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Columns

Does Culture Matter for Product Design?

By Don Norman - January 9, 2012

Figure 1

Once upon a time, when I visited other countries, I would head to the department stores so I could experience the wide cultural variations in such things as cookware, cutlery and tools for crafts and gardening. Today, I seldom do this anymore because all the stores look the same. Rice cookers and woks may have originated in Japan and China, but today they can be found in kitchen appliance stores all over the world. Italian, German and American appliances are for sale in Asia. Asian appliances are for sale in Italy, Germany and America. The country of design and manufacture no longer matters much. A television set, automobile, mobile phone, camera or refrigerator looks the same whether made in Asia, North America or Europe.

I have a collection of photos taken around the world of stores, restaurants and street scenes. I sometimes use them in my lectures, asking the audience to state where the picture was taken. People respond with great confidence, but they are invariably wrong. Why? In what city—or country—was the photograph in Figure 1 taken? It could be anywhere. I can find store displays similar to that shown in Figure 1 in Asia, Europe or the United States. Even the language visible in my photographs provides surprisingly little information: Signs in Chinese, English, French, Korean or German are displayed throughout the world. One street scene from Hong Kong shows less Chinese characters than pictures I have taken in San Francisco, New York or London: most people judge the photos to be from Western Europe. Where did Figure 1 come from? A department store in Daejeon, South Korea.

The same lack of diversity extends to the training of designers. When I visit the top design schools across the world, I find that their curricula and methods are similar. I find more differences in the curricula of schools within a country than between the United States, Hong Kong, Korea, England and the Netherlands.You can see this in mobile phones. Traditional phones varied in size and appearance across the world, so that phones for teen-age Japanese girls were different than ones for Japanese salarymen, which in turn were different than the Blackberry loved by Western business and financial workers. But all the phones were similar in the features they provided and the way they operated. Today, with the advent of smartphones, there are only three major manufacturers of the operating systems: Google (Android), Apple (iOS) and Microsoft (Windows Phone). The iPhone and iPad are unchanged to reflect culture except for language, yet they are incredibly popular all around the world. Android phones are available from handset providers in Europe, Asia and the United States (the most popular phones come from Korea and Taiwan). These are all independent of culture. The same story applies for phones running Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.5 and 8: they are independent of culture whether the handset comes from Europe or Asia.

Does culture matter for product design? The examples I just talked about would seem to indicate that for the world of mass-produced products—that is, for the world of industrial design—culture might be far less important than we might have expected. Is this really true, and if so, is this a positive or negative finding?

Implications for Design

A few decades ago, I believed that cultural differences were fundamental. Moreover, they were exciting and interesting. Today, I believe that cultural differences are still just as fundamental and exciting but they primarily exist in governing social interaction, the types of foods that are eaten and stylistic preferences. Modern products are designed to support particular activities, so that it is the activity itself that controls how they should be designed and used. Traditional activities are heavily determined by culture, but modern office practices, manufacturing, communication, financial accounts and transportation are dominated by the technology used to accomplish them, or in the cases of financial accounts, by world-wide standards intended to make transactions and accounting uniform. As a result, many of our activities are determined by the technologies we use, such as the automobile, computer, cellphone, train or airplane, or by the need to interact smoothly with other countries and cultures across the world. Once the technology determines the activity, the influence of culture dissipates.

These observations have important implications for design. Modern products are driven by technology, which in turn dictates the activity. Designers talk a lot about Human-Centered Design where it is important to design for the needs of the person. Well, this doesn't work when the goal is millions of people all across the world. Computers and software, phones and applications, automobiles, kitchen appliances and housewares are intended for consumption by millions. Human-Centered Design can no longer apply: what does it mean to discover the precise needs of millions of people? Instead, I have argued for Activity-Centered Design, where the activity dictates the design. (See my papers on this topic referenced at the end of this essay.)

Technology dictates the activity. In turn, the activity dictates the design. When the design is appropriate for the technology, people accept it, regardless of culture. Consider musical instruments as a good example. Many are difficult to learn, such as the violin that requires an awkward, injury-prone posture and hand configuration. Consider the awkward fingering of musical instruments across the world. People learn these with incredible skill, not because they fit the body, but because the designs seem quite appropriate to the technology, and therefore to the activity.

There are regional differences. Food and eating provide dramatic contrasts with different cultures adopting very different behavior. Some use silverware, some chopsticks, and some use fingers or bread. Some cultures prefer more ornamentation than others, so that, for example, products intended for East Asia display decorative scrolls and artwork. When the same products are sold elsewhere in the world, they are often identical except for the removal of the ornamentation. Style differences? Yes. Fundamental differences? No.

People drive very differently in different parts of the world, from safety-conscious, law-abiding drivers in the United States, Japan, and parts of Europe, to the free-wheeling driving style of other countries, where the death and injury rates soar. But the design and control of the cars themselves are still done the same way, whether the cars are used in Delhi or Milan, London or Saigon.

