Abstract
This study explores engineering design students’ perceptions of humor in the experiences of creativity development in Project-Organized Groups (
Introduction
Undoubtedly, design is a creative activity. Designers contribute to finding solutions and developing products in a very creative way. Initiative, resolution, economic insight, tenacity, optimism, and teamwork are qualities that stand all designers in good stead and are indispensable to those in responsible positions. Accordingly, there is a growing number of discussions on the links between creativity and design. 1 Furthermore, creativity involves the generation of novel and useful ideas. 2 Although creative ideas, questions, or solutions seem to originate in individual minds, a growing number of studies suggest that creativity is fundamentally a socio-cultural phenomenon. 3
As one of the factors influencing individual emotion 4 and stimulating creativity in a collaborative context, 5 and as one of the forms of ‘creativity,’ 6 humor has been discussed in educational contexts. 7 According to Zhang, humor is the extent of the intentional use of verbal and nonverbal behaviors that elicit laughter, pleasure, and delight, and it is identified as an important immediacy. 8 However, humor is not always supportive to learning positively. The appropriate humor should be emphasized in the context of creative learning. 9 This means humor should be beneficial in building connections between humorists and other persons. 10 Meanwhile, like creativity, humor is also a cultural-dependent concept. As Zhang suggests, although the cognitive and psychological processes of humor mechanisms are fundamentally similar across distinct cultures, cultural expectations and preferences largely color the perception, interpretation, and evaluation of humorous incongruities and arousals in content, target and style. 11
Recent studies have argued there is a growing need for creative engineering designers in China. For example, in the book How Creativity is Changing China, Li describes how the shift from “Made in China” to “Created in China” is underway.
12
The emerging creative industry in China is facilitating such a shift, while design is one of the key factors in increasing industry value added and in bringing about economic transformation. However, there is a lack of studies linking creativity and engineering design from a humor perspective. As suggested by Yue, from a historical perspective, Chinese humor has been mostly characterized by joke-telling and funny show-performing.
13
Humor has traditionally been given little respect in Chinese culture, mainly due to the fact that Confucius once ordered the execution of humorists for delivering an “improper performance” before dignitaries in 500
Following the above points, this article particularly focuses on a learner’s perspective of humor in creativity development in design activities that involve students (n=13) in engineering design education at Northeastern University (
On Relations between Humor, Creativity and Engineering Design Education
Defining Creativity: From What to Where
In general, the two most common characteristics of creativity have been identified in literature: newness or uniqueness, and value or utility. This is true for all cases of creativity, whether within science, art, or politics, etc. 14 Moreover, four special focus areas have been identified as being significant in defining creativity, including A) the person, B) the process, C) the product, and D) the place. However, the systems approach to creativity indicates that any creative behavior is developed from the complex interactions between those special focus areas. 15
As indicated in The Handbook of Creativity, the development of scientific thinking about creativity has followed a trajectory: an early emphasis upon isolated individuals and their internal traits and capabilities followed by a developing focus upon the interaction between individuals and the environment. 16 Thus, researchers have shifted their focus from “what creativity is” to more “where creativity happens”. This shift drives us to further clarify the following characteristics of creativity by considering “where”: 17
Creativity in the mind: As argued by “person” (cognitive or psychological) approaches to the study of creativity, any creative idea is generated from a cognitive process in the mind. The basic cognitive process (e.g., attention, perception, memory, information processing) and individual differences (e.g., intelligence, language, personality style) have close connections with creativity. 18
Creativity in collaboration: Creativity is generated from a collaborative process beyond the individuals, which is defined as group creativity. It focuses on interpersonal interaction as one kind of social influence which can be found in the various evidences of collaborative effort demonstrating that collaboration involves an intricate blend of skills, temperaments, effort, and, sometimes, personalities to realize a shared vision of something new and useful; 19 or it emerges through dialogue, and “being in a relationship” is seen as the dynamic interaction in a constructivist framework. 20
Creativity in the social system: Social influences (e.g., social structure, economy, culture, religion, policy, community, organization, family) are taken into account. This is because social processes and structures represent such dramatic influences on creativity, and they can support, undermine, or neither support nor undermine each other’s creativity. 21
Accordingly, rethinking the definition of creativity from a “where” perspective led by the shift (from “what” to “where”) of study may provide a comprehensive understanding of creativity and lay the basis for linking creativity with other concepts including humor, learning, emotion, and design in the following sections.
