• Home
• About

Welcome to Design Across Cultures

This blog aims to explore the issues that arise when members of one culture design artifacts for use by members of another culture. In particular, I’m going to focus on cross-cultural web design practices. However, I also want to highlight cross-cultural design issues in other disciplines; I believe there is much for us to learn from other fields.

The explosion in trans-national collaborative work that has happened in the past 10 years has been well documented in books such as Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. The popularization of the Internet has been one of the primary causes of this phenomenon, and it is therefore natural that web design become one of the first practices to be outsourced abroad.

Much of the writing I’ve come across on cross-cultural web design has been focused on content and visual design issues; things such as content management in multiple languages, selection of appropriate (culturally relevant) imagery and iconography, and culturally sensitive color selection have been well covered elsewhere. In particular, John Yunker’s excellent Beyond Borders book, and his blog Global by Design, are great resources for these sort of issues.

I’m more interested in how different cultural perspectives affect design fundamentals, including site design strategies, tone, point of view, politics (dangerous, I know!), and how they affect information architecture and the overall user experience.

A bit about me and why I care about this topic

My name is Jorge Arango, and I’m a web designer and information architect based in Panama (Central America). I’ve been building websites since 1995. (More about me on my personal blog.)

I became interested in cross-cultural issues in 2002. At that time I was based in the US, and my team was managing the rollout of a large, trans-national multi-language website for a global (European) telecommunications company. We were attempting to integrate a myriad different country-specific websites into a single global site, within a predetermined site structure. As could be expected, we found a lot of resistance from folks in different countries. Some insisted that they absolutely needed to manage their sites locally; we at headquarters “just didn’t get it”.

It seemed to me there had to be a way to balance the need to have a centrally managed infrastructure with some degree of local control over the site structure and presentation. The questions were “how much control?” and “how can we actually do this?” I looked around but couldn’t find many answers, though I was sure many other folks must have been going through the same pains.

By late 2004 I had left this company to manage my own consultancy back in Panama. While I continued researching these cross-cultural web design issues on my own, my day-to-day job in Panama was focused on more local design challenges.

Then Lou Rosenfeld posted a note on his blog about folks researching “global IA”. This led me to get in touch with Livia Labate and Peter Van Dijck, who were also thinking about these issues. Livia, Peter and I gave a leadership seminar about Global IA at the 2005 IA Summit in Montreal, which was very well received. There seemed to be a lot of interest in the IA community for research into these issues! Peter and I (Liv had started a new job in the meantime, and her new responsibilities precluded her continued involvement in the project) then did a second presentation at the 2005 IA Retreat in New York. Again, we heard from folks who were facing these issues in their day-to-day work.

In the meantime, I started getting jobs from overseas clients. Most of these cross-cultural design issues, which in the past three years had been a fascinating—albeit theoretical—research project, started again to have relevance to my day-to-day work… from a completely different perspective.

Doing outsourced design work across cultures isn’t easy; I believe the only reason that I can do it somewhat effectively is that I’ve actually spent a lot of time living in different places and absorbing aspects of their cultures. However, I do believe that some heuristics can be learned that can make the process smoother; at least come to “know what we don’t know”. These obstacles and opportunities—and the tools at our disposal to navigate them—are what I hope to explore in this site.

Posted on September 28, 2006
Filed Under Meta |

Comments