The ways in which people interact differs considerably around the world, so much so that the traveling businessperson is often advised to take a quick course on proper etiquette for the countries to be visited. Nonetheless, the technologies that support the interaction are the same: telephones, e-mail and text messages, business cards, and the importance of business meals. Behavior differs, but the products are similar.

Responses From the Design Community

I posted an early version of the above argument to the e-mail discussion list "PhD-Design." I received an enormous number of responses, many of which were extremely long, thoughtful and detailed.

Many of the objections to my conclusions came from the design research community. This community has been heavily influenced by anthropology, and one of their core beliefs is that understanding and respecting cultural differences is of critical importance. Peoples' activities are highly determined by culture, they argued, so that even when people use similar products, they create very different experiences out of them. The design researchers pointed out that different people used the same products in many different ways, attempting to fit them into their real needs. If designers could convince companies to focus upon what people actually do with the products available to them, they could produce products better attuned to real needs.

One set of critiques pointed out that although the products might be similar, there often were variations tuned to cultural sensitivities. Moreover, if I were to go into homes and observe how the products were used, I would detect great variability in how they were used and the kinds of modifications (workarounds) people construct to make the products fit their needs.

A more forceful critique emphasized that my interpretations reflect my very Western, science- and business-based education and background. Thus, as François Nsenga explained in a long, thoughtful note, because of my "place and context of up-bringing, education, professional practice, and socialization, together with the resultant mindset, all these cultural factors do not predispose" me to understand the "cultural reality of concern." Those who come from very different cultural backgrounds see the phenomena quite differently. This critique ended by pointing out that "no one knows as yet the exact amount and extent of potential harmful and detrimental effects caused by 'homogenization' of artifacts, neither at the individual level, nor at levels of regions and of the entire planet." In other words, the loss of cultural diversity should be compared with the loss of biological diversity.

Conclusion

I submit that my argument for the lack of cultural diversity in both mass-produced products and the education of industrial designers is accurate, but it can lead to two different interpretations.

One is that standardization of many aspects of life across the different cultures of the world is valuable. It brings all the peoples of the earth together, enabling better interaction, communications and understanding. This is the traditional Western, technological view of the role of technology, industrialization, and the future.

A second interpretation is that the homogenization is disturbing. It diminishes the richness of life, the importance of historical roots, ritual and custom. Cultural diversity is a powerful, positive influence and we, as responsible designers, should pay much attention to how people behave in their environments, supporting the richness of cultural diversity. It is not the product that is important: it is how it is used, in context.

Design education may be the same across the world because many design professors are trained in the same few universities across the world. They all belong to what one might call "the design-education establishment" of people who share similar design philosophies, heavily influenced by western traditions of mass-production and the requirements of large, multinational firms. This is especially true at the PhD level, given the limited number of institutions offering PhDs in design.

It is important to distinguish mass-produced, industrial design from crafts. Crafts reflect centuries or millennia of customs and behavior, and as a result, items produced by craftspeople are apt to be close fits to the demands of the culture. But the subtitle of the marvelous book by Ranjan and Ranjan of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, Crafts of India: Handmade in India, indicates the reason for this distinction. The critical word is "Handmade." Handmade crafts reflect the needs of the people for whom they are crafted. Mass-produced products are intended for use by millions of people around the world.

But just because design training is similar across the world does not mean that the results should be the same. After all, modern design education emphasizes the need to design for the needs of people. Students are increasingly being trained in observational skills, design research methods, and rapid prototyping and refinement. These could be considered to be refinements on the informal ways by which people have refined craft products over the millennia. These methods should enhance sensitivity to cultural variations and people's needs.

Note that the arguments of this essay are specifically relevant to industrial and interaction designers. So even were one to accept that the impact of culture upon mass-produced products is minimal, other areas of design are apt to be far more sensitive to culture. Because social interaction is still the major source of cultural variation, I would expect service design to vary considerably from culture to culture. As social networks pervade the communication and internet space, they too will vary with culture. Other areas of design will have their own special sensitivities to culture.

Finally, how much of this argument derives from my own cultural biases? I've been educated in the West with a technical and scientific education. I've been a faculty member of major research universities in departments of psychology and cognitive science, electrical engineering and computer science, and industrial design. My experiences in business include positions as senior executive at large, multinational consumer electronic companies. Would someone with a very different background and education have reached the same conclusions?

I conclude with the same question with which I started: How much should culture matter for product design?

References:

Norman, D. A. (2005). Human-centered design considered harmful. Interactions, 12(4), 14-19.

Norman, D. A. (2005). HCD harmful? A clarification. From Don Norman's jnd website. http://jnd.org/dn.mss/hcd_harmful_a_clarification.html

Norman, D. A. (2006). Logic versus usage: the case for activity-centered design. Iinteractions, 13(6), 45-ff.

