A colleague of mine recently received a request for a response on the topic of designing interculturally.  It came from a graduate student in design who wrote about how his research “focuses on examining how culture influences visual language and what that means for contemporary designers who are increasingly asked to design across cultural boundaries”. The goal of his research is to create a guide to intercultural design.

The request from the grad student was forward to a listserve along with a statement of alarm from my colleague about the standards of graduate education.  I’m not sure what he was alarmed by, but he seemed to be concerned about the empirical validity of the questionnaire the student had sent.  I replied to forward by asking, “So what alarms you exactly about the questions as posed?  That is, what is it about his culture and your culture that makes this way of designing a guide so alarming to you?”

My colleague’s reaction to the student’s request made me wonder why the empirical validity seemed to be so lacking.  The student was making an earnest effort (something I may personally have to do in the near future) to gather varied perspectives on the topic of intercultural design.  Perhaps my colleague knows of a right way to do intercultural design or if there are more ‘empirical’ ways of conducting design research and of designing.

In any case, I took on the student’s questionnaire and found it more difficult than it seemed at first.  If anyone reading this has any perspectives and ways of going about intercultural design that are developed and seem to work, please share!

Here is the questionnaire with my responses:

Background information

Describe your current job. Please include your job title.
My current job title is artist-in-residence.  Typically artists-in-residence work with or at an institution to create artworks.  They interact with faculty, staff and students to share their processes and sometimes even collaborate.  However, I refer to myself as a design ecologist since that might better describe what I do. Initially I came to the institution I work for under the assumption that I was helping to start up a graduate program and research lab in experimental and new media.

My work ranges from research into the traits and practices that characterize experimentalism and how they contribute to new knowledge and hybridity in form, practice and context.  I’ve taught classes and developed curricula much as a faculty member at a college or university would.  I’ve led workshops, labs, and helped to organize conferences.  I research and write about design in cross-cultural contexts, and how to work across those contexts based on the kinds of knowledge that each creates.  I am particularly interested in how experimentalism and objectivity are made.  I also work to apply research in psychology, sociology, & anthropology to understandings of bias (cognitive and social) so that we can design more fluidly across different social orders.  Today I attended a grad review session to give feedback to students.  I also try to connect where possible people, projects and institutions where I see great value in their working together or in the synergy of their approaches to knowledge and its application.  Other days I just do graphic design or sculpture…still others…I call people and do all the mundane stuff that goes with helping to contribute to the maintenance of a project or organization.

Describe your cultural background. Is your cultural background evident in your work?
Please give examples.
My cultural background is based in the East Side of Detroit.  It borders two edges, the suburbs and the Grosse Pointes. The Grosse Pointes are a wealthy edge of the city on the lake, while the suburbs are mainly made of of people who left Detroit or who inhabit communities that sprung up outside of it. I lived in a pretty culturally-mixed lower-middle class neighborhood composed of houses built in the early 20th century.  I lived sort of at an edge, a hybrid zone if you will.  I went to Catholic school (like most of my family) in Grosse Pointe Park and I visited relatives in the suburbs.  I went camping in the woods as a kid.  We had a house, but we were never well-off.  My parents were divorced when I was in second grade.  My mom worked her way through grad school to support and get my sister and I through school.  I lived in the midwest most of my time through college.  I travelled to far away places a few times through the generosity of relatives.  I learned to be critical of what was presented as fact or as law because I saw it being used arbitrarily and without it’s own self-reflection or criticality.  Maybe I just didn’t like nuns telling me what I should and should not do.  Late in college I started working with a group of evolutionary biologists.  Later still I studied organizations and cybernetics.  I prefer soccer to other sports.  Especially in playing.

Is my cultural background evident?

It depends where you look.  I think it is.  I come from a strong maternal line that last generation had 10 brothers and sisters who lost their father and breadwinner during the Great Depression.  Plus they were Catholic.  So for me to be interested in organizations, feedback, management, systems, knowledge construction, sustainability, robustness, and critical inquiry + truth and justice…yeah I’d say so.

