Over the summer, I had the opportunity to do contract work for a Fortune 500 company. I was very quickly oriented to their values and corresponding design implications thanks to a very robust, 70+ page style guide and accompanying website. …

This paper from 2004 investigates methods of cultural modeling for the purposes of designing usable interfaces on an international scale. …

This is amazing!

Ruth Mirams is a consultant for PwC Australia Indigenous Consulting. She gave an important talk at UX Australia 2016 about considerations when co-designing with indigenous communities. She begins the talk by acknowledging how she is not indigenous, but her work with an indigenous team has been incredibly valuable to…

Excerpts and Insights from Part II: The Ontological Reorientation of Design Starting from the local histories in some corners of Europe, the journey evolved into a “global design.” Is it possible to reorient such a tradition and to redirect the journey into an altogether different direction? Is this what the…

Google Arts and Culture has a repository of experiments that bring arts & culture and emerging technologies together to create incredible interactions. Of note for my purposes: Art Palette (code is open source!)

This is a living document; feedback more than welcome!! Final objective Ultimately, what I’d like to create is a tool, vocabulary, or more accessible framework for materializing cultural values in the design of digital spaces, in order to facilitate a tangible translation of cultural values. …

Interesting tidbits — Singh et al’s 2003 framework has been verified across cultures. America and China are essentially opposites across cultural metrics for websites. The only longitudinal study in the review was conducted by Robbins and Stylianou [2009]. The authors compared the exposure of cultural values in ninety company websites from twenty-two countries…

I am of European ancestry, but my cultural identity is more complex. I grew up on Maui in Hawaii, a place with no ethnic majority, with a childhood immersed in indigenous arts and language. I spent a significant portion of my adult life in Japan, where I worked as a…