Introduction
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 language educator and studied traditional performance arts and literature in my non-working hours. My underlying mission was to cultivate my students’ receptors for discovering beauty in the differences between their culture and others they might encounter.
Nearly two years ago, I decided to move to Pittsburgh, a city in a region I’ve never even visited before, to discover how I might use my talents to do more for the world. Repatriating and living in the mainland US extensively for the first time has been an estranging process. Indigenous culture is extremely important to me, but I’m in one of the world’s most demanding design programs, which limits the degree to which I can enmesh myself with the local community. But even without that limitation, Pittsburgh is the first place I’ve lived where indigenous culture is not immediately visible.
My program at Carnegie Mellon advocates for indigenous wisdom as a pillar of Transition Design, an important new branch of design practice intended to address the world’s most critical and complex systemic issues. When it comes to the practical arm of our course, we’ve had occasional ability to imbue our work with our own cultural backgrounds. But for most briefs, those intended to give us a sense of what to expect in the working world designing for broad audiences, culture seems a much less relevant factor. Understandably, creating a program that seeks to foster designers equipped to handle critical global needs, while still making them employable in the current state of industry, is a challenging balance to strike.
This environment has made me more conscious of the moments when my cultural identity is reflected in the media I consume. Considering the primary way I communicate with my inner circle is through social media, I rely on content to convey senses of home. This made me realize that if social media were devoid of that precious local content, I would rarely encounter my culture on a daily basis. Considering the web’s power to bring the world to you, this seems a shame. Culture shouldn’t be something you have to seek.
This got me asking some questions:
If we are to leverage indigenous wisdom to solve our world’s most pressing problems, couldn’t encounters with indigeneity start in the digital space, where many of us spend our lives? And if so, how can first touches with indigeneity be presented authentically in digital form? Does it have to be sought intentionally?
In what ways might place-based digital culture be cultivated without full dependence on content? What work is already being done to explore cultural factors in digital design?
Where can indigeneity and multiculturalism be found in digital design?
This semester is a chance to explore the landscape of work being done by HCI scholars, design theorists, indigenous design leaders, and multicultural design practitioners, and hopefully identify opportunities to lend visibility or augment efforts to bring cultural value-based digital design to global prominence.
