An Asian student in my laboratory was working on an application to visualize changes in computer software. She chose to represent deleted entities with the color green and new entities with red. I suggested to her that red is normally used for a warning, while green symbolizes renewal, so perhaps the reverse coding would be more appropriate. She protested, explaining that green symbolizes death in China, while red symbolizes luck and good fortune. The use of color codes to indicate meaning is highly culture-specific.
—Information Visualization, Second Edition: Perception for Design, page 16 (via Keith Lang)
I hypothesize that color-codings derived from nature and physics (for example more and less mapping to hotter and colder colors) would work across cultural divides. But maybe that’s just the science-worshiping American in me talking.
UPDATED 2009-02-02: There’s some very good commentary on this post. My hypothesis was wrong, or at very least missed the real difficulty of color coding. Also, it now appears the anecdote was not real culture shock, but a smart student defending their design with the first thing they could think of when it was suddenly challenged.