Cultural Sensitivity in AI-Generated Visual Communication

The Model of Cultural-Emotional Design, a combination of Experience Engineering and New Social Value, aims to understand how visual design traits can evoke culturally mediated emotional responses. The study involved 60 adults aged 18-45, from East Asia and Western backgrounds, and none were design professionals. The study utilised an open-source COCO-style dataset, which was coded for typography, colour significance, and format, as well as emotion-culture mapping, employing a multimodal measurement approach. Participants viewed each IAPS image for 5 seconds, followed by a 3-second inter-stimulus interval. They reported self-assessed Differential Emotions Scale scores, continuous valence and arousal ratings, and real-time facial expression tracking. The results showed a moderate correlation between valence and arousal ratings, with both positive and negative correlations. Subjectivity was suggested by probabilities associated with facial muscle movements and emotional expression. Significant interactions between culture and design features were observed in terms of emotional responses, as indicated by mixed-effects modelling. The results indicated a strong connection between culture and design aspects regarding emotional responses, as demonstrated by mixed-effects modelling. Nonmanual signage and hardware terminals offer varied reading experiences across different languages. The arrangement of characters (e.g., for a book/magazine cover or flyer with bold type formatted in three columns per page). The Model of Cultural-Emotional Design effectively captures emotional design responses influenced by culture, facilitating the development of future AI-augmented multimodal methodologies that inform culturally attuned design processes. Future work will consider diversifying the dataset and examining additional physiological measures.