Exploring the influence of design culture on ICT healthcare product and service design for rural China

Exploring the influence of design culture on ICT healthcare product and service design for rural China

Jiang, J.
Kandachar, P.
Freudenthal, A.

2010-10-27

Design culture is usually considered as one of the important aspects that influence designers’ decisions and actions, especially in Design for Base of the Pyramid projects including ICT Healthcare Product Design in Rural China (IHDRC). There are two research questions in this issue: what are the cultural factors and how these factors influence designers’ cultural values. This paper investigates the first question focusing on the influence of designers’ own cultural background. Based on existing models such as Hofstede’s onion model, the framework of Mohammad and Mariano and Julier’s discourse, the authors propose four dimensions that are relevant: 1) Education and skills of the designer 2) Consumption of design 3) Manufacturing of design 4) Design activities’ management and organization. After two rounds of interviews with Chinese design professors and students, 15 factors within these four dimensions were finally identified. The results show that the unconscious impact of design culture on design can be better controlled and even altered if designers and management are aware of these factors.

Design culture
ICT
heathcare
product design
Design for Base of the Pyramid
rural China

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:17ac797a-c40e-40e7-8ef8-5e7403ab5513

Conference proceedings

conference paper

(c) 2010 Jiang, J.; Kandachar, P.; Freudenthal, A.