Reflection3

The book I read is Cross-cultural Design, from A Book Apart, written by Apkem, S. It focuses on how to make a design fit into varieties of cultures. The author uses many examples of cross-culture design to show the central thinking he wants to share.

I chose this book because the accelerated development of the internet and globalization make it tough to focus on one culture to design. Many successful products in one area are challenging to achieve success in another place, even if the company has tried to adjust according to cultural changes. Usually, people are conscious of adjusting design according to different cultures, but it is not easy to integrate innovation into a new culture. Therefore, I am full of curiosity about how to adjust the design according to different cultures properly.

This book gave me a lot of inspiration. For example, I was very touched when the author talked about how to present multi-culture design. The idea of integrating the product itself into another cultural habit should not be arrogant and let the designer understand how to integrate it, but to start with the details of the culture to understand the different patterns of different cultures. The author enumerates some typical cases of diverse cultures in space, image, color, and type explicitly. I can feel that he believes the cross-cultural design is not carried out by using preconceived cultural understanding with bias but by constantly observing and summarizing the cultural habits obtained from the use to promote the design. I remember that in 2018, Dolce & Gabbana, an Italian luxury brand, produced an advertising video that tried to combine traditional Chinese culture and classic Italian food. They used what they thought of the image of China, some features of extreme prejudice and racial discrimination to produce a promotional video that they thought would attract Chinese consumers and bring more attention to their Shanghai show. This also reminds me of the way we did the initial research. Not only for cross-cultural design, but I can also now understand why any design should be in a zero state at the beginning and regain a complete understanding of the relevant objects of the design without any additional cognition. In fact, we cannot perceive our own cognitive biases for a lot of time, and this kind of investigation from zero can use our rationality to perceive things, instead of using the consciousness that has been influenced by culture, so that we can genuinely realize the critical point of the matter.

Another point that gave me a lot of inspiration is how to get the honest test feedback of cross-cultural users. The book says using people from the local culture to participate in it to get relevant feedback better. But for some cultures, it is more difficult to ask people to make suggestions or opinions directly. In this case, the feedback obtained may not be the most important. Things become worse when you put the participants in an environment similar to a formal interview that interferes with direct feedback of their inner thoughts. In response to this, the author proposed The Bollywood Technique. In this way, when the participants are placed under some specific plots, they will naturally share their dissatisfaction and opinions during the experience. These are efficient feedbacks. I think this also applies to any design. Thus, I try to give the participants a background when doing our climate project prototype testing. This method helped me get some more interesting insights from the participants. This background makes the participants focus on the story's content so that when they use our prototype, product problems are particularly obvious in this background. The feedback obtained at this time is precious.

In fact, there are really many gains from this book, such as the cultural dimension of Hofstede, how to make assumptions, how to strengthen your cross-cultural design abilities, etc. Overall, I highly recommend this book. It is a book that is worth reading whether it is designing or cross-cultural design. And he integrates design thinking into cases or specific examples to discuss, which makes it easier for readers to internalize what is abstract into their own ideas. Please don’t miss the book!