Designers’ articulation and activation of instrumental design judgements in cross-cultural user research

Abstract

Cross-cultural design practices have begun to rise in prominence, but these practices have infrequently intersected with common user-centred design practices that value the participation and lived experience of users. In this paper, we analyse a shared data-set that documented the efforts of a Scandinavian design team as they designed a co-creation workshop with Chinese consumers. We identified how the design team referred to workshop participants, focusing on how these references implicated the design team’s understanding of Chinese culture. We identified referents to the participants to locate projection of and reflection on participant interaction, and performed a thematic analysis of design and debrief activities to document the team’s articulation and activation of instrumental judgements relating to culture. The team’s instrumental judgements shifted over time, moving from totalising cultural references in the design phase to frequent translator-mediated interactions in the debrief phase. Translators ‘nuanced’ the cultural meanings being explored by the design team, while team members attempted to engage with cultural concerns by ‘making familiar’ these concerns within the context of their own culture. Implications for considering culture as a part of standard user research methods and paradigms are considered, along with practical considerations for foregrounding cultural assumptions in design activity.

Keywords:

• Co-creation
• cross-cultural design
• instrumental judgement
• culture

Notes

1. This term references a critique of programming practices by Dijkstra in 1968. ‘Considered harmful’ now references a critical reading of existing practices in computing, made popular in the HCI literature by Greenberg and Buxton (2008).