Interplay between Humor and Creativity
How can humor be appropriate to creative learning environments? According to Freud, there are two types of humor: non-tendentious and tendentious. Jokes or attempts at humor labeled harmless, non-tendentious, or abstract are those that are perceived as innocent and lacking a specific purpose by recipients. 22 On the other hand, attempts at humor labeled tendentious or purposeful often “run the risk of meeting with people who do not want to listen to them”, often because they target others’ personal characteristics” (p. 107). 23 Frymier, Wanzer, and Wojtaszczyk mention that both tendentious and non-tendentious types of humor can be applied in teaching practice, but there should be a balance between them. 24 Teacher humor orientation, verbal aggressiveness, and nonverbal immediacy are related to how students view teachers’ humor. Meanwhile, student humor orientation, verbal aggressiveness, and communication competence are related to how students view teachers’ appropriate and inappropriate humor. 25
Florence also argues that humor is itself a form of creativity. 26 As Wallinger discusses, seeing the humor in a situation requires the ability to view it in a different light, to re-assemble aspects of it from a different point of view. 27 This skill is also required of those who demonstrate creativity, and humor, creativity, and intellect often go hand in hand. Since schools encourage creativity and intellect, humor is a part of the product of the interaction among the individuals involved, be they adults or children. Torrance defines humor and playfulness as characteristics of creative people: 28 this suggests both the ability to appreciate humor, which means to be able to understand the information created by humor, and the ability to create humor. In addition, humor is connected with playfulness in the assessment of a creative climate. For example, in Ekvall’s research, humor and playfulness are proposed as one common factor of a creative climate that is related to people’s feeling in a relaxed atmosphere with laugher and joke. 29
Engineering Design as a Creative Activity
The literature has many discussions about engineering design as a creative activity. For example, Gero describes that engineering design can be conceived as a purposeful, constrained, decision-making, exploratory, and learning activity. 30 Decision-making implies a set of variables, the value of which has to be decided. Search is the common process used in decision-making. Exploration is akin to changing the problem spaces within the restructuring of knowledge. The designer operates within a context that partially depends on the designer’s perceptions of purpose, constraints, and related contexts. These perceptions change as the designer explores the emerging relationships between putative designs and the context and as the designer learns more about possible designs.
Engineering designers are operating as problem solvers in the sense that they have to solve “open-ended problems”, which employ creative thinking, problem solving, goal setting, and interaction. If this is created in teamwork, participants influence each other’s constructive process by providing influence through asking questions, arguing, agreeing, etc. Gero also argues that creative design involves schemas both of routine and of non-routine. 31 He emphasizes that creativity is not simply concerned with the introduction of something new into a design, although that appears to be a necessary condition for any process that claims to be labeled creative. Rather, the introduction of “something new” should lead to a result that is unexpected (as well as being valuable). More formally, we can describe routine designing as following a defined schema where the expectation of what follows is defined by the schema. Creative designing, which is part of non-routine designing, can be described as perturbating the schema to produce unexpected and incongruous results.
Project-Organized Groups (pog s) as an Innovative Strategy for Creativity in Engineering Education in China
In China, learning in
Research Methodology
Participants in the Interviews
The advantages of qualitative studies are considered in choosing interviews as a research method in this study. As Ten Have suggests, the crucial feature of qualitative research is to “work up” one’s research material, to search for hidden meanings, underlying features, multiple interpretations, implied connotations, and unheard voices.
32
All participants in this study come from student project groups working in engineering design in the seventh semester at Northeastern University (
Data Collection and Analysis
Three group interviews were conducted in this study. The numbers of interviewees in each group are 4, 4, and 5. All the interviewees (n=13) were invited in the first instance and participated voluntarily in the interviews. In the interviews, interviewees were asked to answer questions one by one. Frank and diverse points were encouraged. A capital letter (C) and a number (from 1 to 13) were used to mark each interviewee in data collection. This means interviewees were marked from C1 to C13. Each interview lasted around 40 minutes and was recorded. The interviews were semi-structured, allowing in-depth follow-up of initial responses to questions asked by the interviewer. Many open questions were used to find out students’ perceptions on humor; however, they were developed from the following main interview questions in the guidelines:
In your project work experience, what kind of environment can stimulate positive emotions for developing new ideas?
Is there anyone who is very humorous working with you?
