The Effect of Cultural Differences on a Distant Collaboration for Social Innovation: A Case Study of Designing for Precision Farming in Myanmar and South Korea

Abstract

This paper explores the impacts of the ways in which cultural differences were encountered and negotiated during a collaboration between a Myanmar social enterprise and a South Korean university to design a soil sensor that enables farmers to more accurately measure soil qualities such as moisture, nutrient content, acidity, and temperature, thereby increasing productivity through irrigating and applying inputs more efficiently. Precision-farming technologies are expected to improve agricultural sustainability through producing more food with fewer resources at less cost, creating social impacts such as poverty alleviation. Soil sensors are a relatively new technology in both Myanmar and South Korea, two countries with significant socioeconomic and technological differences. When designers and engineers from these countries collaborated to develop new soil sensors and related services from a distance, these differences were magnified. For example, the Myanmar team approached the sensors as a social innovation whereas the South Korean team viewed them as a technological innovation, indicating differences in practices, mind sets, knowledge, value systems, design approaches to innovation, expected social impacts, and stakeholder outcomes. Concluding that an embrace of difference should be a condition for this collaboration, the paper discusses how these differences contoured this cross-cultural effort toward social innovation.

Keywords:

• design
• social innovation
• culture
• precision farming
• soil sensors
• distant collaboration

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Yoko Akama, Joyce Yee, the reviewers, and the Editor-in-Chief for their valuable insights and comments. We also thank Louisa Richards, Dr. Yong-Ki Hong, and Tayzar Lin for helping us run the project.

Note

Notes

1 The affinity diagram, devised by Kawakita Jiro in the 1960s (also known as the KJ method), is useful for organizing a large number of ideas into their natural relationships.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joon Sang Baek

Joon Sang Baek is an Associate Professor at Yonsei University in South Korea. He also worked at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), where this study was initiated. His research areas include design for sustainability, service design, and nature-inspired design. His current interests include taking a sociotechnical approach to designing for relational qualities, collaborative services for elderly one-person households, and social biomimicry. [email protected]

Soyoung Kim

Soyoung Kim is a Doctoral Researcher in the Emotion Lab at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in Korea. She earned her B.A. at Ewha Womans University and her M.Eng at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Her doctoral research is on new uses of everyday products, and her areas of interest include sustainability and interrelations in human–product interactions. [email protected]

Taiei Harimoto

Taiei Harimoto is the Head of Product and Service Design at Proximity Designs in Yangon, Myanmar. He is a designer with experience in bringing products and services to market in challenging environments. He likes to work at the ground level with the details of design, engineering, and fabrication, and also cares deeply about team culture and development. He grew up in Japan, was educated at Stanford in California, and currently lives and works in Yangon. [email protected]