Designing across cultures

Culture is a broad term encompassing the customary beliefs, traditions, social norms, social habits and values as reflected in human practices and behaviours as well as in religion and art. Culture reflects the expected or correct way to think and act, and determines what is acceptable or unacceptable, important or unimportant and right or wrong. It is generally acknowledged that cultural differences pose challenges, as well as opportunities, for the way people interact with each other and that such differences may lead to misunderstanding as well as conflicts. Such cross-cultural challenges and opportunities also apply to collaborative design.

Internationalisation of society in general and of the design industry specifically, in terms of outsourcing, sub-contracting and cross-continent branches, poses new challenges due to physical distance and time zone differences, but importantly also due to cultural differences. Cultural differences are reflected in design tools and materials, as well as immaterial aspects such as social organisation, power relations and politics in organisations. Two pertinent cross-cultural issues frequently arising in collaborative design relates to design team cultural heterogeneity, and designing for a cross-border audience. Often products and services are designed in one country, but marketed and traded in another, and in this new international marketplace, the adequate understanding of cultural characteristics of users have become increasingly important (Plocher, Rau, and Choong 2012). Furthermore, in large corporate settings, collaborative designing very frequently takes place in culturally heterogeneous teams, which may lead to new team perspectives, but also challenges with respect to collaboration and mutual understanding.

The papers in the current special issue stem from the 11th Design Thinking Research Symposium, (DTRS11) and relate directly to issues with respect to cross-cultural design, as they are all based on analyses of a video-based data-set that covered a Scandinavian design team working for a European car manufacturer designing for the Chinese market. Centrally, the case included co-creation sessions with Chinese users, and company collaborations between a core Scandinavian design team and Asian consultants.

From the literature on cross-cultural collaboration, we know that perception of hierarchy is one of the main differences between cultures as people relate to their superiors quite differently in Scandinavia than in parts of Asia, for instance, Japan, India and China. Likewise, certain cultures value independence and initiative whereas others do not. Such differences may account for how certain design activities, for instance, workshops, operate in a cross-cultural context with respect to who takes the initiative or whether and how participants reflect on and critique each other’s ideas.

Based on a global survey in the IT industry and theoretical studies, Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov (2010) argued that thinking, feeling and acting vary by cultural context, and developed a culture profile model consisting of value scores along six dimensions, which offer the opportunity to compare value scores between nations. The six dimensions are (1) Power Distance (high versus low), (2) Individualism (versus Collectivism), (3) Masculinity, (4) Uncertainty Avoidance, (5) Long-Term Orientation and (6) Indulgence. Based on the comparison tool available at https://www.hofstede-insights.com/, we may compare the culture profiles of China and Scandinavia (i.e. Norway, Denmark and Sweden), see Figure 1.

Figure 1. The culture profiles of China and Scandinavian countries.

The comparison of China to Scandinavia is particularly relevant due to the nature of the shared data-set (Christensen and Abildgaard 2017) that serve as the empirical grounding for the papers in this special issue, and which involved a Scandinavian design team designing for a Chinese audience. As illustrated in Figure 1, the multi-cultural team was faced with the challenge of trying to understand and design for a markedly different cultural target group.

Several researchers have investigated the social encounter in cross-cultural design teams. Based on three case studies Jordan and Adams (2016) have identified a set of factors, which contribute to virtual cross-disciplinary collaboration in large multidisciplinary design teams. Vestergaard, Hauge, and Hansen (2016) have studied how the use of personas helped overcome the cultural distance between European designers and Indian users as part of understanding the users’ needs, values and interests. Another design technique, context mapping, which originally has been developed in Western cultures, was adapted by van Rijn et al. (2006) to more ‘reserved’ cultures in for instance East Asian. Anderl et al. (2009) have in the domain of product development identified a set of challenges encountered in intercultural teamwork. Notable cultural differences identified in the literature of relevance to systems design, human factors and HCI include preference of communication style (how much context is needed in communication), anthropometry (body sizes and associated characteristics), user cognition (perception, searching for and organising information, temporal and spatial cognition, approaches to problem-solving) and of course language, see Plocher, Rau, and Choong (2012) for an overview.

The Design Thinking Research Symposia series is a bi-annual interdisciplinary symposium series linking international academics with a shared interest in design thinking and design studies coming from a diversity of disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, architecture and design studies. DTRS11 marked the 25th anniversary of the symposium series, where video-based data-sharing has been a pioneering and recurring way of organising the symposium event ever since Kees Dorst, Henri Christiaans and Nigel Cross championed the first data sharing event in what later became known as DTRS2 (Cross, Christiaans, and Dorst 1996). Janet McDonnell and Peter Lloyd picked up the data-sharing format for DTRS7 (Lloyd and McDonnell 2009; McDonnell and Lloyd 2009a, 2009b) more than a decade later, and for DTRS10, organised by Robin Adams (Adams and Buzzanel 2016; Adams, Cardella, and Purzer 2016; Adams, McMullen, and Fosmire 2016), once again a shared data-set was utilised. DTRS7 and DTRS10 paved the way for the current data-sharing format, which we built upon and extended for DTRS11.

The DTRS11 symposium held at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark in November 2016 focused on participants’ analyses of a common data-set relating to cross-cultural co-creation. The research outputs include 28 symposium papers and a 30-chapter edited book (Christensen, Linden, and Halskov 2017), with select best papers revised for this issue of CoDesign and a forthcoming special issue of the journal Design Studies (entitled ‘Designing in the Wild’) topically focusing on ethnographic studies of design cognition.

The special issue opens with the paper ‘Designers’ articulation and activation of instrumental design judgements in cross-cultural user research’ by Gray and Boling, which investigates the designers’ instrumental judgement and shed light on how participants are referenced before, during and after a co-design workshop. The analysis provides a stepping stone towards a greater awareness of the cultural dimension in multicultural co-design activities. In ‘Psychological factors surrounding disagreement in multicultural design team meetings’, Paletz, Sumer and Miron-Spektor, zoom in on the role of conflicts in individual cultures compared to collectivistic cultures and investigates how cultural composition affects the expression of micro-conflicts in multicultural team meetings with a particular interest in team creativity.

In ‘How cultural knowledge shapes core design thinking—a situation specific analysis’, Clemmensen, Ranjan and Bødker combine a design thinking perspective with constructivist theory of culture in order to develop a framework for analysis of design thinking in cross-cultural teams. Applying the framework on the DTRS data-set the authors highlight how the design process initially focused on value creation before moving on to apply cultural knowledge in order to articulate more specifically what to design. In the final paper, ‘Fluctuating epistemic uncertainty in a design team as a metacognitive driver for creative cognitive processes’, Christensen and Ball study cross-cultural interpretation by investigating the effect of epistemic uncertainty on creativity not only in localised moments but also with respect to long-term effects later in the design process.

Funding

This work was supported by Innovation Fund Denmark [grant number CIBIS 1311-00001B].

Kim Halskov
Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
[email protected]
Bo T. Christensen
Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark
[email protected]

Acknowledgements

The guest editors would like to thank Innovation Fund Denmark for supporting DTRS11 through a grant to the research project ‘Creativity in Blended Interaction Spaces’ (Grant CIBIS 1311-00001B). Innovation Fund Denmark invests in cultivating and translating ideas, knowledge and technology for the benefit of Danish Society. DTRS11 also received generous support from the Carlsberg Foundation, The Danish Council for Independent Research, the Otto Mønsteds Fond and the Design Museum Denmark.