What is humor? Can you provide a personal definition?
In your daily life, how did you learn humor?
Do you like the humorous people? Why or why not?
Do you think of yourself as a humorous person? If you are, on what occasions and in what way are you humorous?
Do you think in the study of design there is any need for humor?
What do you think is the relationship between humor, emotion, creativity, and learning?
All the interviews were transcribed as text, and then content analysis was employed. This is a process by which the “many words of text are classified into much fewer categories”. 33 Categories are usually derived from theoretical constructs or areas of interest devised in advance of the analysis (pre-ordinate categorization), rather than being developed from the material itself, though referencing the empirical data may in turn modify the categories. 34 The conclusion or the newly generated theory thus emerges inductively from the data collection and analysis. A theory provides modes of conceptualization for describing and explaining: it should be clear and understandable to a wide range of people. While qualitative data analysis involves organizing, accounting for, and explaining the data, making sense of data in terms of the participants’ definitions of the situation involves noting patterns, themes, categories, and irregularities. 35
Although group interviews bring the advantage of diverse points to this study, the individual interviewees were influenced by the group setting to some extent, as the individuals were trying to avoid group conflict in interviews. This may be a limitation to the data collection and analysis in this study.
Findings and Discussions
A Brief View of Research Findings
Through data analysis, this study acquired engineering design students’ diverse perceptions of humor in relation to their creative design experience in
Students’ Perceptions of Humor, Creativity, and Engineering Design in pog s
According to the interviews, most students think the open and flexible group facilitates individual creativity and such a context also gives birth to humor. This is in line with discussions in many previous studies, such as Cayirdag and Acar 36 and Grossen, 37 who emphasize that when group openness is encouraged, students may feel psychological safety in a friendly environment where diverse group members are more likely to suggest novel ideas, criticize others’ ideas, challenges the status quo, ask naïve questions, or admit mistakes because they lack fear of ridicule or more subtle forms of interpersonal rejection. 38 Most interviewees expressed satisfaction with their group-working atmosphere and individuals’ positive emotion was stimulated:
We are working in a positive and open group. It means we all are very happy and everyone prepares for his job very well. We do not have many complaints that will kill most of the creative ideas. (Interviewee C2).
At the same time, group openness also encourages students’ informal discussion, talk or chat, and social activities beyond project work. It then provides conditions for generation of humor: as the students expressed, humor happens in free situations such as in a supervisor meeting, group discussion, during breaks, on the way to the library or canteen, etc. The humor, from the students’ point of view, can be regarded as a tool for forging closer relationships with others when it makes others laugh. Meanwhile, students think the responses to humor differ from person to person, as people have different perceptions of fun. They agree that humor is an emergent phenomenon that is always an unexpected result of a talk. Sometimes the emergence of a joke or a funny behavior changes the planned track of discussion, and that also brings unexpected creative ideas:
Just like several days ago, we had a task of designing a slogan for a restaurant. We were very tired of discussion of the design plan, focusing on good looking handwriting of words in the slogan. But we did not find a satisfactory solution. Then one of us suddenly began to imitate that we were eating very flavorful dishes. He looked very funny that made all of us laugh happily. Then we realized we should turn to integrate the feeling of tasting flavor into the design. Yes, this was stimulated by the humor. (Interviewee C10).
As Gero suggests, emergence allows for the introduction of new behaviors and new functions, 39 and it is the equivalent of a designer refocusing his or her attention and/or reinterpreting the results of his or her actions so far. Gero also argues that creativity is involved with the production of an unexpected result through the confluence of two schemas. The first schema provides a set of routine expectations; the second schema is needed to understand the unexpected result. The unexpected result can produce (or be produced) in a number of different ways, including humor. Meanwhile, Sawyer documents that collaborating groups have the key characteristics that form “collaborative emergence”, 40 meaning that novelty is a collective process and involves a dialogue between actors and audience as a way of constructing the unexpected meaning. In this sense, Sawyer suggests that creativity is an emergent process that involves a social group of individuals engaged in complex, unpredictable interactions. 41 So to link these points and the interview findings discussed above, this article provides empirical evidence of the emergence of creativity from a humorous approach.
