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Does Culture Matter for Product Design?
Huawei from China is also huge around the world!
I agree in that designers
need to be trained and educated in a global way. Designers with a greater
understanding of cultures and the nuances behind them can create better and more
meaningful products. At the same time, it will create more empathy and more
likely that a product will be accepted. I believe that part of
the solution, for larger companies that do not have design offices in markets
where they sale, is to adopt a glocalization design method. This could allow
for the design vision to be from the headquarters and the localization to be
done by a smaller group of designers from the new market.
human interface design has been replaced by interference design which is made to monetize humans... which by the way are the only PRODUCTS in modern technology design...
next bright idea from California technobankers please.;)
facebook, google, adobe and apple are all now about packaging humans... not products... any pieces of metal or code are just "platforms" for the harvesting of the human by product from using digital technologies... data.
Apple is one of the few companies who has overcome this to a degree, mainly through the sheer will-power of Steve Jobs and his people on the ground in China. If the CEO won't push for it, it won't happen unless a designer is willing and able to head product development and interfacing with China, and most are not because it's not as fun as designing stuff.
Apple so far has been wise enough to periodically leverage each progressively better tier of increasing volumes to get R&D leverage and do things no one else can (mill metal devices), but so far they've been the only one on a global, huge scale to do so.
The ODM model also ruins brands. How the heck can I trust a brand if different products of theirs are made by completely different manufacturers and their products aren't even consistent with each other? Parts may be cheap and shoddy. A shopper has almost no way to know if the $300 blender will actually be better and last longer than the $30 one, it just looks more high end but it's a crapshoot. ODMs have no stake in brands and little motivation to do anything more that crank more of the same out as fast as possible. Until such approaches to product creation change, culture will be very diluted for most new products that are created.
With a healthy social ego intact one would think (hope?) that cultures in genral would take new ideas/designs more with a grain of salt than with the seeming reckless abondon that is presented here.
Perhaps then find areas of the world that are not in the path of technology or the information super-highway, just out of cell range, and then tell me your findings....
My point is the image may look very similar at first glance to the untrained eye, but look closer and you find the influence of Korean culture. You will not find that variety and thickness of floor mats in a department store in the UK for example. These details may seem trivial, but it is a fundamental reflection of the influence of culture on the design of bedding and house wear.
The point is that, if we look closer, it might be that culture is indeed at the centre of design, but it’s the presentation of the product that seems generic and unchanging in the department store context.
1. Perhaps question the anthropological equivalence of culture with ethnicity. For me, it is helpful to think of place, philosophically, as a condition of experience, and culture as shared experience/ place or activity as you describe. This allows me to consider corporate culture, youth culture, DIY culture etc, as well as national cultures.
2. The suspicion a Western viewpoint carries can be reversed or neutralized in studying Western instances where 'place' matters. For example, the promotion of the Chrysler 200 as "imported from Detroit." Can we speak of the West having a culture....certainly.
3. Finally, we can think about place (shared experience, culture, activity) as inspiring a product or as the site of production or as a consequence of design....that puts a culture/product on the global map of exchange. The question of place/culture exceeds design inspiration or need because of its symbolic force.
The lack of cultural variation in departmental stores, the role of technology and universality, activity centered design, primacy of user experience......all these considerations present questions I hope to further explore. Thank you for this conversation.
A very interesting topic, indeed.
I think most of the electronics and houseware are not a subject of cultural influence. Small variations or adaptation to specific cultures can be done on the interface/software (when present), or in their adds.
I think we're talking about the obvious effect of standardization, and the ease of transportation and communication, these very important globalisation vectors of the latest century.
There are still some industries that are directly influenced by culture, as well as geographical conditions: clothes industry, for example. Clothes are not just tools, they are means of social interaction.
That's why, a woman wearing a pink sari will look odd in Nike sport shoes.
A culture or language provides one with a whole different perception on life, giving different meaning and experience to the utilitarian features of an artifact. I recommend Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, Krippendorff and Shove's 'Design of everyday life' as a nice start of your quest. Contact me if you like.
How much should culture matter for product design?
Depends on
1. How does user create the need (activity, tasks, process, ...) in the culture?
2. How would the user want the positive outcome (influence, impact, solution, ...) brought by the product?
For example, Asian steam food, cook rice, keep warm after cooking, cook soup, boil food, ... with pot and stove, in old days. Modern way, it is convenience and the needs of the electrical appliances that does all the same activities, which created the culture. Once, we use rice cooker to do those activities. Then, from the feedback of user, we have the modern rice cooker & steamer in one!
Suggest even more so with the interconnected way in which both people and information is shared/consumed across the world every second of every day.
rgds,
Dan
After reading through your tightly constructed column I'm left with nothing to pick on although I do see a hole or two but that may be entirely due to my own perspective and experience. In response to your question, here is what I have seen:
1. One can cluster types of goods in consumer electronics, home appliances, communication devices across socioeconomic and geographical disparities as 'modern tech' - regardless of income, styling preferences and choices are similar. As you debate within your article whether this is good or bad, imho it only supports that in this area, the activity does indeed supersede the culture. I think primarily due to these product categories not actually being part of any specific culture or region's heritage but for the most part, the majority of these goods have emerged if not in our own lifetimes then within a generation or two. One could say its simply a matter of the rate of diffusion across the world but the world as a whole has been introduced to all of these artifacts in one era.
2. In my experience what I've seen is that when there is indeed a driver for significant difference in product design, it seems to emerge from conditions of resource scarcity or abundance in the environment. That is, putting the activity itself (say washing clothes or using the phone) aside (common across humanity) the environmental conditions often drive the need for vastly different design criteria or specifications. Examples of such are variations in power supply, water quality or supply, prepaid airtime as a finite resource, harsher environments or bad infrastructure - while not "culture" per se, they do tend to be localized but can be clustered across global regions however. This would be a critical driver in addition to your Activity based design approach, imho, once we step out of the legacy infrastructural systems of the highly industrialized nations.
Thanks for bringing this up, there's more as I stop and reflect further on your words but enough for this comment, I'll get my own blog and write again.
Best,
Niti