entists have dubbed this tendency “collectivism.” It’s one of the primary dimensions they use to “measure” cultures. According to a ranking based on organization theorist Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, the U.S. is the world’s most individualistic culture [ 1]. And it was American product designers, coincidentally or not, who came up with the mobile phone.

The cell phone would seem to represent a whole slough of contradictions for India. It’s a device from an individualist design context, transplanted into a fundamentally collectivist culture, that atomizes society while facilitating communication.

Those contradictions haven’t stopped Indians from signing up for the service, though—cultural ideals never stood much of a chance in the case of culture versus phone. As this article was being written, India surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s second largest mobile network. The Indian government has targeted 500 million telephone users by 2010 [ 2].

 

Culture Strain: Saying One Thing and doing Another Culture itself changes. New ideas and new technologies are

always coming down the pike, and history has borne witness to the geopolitical and technological shifts that have radically changed society in Japan, China, and Russia. At the inflection point of change is what we define as “culture strain,” where the gap between what ought to be and what is creates tension— and critical opportunities for design solutions.

Take for example the huge popularity of Indians using headsets with their mobile phones or mp3 players. It’s an expression of the desire for privacy, the wish to be able to have one’s own space, outside the stranglehold of the collective, in which to assert individual identity.

The culture strain in this case is the tension between a cultural ideal that does not value privacy (given the collectivist nature of society) and the cultural practice today of people wanting to assert their individuality, even if in a subtle way. The innocuous mp3 player or mobile phone now allows members of a family to maintain their collectively/hier-archically determined entertainment routine while each person indulges his or her own entertainment wish list in a way that

is only minimally in your face.

The critical disjuncture where tension is strongest between cultural ideals and cultural practice is where designers can find ideas for products people are really going to need—and use.

In a society in which cell phones are widely shared, Amar would have given anything for a more surefire way of keeping call and message logs private. If you asked Deepa, she’d want to see a more secure way of accessing text messages. And even Raju’s technologically illiterate family will soon have strong opinions on the subject—they’ll call for better authentication protocols and even an auto-delete feature for text messages.

The key question, then, is how do designers find out this stuff? How do they discover where, when, and how culture strain is occurring?

Ultimately, it’s happening inside the heads and hearts of the Amars, Deepas, and Rajus. Now in the West, when we want to find out what a target user is thinking and feeling, we trot out surveys and focus groups, in-depth interviews, observations, and talk-aloud testing. But canonical as these methods are in the industry, emerging mar-

[ 1] Allik, Jüri and Anu Realo. “ Individualism-Collectivism and Social Capital.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 35, no. 1 (2004): 29-49.

[ 2] “India Becomes 2nd Largest Mobile Market in the World.” TheHinduBusinessLine. com April, 26, 2008. < http://www.the-hindubusinessline. com/2008/04/26/sto- ries/2008042651040400 .htm>