At the same time, students addressed “healthy” humor, meaning humor should be harmless to others and positively affect their emotions and the group atmosphere. The students welcomed humorous peers or supervisors. They think a “strong” sense of humor defines a charming personality or possibly a genetic predisposition. In the students’ eyes, not all creative persons are humorous, but all humorous persons are creative. Accordingly, some of them did not think they were good “creators of laughs” in the group, but they were “doing laughing” very well. Meanwhile, there should be a balance between serious work and a flexible atmosphere: if humor brings too much leisure to the group work, it will waste group time and destroy the group working plans.
It is also very interesting to find that supervisors like to express their humor when they share with students their experience of dealing with learning challenges they encountered in their youth. In such a way, the supervisors behave as “learning experts” among students, and that is helpful in stimulating the group dynamic and individuals’ confidence in the face of difficult problems in project work. Moreover, we can say that the supervisors are fond of being the “learning experts” through using humor in the practice of supervision principles and encouraging students to “let go” and learn by “hands-on experience” in
He [the supervisor] played jokes with us, saying when he just started to learn design, he was like a dancer but danced with his feet in chains. This inspired us to think freely, to be open to express a designer’s ideas in the product. (Interviewee C5).
Besides talking about humor related to their peers and supervisors, students also expressed that social media was the main way of gaining fun through humor. Social media includes online news, movies, cartoons, forums, etc. When the students talked about learning humor from social media such as in the movies, they mentioned that humor is culture-related. For example, one student mentioned that western humor (mainly among American and European people) is more exaggerated and explicit, while Chinese humor is more introverted and implicit. Some students even expressed that humor is quite different from area to area due to the diverse subcultures within China. For example, one student comes from south China, and when he first arrived at
In the first semester, sometimes when my local classmates were chatting and suddenly laughed together, I knew they were telling some funny stories that I could not understand. I come from the south and there are many differences in the humor culture between the north and the south, even between different smaller areas in China. (Interviewee C11).
As discussed previously and generally, the appreciated use of humor is beneficial to group creative work and builds good relationships with others, a fact which was mentioned by interviewed students. In particular, as young designers, the interviewees think humor should be a meaningful design style shown by their products. In this sense, humor is the “outcome” of applying creative ideas to design practice that helps to increase the novelty of the product and therefore attract more purchasers. The “humorous” design products may also enhance certain public awareness, such as sustainability, or deliver some positive social values, such as loving others. So more precisely, humor, in the minds of design students, is not only a “communication tool” or a type of “personality”, but is also a “social creative path towards well-being”.
If a product is humorous, it brings not only fun but also reflection on some topics that leave a deep impression on the audience. So humor could be a power stimulating others to rethink the meaning behind the product itself. This [to design a humorous product] is much more than to design a point of laugh. (Interviewee C7).
The illustration by students also involves designers’ social responsibility; however, humor becomes one of the foundations to build that. This means the industry needs humorous designers who have good communication skills to build collaborative relationships with others for group creativity; it further needs humorous design products that manifest creativity and realize designers’ social responsibility. Thus, humor is an element integrating into a designer’s life that must not be overlooked.
Furthermore, the students think that if one person is humorous, it is mainly due to his/her excellent verbal skills and creative use of the meaning of the Chinese language in ongoing conversation contexts.
It [Chinese humor] is a personal ability to use the language to express a special meaning in the immediate communication or telling jokes stimulating laughter. So most of the humorous persons are good at the Chinese language. (Interviewee C10).
In other words, the students think humorous people are creative in making a new form of discourse. Such a point may be helpful in understanding the points discussed in one of the early studies of Chen, who said that Chinese jokes, from the very beginning, tried to express both “denial humor” (critical of reality) and “complimentary humor” (complimentary of reality), 42 which is different from the “pure humor” expressed by western jokes (just making people laugh). So Chen suggested that Chinese humor production very much emphasizes “expressive subtleness and appreciative delicacy”, and, as such, Chinese jokes tend to be highly dialectic and aesthetic. 43 Following these points, here we may further argue that Chinese jokes also tend to be highly word suggestive. One of the examples may explain this further: if a man has not found a job after graduating from Ph.D. study, he may introduce himself to new friends in a humorous way by saying “I am a postdoc”. The Chinese pronunciation of “postdoc” is “bo shi hou”. Normally, “bo shi” means Ph.D. study or Ph.D. degree and “hou” means a subsequent period (after Ph.D. study). In this sense, “bo shi hou” corresponds to the English meaning of “postdoc”. However, in Chinese, there are many different words with the same pronunciation as “hou”, and one of those words means a pending situation, or waiting for somebody or something. So in this sense, the man describing himself as a postdoc is ironically suggesting his own jobless situation. As Lee and Ang point out, the word suggestiveness can be particularly relevant in ideographic writing systems such as the Chinese language. 44 In the English language, the mental code for verbal material seems to be phonological, while in the Chinese language, phonemic information is used much less. Instead, Chinese characters seem to be encoded visually and mapped on meanings directly. So a new meaning of Chinese words relies on a new semantic association between words. This suggests that Chinese jokes are made more accessible to the audience if they are able to bring the fun of word suggestiveness in delivery of a newer meaning.
