao, Y., Lu, X. (2021). The Effectiveness of Scene-Based Icons Inspired by the Oracle Bone Script in Cross-Cultural Communication. In: Rau, PL.P. (eds) Cross-Cultural Design. Experience and Product Design Across Cultures. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12771. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77074-7_38

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77074-7_38

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-77073-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-77074-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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