Cultural considerations in design

How important is it for you to understand the culture of your audience?
It depends on the context and what I am trying to do.  One question I ask is if my understanding matters at all.  Most people in the world are muddling by, understanding very little, and they seem to be doing just fine.  Then again, there seems to be a lot we can learn about each other–culturally speaking.  I think there is a lot to be gained in understanding each other’s culture if and when there are conflicts.  Often times this is because we are holding assumptions about how the world works deep inside us, and we aren’t making these known.  There was a recent study of negotiations between Palestine and Israel that showed how what one believed to be the sticking point in the negotiations was not the case at all. The researchers showed how a ‘reframing’ of values could allow negotiations to proceed by articulating what could be exchanged for material compensation and which values were beyond material compensation–even though it was assumed they were not—because of cultural assumptions.

Are there any specific steps you take to understand the culture of your audience?
Absolutely! I think first it makes sense to assess exactly what you mean when you say ‘culture’  I like Atran et al’s (2005; the cultural mind) discussion of culture:

“it is important to note that the question of how culture should be defined is separable from the question of how best to study it. Although we think a definition of a culture in terms of history, proximity, language, and identification is useful and (if not too rigidly applied) perhaps even necessary as a beginning point, it does not follow that the cultural content of interest must be shared ideas and beliefs.”

They go on further to describe some of the many ways culture is looked at by different fields and people with different interests, and they determine that cultural definitions are based on utility on one hand and the scope of interest (e.g. scale or subject) on the other.  In the end they see culture as that which allows the uptake of processes, of procedures, information, beliefs values and so on.  So culture then is not the nouns (belief, behavior, value, etc) that we commonly associate with culture–rather it is the means by which we acquire those nouns.

Another step beyond this definition would be to lay one’s own cultural assumptions bare.  I’ve attached an image from Malt et al. (1999; knowing versus naming) that shows a comparison of the number of items or objects that words across three different languages.  You can see quite clearly that are quite different distributions of words for these items when you compare.  Now ask what this means for different locations, use patterns, numbers of items and how these items interact with language!!!  The most important point here is to assume nothing!!!

Ask what the starting points of culture are and move on from there.  Design is an appropriate place to do that since so many aspects of what we use to create culture are DESIGNED!  Nature is another, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to disentangle nature and the social.  I think objects and artifacts are great because they tell us some much when we fail to use them “correctly”.  The workplace is yet another spot where different cultural artifacts and practices converge.

Please give examples.
Describe a specific project. How/why did the culture of your audience influence your choice of the following design elements:

The project I am thinking of is one I recently submitted a proposal for.  The goal is to identify culturally appropriate ways of communicating climate change and risks associated with it for disaster preparedness.  Here is how the audience(s) I think would influence the following elements:

• Shapes: How are names associated? What do they reference? Are there assumptions or associations that people have with them?
• Colors: What level communicates versus disturbs?  Are there associations or not (e.g. red = hot)?
• Images/photographs: How does framing, angle, & focus matter?  And how does the semeiotic relationships between the elements in the images narrate and structure our engagement with it and with other things (see van leeween and kress for more on that one)?
• Symbols: In what context does the symbol make sense?  In everyday life? In an abstracted work setting?
• Layouts: What is the flow of information and meaning?  Where do/should narrative elements appear?
• Other? Time, the temporal view, how do we access the future? the past? the present?  On what terms and with what detail and agency?

Are there any specific steps you took to verify you were using the above elements in a culturally appropriate way? Please give examples.
No not yet with that one, but all of the above considerations were based on prior field research that identified some of these as core concerns in their engagement with the design of these information systems.  So going back to question 4: do field research.  Talk to people and ask them questions…about what makes them upset..about what they don’t understand…about what seems ‘alien’.

What advice would you give to other designers working on a similar project?

It it a similar cross-cultural project or a similar guide?
Either way: GO SOMEWHERE WHERE THE CULTURE IS NOT YOURS.  PAY ATTENTION.  DOCUMENT YOUR FRUSTRATION.  THEN YOU WILL BETTER UNDERSTAND WHAT MUCH OF THE WORLD IS EXPERIENCING RIGHT NOW.