Ranjan, M. P., & Ranjan, A. (Eds.). (2007). Crafts of India: Handmade in India. New Delhi: Council of Handicraft Development Corporation: Office of the Development Commissioner Handicrafts, Ministry of Textiles. (The entire book is available as a PDF at http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/.)

Columns

Don Norman

Don Norman claims his goals in life are to make a significant difference, but to have fun while doing so. he has just established the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego which he intends to grow to become a major center for design with a focus on the application of human-centered design principles to complex sociotechnical systems, such as healthcare and automation. He is both a businessperson (VP at Apple, Executive at HP and a startup) and an academic (Harvard, UC San Diego, Northwestern, KAIST). As co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group he serves on company boards and helps companies make products more enjoyable, understandable, and profitable. He is an IDEO Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He gives frequent keynotes and is known for his many books including "The Design of Everyday Things," "Emotional Design," and "Living with Complexity" (which argues against simplicity), and a completely revised, updated edition of "Design of Everyday Things."

15 Comments

Maggie Guo

7 months ago

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Huawei from China is also huge around the world!

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Josue Ricardo Campos

2 years ago

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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.

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Vipul S. Chawathe

6 years ago

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I am young enough to appreciate the globalization in mass production, & I respect my more traditional elders of earlier generations who weren't online from the onset of their lives. IT just happened to happen along-with millenials- so much to establish diversity among our background. I am an engineer. Culture is an attribute of the Customer Class, to be analogous with Object Oriented paradigm. The design programme touted by universities (nah, lets just casually refer to its products as designers) have implementation defined behavior while weighing the attributes. Product strategy, imho, is the determining criteria for the exact weight of culture & such attributes. If design is to be optimized for small locale with well-known economic positioning (upper/middle/lower class), or internationalized, like the automobiles being customizable by nation specific driving trends example in the article, or globalized- one size fits all, like the schema.org vocab as opposed to domain-specific ones such as foaf & Good Relations, then its weight must be compensated by designer accordingly.
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larryr

7 years ago

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the culture IS technology.. and the medium, the machine...
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.
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Cameron Nielsen

7 years ago

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Culture does matter, but the advent and proliferation of ODM manufacturing waters down most attempts to enrich it, because ODMs promote and even collude with suppliers and partners to maintain the lowest common denominator for most meaningful variables in product design (materials, manufacturing technology, sourced parts, no innovative solutions to old problems, etc).

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.
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Tiffany

7 years ago

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An interesting question for sure and one that I am not sure is able to be answered because the term "culture" is varied and complex and does not mean the same thing to every person. I used to view culture as more of a location characterized by music, food, entertainment, and language. However, as I have gotten older and engaged in numerous conversations about how to classify culture, the more convoluted this seemingly straight-forward term has become. Culture is not just a set of practices of a certain region or strictly tied to fine arts and humanities. It is a set of shared attitudes, beliefs, and dreams; it is behavioral and dependent upon social learning; it is a classification and way to differentiate various lifestyles. The question "Does culture matter for product design?" assumes that culture is one specific thing which is perhaps why this question is not one that can be answered with unanimous consensus. I propose we start with asking "What are the forms/definitions of culture that influence product design?"
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Skip

7 years ago

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To answer the question, culture should matter as much the society that it influences and/or supports values their individual culture. Essentially freedom of choice, but I digress.....
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....
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James Self

7 years ago

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The image used is ironically quite obviously from Korea, but only obvious to a Korean or someone familiar with Korean culture. Koreans very often sleep on specially designed, thick floor mats. This is because a Korean house is designed with a special type of under floor heating call 'Un-dul' heating - under floor heating in Korean culture goes back a long way.

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 itâ€™s the presentation of the product that seems generic and unchanging in the department store context.

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Lisa

7 years ago

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An informative and thoughtful summary of a fundamental question concerning culture, perhaps also of technology. I want suggest a few possible extensions.

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.

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Razvan

7 years ago

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Hi Don,

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.

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Nick Sturkenboom

7 years ago

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Culture matters so much that even one of the posterboys of globalization, Mc Donalds, has cultural diversity in its offering. Above all, companies like Nestle are actually the biggest food manufacturers in the world and they thrive on cultural diversity.

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.
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Leonard7

7 years ago

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Does culture matter for product design? Yes.
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!
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Daniel Szuc

7 years ago

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Culture is in a constant state of change and influence which makes it all the more interesting to watch.

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

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aepxc

7 years ago

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Cultural diversity (especially NEW cultural diversity, as opposed to the mere keeping of old traditions) depends on isolation. It emerges when people try to solve the same problems without any way of knowing how others have done the same. We cannot have both diversity and interconnectedness. It is unfortunate, but we have to choose.
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Niti Bhan

7 years ago

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Hi Don,

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
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