In addition, the students also expressed the intention of being humorous to build a creative group learning environment and mainly to keep a “harmonious” relationship with others and avoid group disagreements.
Personally I always give enough respect to the others. Sometimes I make critical comments of others’ ideas but seldom use a joke. The group harmony requires us to give more provocative suggestions and fewer disagreements with others. (Interviewee C5).
This is in line with what has been much discussed in relation to the influences of collectivism on individuals’ behavior in a group context. 45 It is well known that the traditional Chinese social system is a collective society, which is rather defensive, and discouraging of independence; it stresses the importance of social harmony that can be achieved through compromise, moderation, and conformity. Therefore among the Chinese students there is a greater emphasis on meeting a shared standard so as to maintain harmony in one’s relationship with the group. 46 As group disagreements are not welcome, the high level of group conformity at times is a killer of individual creative ideas.
Implications: Integrating Humor into Engineering Design Education in China
Based on the results, we may further infer, in a general sense, how to facilitate the learning process of engineering design students and teach creative engineering designers by integrating humor into
Firstly, humor is an emergent phenomenon that may trigger the development of creative ideas that could also emerge in the group work. Along with fun, healthy humor provides the groups a more comfortable and enjoyable learning atmosphere where the students spark the creative ideas in a way that is full of randomness, playfulness, and imagination. This further brings more interplay between routine and non-routine ways of thinking in the process of seeking for solutions to problems and in the group engagement with a deeper learning. Thus, humor adds more positive value to the creative process and a creative climate. Accordingly, this requires in a
This is calling for a free, flexible, and comfortable educational environment facilitated by engineering educators in China. In this sense, the use of appropriate humor as a tool to build a creative learning environment should be considered. As the supervisors also have their own individual sense of humor and knowledge of how to behave well as “learning experts”, they have an insight into being humorous appropriately on occasions, such as when the students meet challenges in the learning process; they have an insight into to what extent humor should be a professional requirement in facilitating the groups and allowing students to express and enjoy their humor appropriately in developing creative ideas; and they have an insight into the response of students to the humor, ensuring the supportive role of a creative climate in students’ ongoing learning process.
Secondly, for engineering design students, humor is regarded as one element that can be integrated into design products as a personal trait, a communication tool, and a way of enjoying amusement. This calls for humor to be a part of the learning culture in engineering design education in China. Furthermore, humor is language-related and involves both thinking and a narrow sense of language as a communication tool, such as is the case in “verbal humor”. Accordingly, as teachers, it is necessary to consider how to better understand students’ “language of humor” (locally and internationally) and how to integrate humor into the foundation of building a creative learning community, where the young designers are stimulated by positive emotion in a collaborative learning process, can share creative ideas with peers freely, and can develop creative products. Briefly, humor is expected to be one of the key pillars of constructing engineering designers’ social identity and realizing their social responsibility that underpins their social position in the developing creative industries in China.
Thirdly, humor can be precisely defined as “culture-dependent”. Relating this to teaching design students from a global perspective, we may ask how best to use an appropriate humor that may meet the common/diverse needs of intercultural student groups. It is also important to ask how to use humor to help students (in multicultural group contexts) to break the cultural barriers in their engagement with group work.
Finally, this study provides evidence that
Footnotes
1 Gerhard Pahl, et al., Engineering Design: A Systematic Approach, ed. and trans. Ken Wallace and Luciënne Blessing (London: Springer Science & Business Media, 2007).
2 Robert J. Sternberg, Handbook of Creativity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
3 Michèle Grossen, “Methods of Studying Collaborative Creativity: An Original and Adventurous Blend,” Thinking Skills and Creativity 3, no. 3 (2008): 246-249.
