In today’s globalizing world an increasing number of companies design products and services for overseas markets and users. Designers face the challenge of creating solutions that fulfil users’ needs, and this becomes more important as the cultural distance between them continues to grow. Unsuccessful international endeavours which resulted in market disasters have already been noted. For example, the Italian fashion company Dolce & Gabana recently made an advertisement that featured a Chinese model struggling to eat ‘the great traditional Margherita Pizza‘, by using ‘this kind of small stick-shaped tableware’- chopsticks, and many Chinese customers took cultural offense at being depicted in the caricature (Ng, Lam & Jane, 2018). As can be imagined, if designers do not carefully consider the local cultural context for which they hope to create designs, their solutions are likely to be mismatched, or perhaps even harmful to their users. To avoid such situations, rich stories about everyday experiences, shared by users, are valuable resources to help designers to develop empathic understanding of users. Contextual user research, using generative techniques, has been demonstrated to be an effective way of collecting insightful user stories and communicating them to designers in order to create meaningful solutions, and has become a recognizable part of design practice. However, most of the reported work has been with users and designers with a shared a cultural background, so that empathic understanding can be built on a tacit shared cultural basis. When conducting contextual studies with a cross cultural dimension, we found the problem to be twofold: first, these tools and techniques, when employed in user research, sometimes failed to facilitate social interactions or bring out expressions of users, due to mismatches with cultural inclinations. Second, designers found it difficult to empathise with the individual aspects of user insights (such as quotes and anecdotes) from a culture they had little experience with. This thesis focuses on conducting contextual user research in a cross-cultural setting. It investigates ways of supporting users in telling rich and relevant stories, and designers in building empathic understanding (the design goal of this thesis). By investigating the issues mentioned above – a framework will be proposed, various tools and techniques to support users and designers will be created. A new and rewarding process for conducting intercultural contextual user research, called Cultura, will be developed at the end of the research.. ... Read more

Cultural sensitivity is an important issue in design and not only about dealing with cultural diversity, but also about designing for cultural dilemmas that are related to multi-cultural contexts. This paper is concerned with cultural sensitivity and presents students’ perspectives, which were obtained through workshops. For this aim at first workshops on cultural sensitivity in design were briefly introduced. Then the last workshop, which was performed in Kish Island (Iran) at University of Tehran, was explained and some design results were presented through illustration. 70 design students with different backgrounds and nationalities participated. In order to obtain the students’ perspectives, an online questionnaire was sent to them. The mix of open and closed questions was related to students’ learning experiences. The results were categorised into five themes that arose from the open questions. The findings indicate that students had a fruitful experience in the workshop and obtained a large amount of knowledge and experience regarding cultural sensitivity, not only through the workshop approach and teaching style, but also through the international character and its socials aspects. ... Read more

Designing successful products and services that people like, requires an understanding of the context and the aspirations of those people. Over the past decade, a range of methods has been developed to help designers gain such empathy. These have worked well when designer and target user share a cultural context. However, designers often find it difficult to empathize with the user insights of individuals from a culture beyond their first-hand experience. To help designers step beyond this limitation, those user insights need to be placed in a larger understanding of the cultural context. In this paper, we present Cultura: a toolkit that uses nine cultural aspects based on cultural models, informing designers about user insights in a broader cultural context. The toolkit was evaluated in design sessions with four design teams. The findings indicate that Cultura provides inspiration and motivation for designers to gain empathic insights into users beyond their own cultural boundaries and to make effective designs for people. ... Read more

The value of understanding user needs has been recognized by industry, and user research methods have become an accepted part of industrial design practice. These techniques were originally developed and tested for Western markets, with participants from Western cultures. More recently, companies developing goods and services for the Chinese market realize that these goods have to fit the needs of Chinese users. Like the products, the techniques for involving participants in research may also need to be adjusted. Many of the current techniques make use of social interaction forms that are more common in the West than in China. In this paper, we describe our experiences with applying contextmapping, a well-documented set of generative user research techniques, critically review the techniques using cultural theories, present modifications of the techniques, and evaluate these modified techniques in the field with a commercial design context. We discuss how cultural parameters are used to help understand local social interactions. The results show that the modified techniques fitting the local culture made generative user research successful in China. ... Read more

Contextmapping - a set of generative design techniques, used by designers to understand the context of their intended users - has been used successfully over a decade with Western participants, both in practice as well as in design education. However, for East Asian participants, the techniques are found not well attuned to their cultural norms and values. For example, in comparison with Western
participants, many Asian participants tend to be more modest in expressing their feelings, which requires more supports in contextmapping sessions. In this explorative study we compared differences and commonalities regarding the understanding and application of contextmapping techniques among four groups: East Asian design students (from China and South Korea), an international group of design students (from Europe and America), and two groups of design students from the Netherlands,
where the techniques have been developed. In this paper we discuss their behaviour and reflect on four identified culture respective strengths useful for learning and using contextmapping: creativity, autonomy, sensitivity, and effort. Some of the techniques’ characteristics are found to fit better with either Western or East Asian cultures, and could be modified to better accommodate the participants’ cultural preferences. ... Read more

The aim of this paper is to discuss the importance of sensitivity for cultural aspects of design, in design education. This relates to the cultural context of the intended users, as well as to the cultural context of design students and design educators. In both cases sensitivity for cultural diversity is a prerequisite for a success.

The paper starts by framing what we mean with cultural diversity, emphasizing on the sensitivity of the topic itself, elaborating on the thin line between stereotyping and acknowledging patterns and nuances. Next, we describe our experiences with two design courses addressing specifically the cultural context in design (by the design brief) and in design education (by organising a design course in an international setting). The paper concludes on the themes that are relevant for cultural sensitivity
in design education, and reflects on the overall insights that need to be further developed. ... Read more