Seminar - Meaningful Design for Global Culture

The Design Management Institute is sponsoring a series of seminars that aim to “enable design, marketing, and business professionals to bridge the design and business gap and become key drivers of organizational success.”

There is one in particular that I’d really like to attend: Meaningful Design for Global Culture by Gordon Bruce. There are two sets of dates: late April in Providence, Rhode Island, and September in San Francisco. Alas, this is pretty far away from where I live, and I have no plans to travel to the US at either of these times. (It’d be great if DMI would later publish these seminars as edited podcasts!)

Posted on February 23, 2007
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Appealing to ethnic niches

Rohit Bhargava profiles the new global cinema service Jaman. He makes an interesting observation about the most successful ethnically-focused web services, which tend to be dating or social networking sites:

The problem with [appealing to an ethnic niche] is that most of these sites are not inviting others outside a particular ethnicity to interact and learn about a culture.

Jaman, on the other hand, is focused on bringing a portion of the world’s cultural artifacts (in this case, movies) to the world, thereby encouraging cultures to explore each other. This is yet another example of a bogie — providing a common denominator (in this case, a medium: cinema) — to help explore the differences and similarities between cultures. I find it particularly interesting that for a service that is focused on cross-cultural exploration, Jaman’s site is presented exclusively in English, and seems to target the US market initially. (I imagine this will start to change once the service leaves beta.)

Posted on February 23, 2007
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What’s culture got to do with it?

Juli Ann Reynolds writes in the Tom Peters blog about the importance of aligning an organization’s culture and its strategy:

A beautifully crafted strategy can fail when the employees in various divisions within an organization clash. Logically, we think that strategy should drive behavior, but, in reality, it’s the culture—underlying norms, values, belief systems—that dictates how effectively people work together.

Culture is not just about countries; any group of people that comes together to perform any kind of human activity will in time develop an identifiable culture. Within one organization, there may be multiple cultures co-existing and co-operating.

In some cases, these groups may have different enough cultures that they require interpreters. I sometimes describe my job as “an interpreter that allows marketing people and technology people to understand each other”.

Posted on February 16, 2007
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Building IA means building local groups

Information architects of the world, unite! Writing in the ASIS&T Bulletin, Stacy Surla highlights some of the challenges that IAs around the world are facing in developing the profession’s identity. She includes comments from Jason Hobbs (South Africa), Wolf Nöding (Germany) and Javier Velasco (Chile), IAs who are leading the development of the profession in their respective parts of the world.

Stacy writes:

Face-to-face or across networks, local groups are bringing an ideal into being—a place where people can get together, drink beer and coffee, spread their deliverables out on the table, share encouragement and ideas, and plan the next Big Thing.

The IA Institute has a local groups initiative, which aims to help IAs organize events to help build a spirit of community (and identity) amongst peers. This is an important effort, I encourage you to check it out.

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Posted on February 15, 2007
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Advantages of an “alien” perspective

Inc. Magazine has an article from last May called The Thinking Man’s Outsourcing. It’s an interesting, if somewhat run-of-the mill, overview of a few companies that are outsourcing their software development overseas.

However, it includes an interesting story about Brian Reale, CEO of a business software company called Colosa. Mr. Reale outsourced his company — and himself — to La Paz, Bolivia, where he could climb mountains and hire developers for 1/8th the cost of their US counterparts.

The interesting bit is that culture shock led to the creation of a new product for the company:

Reale and [co-founder Robert] Vernon launched Colosa to build an online marketplace for insurance companies. But while overseeing that product’s creation, Reale found himself coping with really long lines. In Bolivia, “you see lines of people three or four blocks long waiting to fill out a form or get a license,” says Reale. “The Spanish word for that is tramite. We saw an opportunity to build a system to reduce tramite.”

They built this system, and it turned out to solve bigger problems for companies wanting to do business in Bolivia and beyond. They now have more than 1,000 customers in the U.S.

There are opportunities in 1) understanding there is a problem, and 2) having a viable framework to resolve the problem. Having an “alien” perspective could allow you to see problems that “locals” may not, and may provide you with frameworks that may help solve them.

Posted on February 14, 2007
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Understand cultural differences by focusing on common elements

It’s difficult to understand other cultures objectively with your own standing in the way; we are surrounded by our culture, and its biases creep into our understanding in subtle ways. This is one of the challenges that makes cross-cultural design difficult.

One method I’m exploring for studying other cultures more objectively is to focus on a single “alien” element that the other cultures (and my own) share in common, and then try to understand the ways in which they engage with this element. I call this alien element a “bogie”: it could be an icon, a tune, a concept, or any other cultural artifact that isn’t common in either culture, or an element that has been inherited from a third culture, but that must be localized to both. (I see this often when designing for Latin American audiences; many common elements of the web vocabulary — the “Home” link, for example — seem rooted in American culture, but are expected of most websites.)

This principle is beautifully illustrated in a blog post that has been circulating in the past week that features the Super Mario Bros. theme played in a variety of different musical instruments. Because these performers are all playing the same tune, and because this tune is recognizable yet also quite alien to their traditional repertories, hearing it performed wiith different instruments gives us a better understanding of the instruments, their performers’ styles, and the tune itself.

The Mario theme is a perfect cross-cultural bogie because videogame culture is primarily non-verbal and therefore travels more easily across cultural boundaries. It is also very recognizable and fun, at least to people of a certain age. (Actually, this music is more localized to an age group than to a culture.) However, the key to the viral nature of the Mario theme meme is the whimsical and slightly irreverent idea of playing videogame music with a traditional instrument. (Check out the kid with the balalaika.)

How can we apply this principle to cross-cultural design? The web doesn’t (yet) have many sacred cows to make hamburgers from, so finding our own bogies may be more difficult. We can look for a common element that is alien (yet central) to all the locales being served, and we can key our design approach to cultural responses to that one element. (For example, the “Home” page link mentioned above.) Or we could set up a design excercise with the different parties involved to introduce such an element into the design process, if only to break the ice and provide some initial understanding. The idea is to have some common element that allows the differences between the locales to surface.

Posted on February 13, 2007
Filed Under Culture, Design, Strategies | Leave a Comment

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