4 Katy Wing Yin Liu, “Humor Styles, Self-Esteem and Subjective Happiness,” Discovery-
5 Christians Humke and Charles E. Schaefer, “Sense of Humor and Creativity,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 82, no. 2 (1996): 544-546.
6 Nur Cayirdag and Selcuk Acar, “Relationships Between Styles of Humor and Divergent Thinking,” Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences 2, no. 2 (2010): 3236-3240.
7 John S. Gero, “Creativity, Emergence and Evolution in Design,” Knowledge-Based Systems 9, no. 7 (1996): 435-448.
8 Qin Zhang, “Immediacy, Humor, Power Distance, and Classroom Communication Apprehension in Chinese College Classrooms,” Communication Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2005): 109-124.
9 Linda M. Wallinger, “Don’t Smile Before Christmas: The Role of Humor in Education,” National Association of Secondary School Principals Bulletin 81, no. 589 (1997): 27-34.
10 Zhang, “Immediacy, Humor, Power Distance, in Chinese College Classrooms,” 109-124.
11 Ibid.
13 Xiao Dong Yue, “Exploration of Chinese Humor: Historical Review, Empirical Findings, and Critical Reflections,” Humor 23, no. 3 (2010): 403-420.
14 Mark A. Runco, Creativity, Theories and Themes: Research, Development, and Practice (London: Elsevier Academic Press, 2007).
15 Graham Thompson and M. Lordan, “A Review of Creativity Principles Applied to Engineering Design,” Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part E: Journal of Process Mechanical Engineering 213, no. 1 (1999): 17-31.
16 Sternberg, Handbook of Creativity.
17 Chunfang Zhou, Group Creativity Development in Engineering Education in a Problem and Project-Based Learning Environment (
18 Teresa M. Amabile, Creativity in Context (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).
20 Anna Craft, Creativity in Schools: Tensions and Dilemmas (London: Routledge, 2005).
21 Runco, Creativity, Theories and Themes.
22 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1960), (Original work published 1905).
23 Ibid., 107.
24 Ann Bainbridge Frymier, Melissa Bekelja Wanzer, and Ann M. Wojtaszczyk, “Assessing Students’ Perceptions of Inappropriate and Appropriate Teacher Humor,” Communication Education 57, no. 2 (2008): 266-288.
25 Ibid.
26 Florence Ditlow, “The Missing Element in Health Care, Humor as a Form of Creativity,” Journal of Holistic Nursing 11, no. 1 (1993): 66-79.
27 Wallinger, “The Role of Humor in Education,”
28 Ellis Paul Torrance, Encouraging Creativity in the Classroom (Dubuque, lowa: W. C. Brown Company Publishers, 1970).
29 Göran Ekvall, “Organizational Climate for Creativity and Innovation” European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology 5, no. 1 (1996): 105-123.
30 Gero, “Creativity, Emergence, Evolution in Design,” Knowledge-Based Systems, 435-448.
31 Ibid.
32 Paul Ten Have, Understanding Qualitative Research and Ethnomethodology (London:
33 Robert Philip Weber, Basic Content Analysis, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks,
34 Louise Cohen, Lawrence Manion, and Keith Morrison, Research Methods in Education. (London: Routledge, 2007).
35 Ibid.
36 Cayirdag and Acar, “Relationships Between Styles of Humor and Divergent Thinking,” 3236-3240.
37 Grossen, “Methods of Studying Collaborative Creativity,” 246-249.
38 Zhou, Group Creativity Development in Engineering Education.
39 Gero, “Creativity, Emergence, Evolution in Design,” 435-448.
40 Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: the Creative Power of Collaboration. (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
41 Ibid.
42 XiaoYing Chen, “On Origins of “Humor” Journal of Aesthetic Study and Appreciation, no. 1 (1982): 60-65.
43 Ibid.
44 Yih Hwai Lee and Kim Soon Ang, “Brand Name Suggestiveness: A Chinese Language Perspective” International Journal of Research in Marketing 20, no. 4 (2003): 323-335.
45 Jack A. Goncalo and Barry M. Staw, “Individualism-collectivism and Group Creativity” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process 100 (2006): 96-109.
46 Kyung Hee Kim, “Exploring the Interactions between Asian Culture (Confucianism) and Creativity” Journal of Creative Behavior 41, no. 1 (2007): 28-53.
47 Li, How Creativity is Changing China.
48 Ibid.