A Norwegian Wind Brought Design and Sustainability to UMPRUM: A Look Back at the Lecture (Part 1)

Gone are the days when design meant tinsel on a finished product. Practice is finally catching up with theory and acknowledging that design is a fundamental human activity, a way of reshaping the world around us. Unlike cold technology, however, it is interested first and foremost in the human element and in the wider context in which the resulting product will be used. By the word context we may mean the immediate space and time in which we currently find ourselves. Clearly, this so-called momentary context is only the tip of the iceberg.

Whether we are holding the latest technological sensation firmly in our palm or using public transport, we always bring along our own body and our previous life experience. This necessary “baggage” will inevitably influence how we react to the results of the design work that the gentlemen and lady designers have so painstakingly created for us. The place we were born, the number of hours spent at school desks, our job, our hobbies, but also the whole society in which we live, all influence the way we react to the world around us — so let us call these influences the wider, socio-cultural context. And these influences are, of course, as varied as life itself. No wonder, then, that designers who want to be sure that their work will not be merely an arbitrary product of intuition, but the product of a careful analysis that precedes the creative part, may be at a loss and ask: how do we take in all the aspects of context so that our work is relevant?

Although science has confirmed that the craft of design cannot do without a large dose of empathy (with which practitioners of the field are gifted), it lies beyond the extensive list of human skills to peek under the lid of the web of mutual relationships, meanings and values that make up human existence on the basis of intuitive insight alone. New methods are needed, or at least old-new ones, that could bring the tangled web of the lives of people-users at least a little closer: what is needed is systems thinking and a contextual approach.

That is one of the main watchwords of the lecture that took place on 13 October at UMPRUM. From Norway, the academics Prof. Casper Boks, Prof. Tore Gulden and Andre Liem accepted an invitation from the Czech association CZECHDESIGN. Their topics were as follows:

— The culture of design and innovation (Liem),

— Visualising complex systems — GIGA-mapping (Gulden),

— Sustainable designers, companies and users (Boks).

 

The culture of design and innovation (Liem)

Andre Liem began his lecture with two concepts that outlined how complex the problem of context is for design work. It was nothing other than understanding how culture works and what potential tools can be found in the universe of scientific methods that would help designers understand the context they are designing for. These concepts were Acculturation and the Contextual approach to design.

Acculturation

Liem illustrated acculturation with the example of how the design of hi-fi electronics has changed over the last thirty years. Whereas until recently Asian brands professed an entirely utilitarian, functional design language, in recent decades their handwriting has changed markedly. The change as such is not surprising, since the formal vocabulary of products is constantly evolving; much more interesting, however, is what influenced the change. And this is where the theory of acculturation comes in, as a concept from the social sciences that uncovers the process by which an individual or a group adopts elements of the dominant culture, or of the culture they enter as immigrants.

Let us digress for a moment and remind ourselves (briefly) what culture actually is:

Culture is a set of values, norms, rules and patterns of a given community, which manifests itself in the members of this social unit as a learned tendency, in concrete situations, to think, experience, act and behave according to established algorithms. By means of cultural patterns people cope with reality; culture ensures continuity in the development of the community and the identification of the individual with the community, and thereby the integrity of the social system is secured (Nový et al., 1996, pp. 11–12).

The emphases in the quotation above are mine; for design it is certainly significant to know that the socio-cultural context mentioned in the introduction really does influence precisely those human attributes that are essential for designers if they want to practise human-centered design, that is, design focused not on technical requirements but on human needs and goals.

In the quotation I also highlight “algorithm”, because I suspect that in the cited work the algorithm is used as a metaphor rather than as a technical term from computer science. We know that one of the properties of an algorithm is determinacy. Is it really true that human action and experience(!) can be pigeonholed into an algorithm? Of course not; not yet.

Back to acculturation. Next we heard about four strategies that immigrants can resort to when they come into contact with a new culture. The widely cited theorist John W. Berry (Berry, 2001) describes that immigrants:

1. can integrate and become part of a multicultural society, while still preserving elements of their original culture
2. We speak of assimilation when immigrants give up their original culture entirely and adopt the dominant culture of the new environment
3. Newcomers resort to the strategy of separation if they preserve their own culture and avoid the dominant culture
4. Marginalisation then means a strategy in which the immigrant “has no interest in preserving their original character and at the same time does not take part in interactions with other cultures, including the dominant one” (Matysová, 2012, p. 25)

Since acculturation presupposes a process in which at least two parties take part (a dominant and a minority group), Berry also defines the strategies that the dominant group must adopt so that immigrants have the possibility of choosing how they will join the new culture in the first place. As a mirror image, Berry uses the terms multiculturalism, melting pot, segregation, exclusion, depending on how open or closed the dominant society is towards migrants. To visualise the relationships between the strategies, I attach the following picture:

We might ask how acculturation differs from simple assimilation or cultural change. The English prefix —ac, an alternative to the Latin —ad, already suggests that this concept is concerned above all with the course of events in which two or more cultures meet, influence each other and gradually adjust their behaviour. The social science disciplines dealing with acculturation thus provide a theoretical framework that should shed light on the dynamic changes that take place precisely during migration. But what follows from this for design?

If we understand design as a creative discipline that, in a certain context, forms a new (human) meaning for an otherwise semantically neutral technology, it immediately occurs to us that acculturation is a potentially useful tool in a globalised world, where many cultures are clashing with one another at every moment.

Not to mention that migration is one of the hardest moments that can come about in the life of an individual or a group; and not only because of barriers in communication. Here design can step in for politics and remove stereotypes thanks to its capacity for empathetic communication. Let us ask: can we design social processes so as to give them more humanity where fear and xenophobia are making themselves comfortable?

