Designers approach design on the basis of “personal experience, knowledge and ideas derived from a particular socio-cultural background,” projecting onto the design through the “plane of their cultural filter.”

“Whether they share the same cultural origin or are foreign to that culture, the designer is required to be sensitive to the user’s culture and to be able to view it through the user’s cultural filter plane” [ 7].

Acquiring this requisite sensitivity is not easy. While conceptually the relevancy of culture and associated considerations in design are well understood— “technology is not a good traveler unless it is culturally calibrated” [ 7]—there still remains a need for tools in assisting designers in understanding and dealing with these sorts of considerations in informing design. “There is a notable lack of research on how culture and society affect technological decisions” [ 8]. The need is pressing, especially as the reach of our efforts as designers is extending beyond a work or workplace focus into differing domains and within communities and constituencies that are often not culturally reflective of “us,” which is becoming more the case than not.

As Churchill notes, the “us”,
product/technology designers,
are most often male. Further,
I would add that these males
are most often white, most
likely are members of a higher
socioeconomic status, and to
further provoke, identify as
heterosexual. Thus, expanding
on Elizabeth’s thoughts, design
decisions, while I am sure well
intended, will most likely be
made through “planes” aligned
and reflective of this charac-
terization— male, white, het-
erosexual, etc. However, if we
are to realize our future of fully
imparting the tools to affect the
future to the whole of society as
Genevieve Bell postulates as our
mission, Houston, we’ve truly
got a problem.

appropriate set of assumptions, notions, and understandings that could better align with the constructs, values, and motives offered by the given design dilemma. This is especially of import in our deeper dives.

Conceptually, the power of a lens challenges the designer to consider the design activity from a different perspective. This could render transparent those conceptions that could more adequately underpin decision-making throughout the entire design lifecycle—from problem space identification and exploration to solution implementation. Moreover, the lens equips the designer with the ability to see through the end user’s eyes (e.g. their cultural filter), bridging gaps between the designer’s perception and the end user’s perception— making visible those things that may be clouding a design response. Which I often feel is the case in the response of the HCI community to the domestic HIV crisis.

[ 7] Shen, S, Woolley, M., and Prior, S. “Towards Culture-centred Design.” Interacting with Computers 18 (2006).

[ 8] Tedre, M., Sutinen, E., Kähkönen, E., and Kommers, P. “Ethnocomputing: ICT in cultural and social con-text.” Communications of the ACM 49, 1 (2006), 126-130.

[ 9] Designing with Lenses; http://www. designingwithlenses. com/

 

Affording the Deeper Dives The domestic HIV crisis reflects a design dilemma that is steeped in, among other things, deeper notions of sex, specifically notions of sexual orientation. Not only would I offer that sexual orientation lies on a continuum of social discomfort from the prevailing white heterosexual malestream or heteronorma-tive perspective that dominates our profession, but also that the analogous “cultural plane” may offer an underlining assumption: Sex between individuals of the same gender is not normal (i.e., men who have sex with men (MSM)). This may, fundamentally, be restraining and/

[ 10] Bardzell, J. “Interaction Criticism and Aesthetics.” In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2007)

[ 11] Bardzell, S. “Feminist HCI: Taking stock and outlining an agenda for design.” In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2010).

November + December 2010