Acculturation and Geert Hofstede

The lecture went on to discuss the Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede. In the 1980s Hofstede worked for the international giant IBM as a management researcher. With a good dose of luck, data on roughly 100,000 employees of local IBM branches in more than 50 countries came into his hands. These data came from questionnaires in which IBM wanted to know which values employees associated with their workplace. While the data at the level of individuals turned out to be confusing, Hofstede recognised that if he looked at the data at the level of countries, he could discern the profiles of individual cultures and how they approach these questions:

• dependence on superiors
• the need for clearly set rules and a predictable environment
• the balance between the goals of individuals and dependence on the company
•  the balance between the needs of individuals (career, money) and of social groups (cooperation, a shared living environment)

In his 1980 book Culture’s consequences, Hofstede, by applying factor analysis to the IBM data, but also to subsequent research, specified four dimensions related to the attitudes and values of cultures (Willerton, p. 102):

1. Masculinity/femininity — cultures can be divided according to the qualities they value most. Some prefer masculine attributes, such as performance orientation, independence and competitiveness, others place emphasis on feminine qualities, for example cooperation. Japan in particular considers masculine qualities very important, whereas Sweden and Denmark value feminine qualities. The United Kingdom belongs among the masculine-oriented countries.

2. Power distance — this dimension points to a preference for hierarchical or, on the contrary, egalitarian relationships. Central and South American countries (e.g. Venezuela) place emphasis on respecting hierarchy, whereas Denmark and Israel belong among the egalitarian countries. Great Britain ranks rather among the egalitarian countries.

3. Uncertainty avoidance — this dimension concerns attitudes towards uncertainty and risk. Greece, Portugal and Japan have a strong tendency to prefer certainty, so risky behaviour tends not to be approved of, while Denmark has no problem “tolerating” uncertainty.

4. Individualism/collectivism — here personal decisions come into play, marriage for example. In individualist cultures the individual makes them for themselves, whereas in collectivist cultures the decision of the wider social group, such as the family, carries more weight. South American and many Asian countries (Pakistan, Taiwan, Thailand) belong among the thoroughly collectivist cultures, whereas Great Britain and the United States of America are unambiguously individualist.

After further collecting and analysing data, Hofstede proposed a fifth dimension in addition to these, which he originally called Confucian work dynamism (WU) and later, in 2001 (WU), renamed long-term orientation. It is essentially a description of work ethic and of human qualities that are oriented either towards goals in the more distant future or towards short-term gains.

* * *

Acculturation and theories of culture define and uncover for us mechanisms that help us grasp something as complex as human existence and coexistence with the surrounding environment. Knowing the terminology gives us a linguistic apparatus with which we can think about the problem. But a designer needs more. Even though theory is an integral part of any serious practice, the purpose of these points of the lecture was surely to whet our appetite for applicable methods that contemporary design practice is finally beginning to use on a massive scale. Whether this is driven by a pure interest in how to improve people’s lives, or by a sort of opportunistic jumping on the bandwagon of a currently popular term, is beside the point. What matters is that we have here approach(es) to design that make it possible to obtain relevant data about the people, and their lives, who are the target group of a designer’s next project. Andre Liem brought slides to Prague in which he introduced one of the options for an approach to design that is indispensable for today’s globalised, multicultural world and for the complex relationships between humans, technology and nature: he devoted the second part of his lecture to Contextual design.

Contextual design

It is interesting to recall that both contextual design and, for instance, participatory design originally arose as approaches applied to the design of information systems. I can vividly imagine the 1970s or 1980s, when technocrats and mathematically minded programmers ruled the IT sector; in retrospect it may seem absurd that precisely these people should design user-friendly systems (as a curiosity I can add that just recently I heard a university student from the Czech Technical University relishing the fact that he works as a programmer because it does not require communicating with people). The fact is that before the arrival of the world’s largest global network — the Internet — computers and the associated IT systems were an expensive and sophisticated pastime; letting designers near them seemed a dangerous idea.

It is no coincidence that participatory design, as a collaboration between creators and users on the final version of a product, arose in the Scandinavian countries, which traditionally have a positive relationship to design. Scandinavians thus enjoyed well-designed information technologies “somewhat” earlier than the rest of us. Participatory design, however, is just one of the ways to implement so-called human-centered design into design work, in other words, design centred on the human being.

Another is contextual design. It is a structured, human-centred design process that borrows methods from the social sciences: anthropology, sociology and psychology. The main philosophy of contextual design is the assumption that design exists in a context that will only rarely be accessible to the designer in an exhaustive way. Contextual design provides the designer with methods that force them to think about a design problem as a system of interconnected visible and hidden relations.

Besides the by now well-established design tools in the form of personas and scenarios contextual design sets off in the direction of so-called models. When I personally hear the word “model” in connection with design, Don Norman and his description of mental and conceptual models come to mind: the idea of how a certain thing works will differ considerably between designer and user; that is why Norman says that the closer the user’s mental model comes to the conceptual one, the better the user will be able to make full use of the potential of the product or service being designed.

Mental models are originally a theoretical concept from cognitive psychology; they certainly do not provide methods for ensuring that the mental models of user and designer match as closely as possible. This is where contextual design comes in, with its work models, which, through visualisation, try:

• to capture the user’s interactions during their activity,
• to create a so-called flow model, in which these interactions are marked
• a cultural model, in which the constraints arising from the culture or policy of the given company (or state) are indicated
• a sequence model, which analyses the individual steps of the user’s activity
• a physical model, which finally also includes the context of the physical environment in which the interactions will take place

I will leave a concrete analysis of these work models for next time, however, since in their function they touch on what the second speaker had prepared for the audience within the walls of UMPRUM. In the second part of the article I will talk about a newly emerging technique for visualising the complex relationships between context and user — GIGA-mapping.