Delft Design Guide -Revised edition. Annemiek van Boeijen
Mindset: Developing cultural awareness and sensitivity can only result from a curious attitude, an open mind, and a broad social and historical interest. CSD requires you to reflect on your own cultural background to understand how it influences your values and beliefs, as well as what it means for your own work.
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28. Culture-Sensitive Design
How? CSD offers models that help designers sharpen their lens in looking at culture, appropriating existing methods, or exploring cultural contexts. Theories are adopted from other disciplines such as anthropology, design history, and sociology, and these are attuned to the designer’s needs. An example is the circuit of culture, a comprehensive model that entails five processes that influence the cultural meaning of things: these processes are production of meaning, consumption (daily practices), social
regulation, representation by media, and identity.
In line with Persona, a new method called Cultura has been developed that helps designers gain insights into people’s cultural contexts and build intercultural empathic under- standing in the early stages of a new product or service development. A set of sociocultural dimensions and the Crossing Culture Chasms card set can help designers raise culture-specific questions and generate ideas based on specific value orientations.
Culture-Sensitive Design
References & Further Reading: du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackey, H., & Negus, K., 1997. Doing Cultural studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman . London: Sage Publications (in association with the Open University). / Hao, C., van Boeijen, A.G.C., & Stappers, P.J., 2017. Generative research techniques crossing cultures: a field study in China. International Journal of Cultural and Creative Industries. / van Boeijen, A.G.C., 2015. Crossing Cultural Chasms: Towards a culture-conscious approach to design. Doctoral Thesis, Delft University of Technology, Delft. / van Boeijen, A.G.C., 2020. Culture Sensitive Design: A guide to culture in practice. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.
Tips & Concerns
Culture is a comprehensive term that is not easy to delineate and cannot be cast into concrete. Therefore, you need an open and flexible mind and a broad interest.
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Individuals often do not consider themselves as representatives of a cultural group. A helpful analogy is the forest: we can classify a group of trees into different types of forests, such as a tropical rain forest or a Mediterranean forest. While each type is different, together they have something in common.
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Culture-sensitivity helps you attune your design research methods to intended users and to develop your own stance regarding what your design should do in the cultural context.
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It also helps you specify who is or isn’t included in the context.
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Limitations
CSD is based on viewing people as members of groups; therefore, less attention is given to individual differences.
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It does not highlight what most individuals have in common, such as the universal principles of human behaviour.
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To avoid blunders, culture-sensitivity should be incorporated into regular design processes.
Culture-Sensitive Design (CSD) is a perspective that highlights the influence of culture regarding a designer’s background, the process of designing, and the generated designs. A sensitive ‘eye’ for the cultural context helps with finding opportunities and overcoming barriers due to cultural influences.
perspectives
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29
This Artificial Biological Clock highlights the complex social pressures and expectations that dictate a woman’s reproductive potential in contrast to the body’s natural rhythms. A woman seeking a clearer understanding of her circumstances could look to the clock, which is fed information by her doctor, therapist, and bank manager via an online service. When these complex factors align, the clock lets her know that she is ready to have a child. (Revital Cohen, 2008)
Posthuman Habitats is a wearable landscape system, The garments promote healthful diet and lifestyle, as the gardens are fed and nourished by bodily wastes, and inspire outdoor exposure to optimize photosynthesis. Distinctive subjects, isolatable artifacts and environment are blurred and hybridized. Here, bodily systems and plant ecologies are symbiotic and the ‘human’ becomes part of a larger habitational field. (www.foreground-da.com)
What & Why? Speculative Design uses the future as a backdrop for engaging with social dilemmas, and it allows designers to break free from some of the cognitive, normative, and behavioural constraints of the present. This method creates an imaginative space for designers to consider and convey the consequences of contemporary and future ways of being. Speculative Design can be seen as a form of communication – it invites users to reflect and debate matters of concern, perform the future situation or ‘try it on for size’, and discover alternatives to current conditions.
The imaginative nature and future orientation of Speculative Design make it es- pecially suitable for engaging with complex and even ‘wicked’ problems. Such prob- lems often display a puzzling array of emergent, interrelated causes and dynamics, and therefore they do not lend themselves to traditional forms of problem solving by design. Speculative Design allows designers to inquire about the various dimensions of the problem without attempting to solve it outright, thus opening up the problem space to new perspectives.
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Mindset: Speculative Design operates on multiple temporalities, thereby suggesting alternative pasts, presents, or futures. To do this effectively, both designers and users are asked to suspend disbelief in the designed outcome. This involves replacing plausibility: ‘Will this come true in the future?’ , with credibility: ‘Does it feel like this future could come true?’ as a criterion for evaluating outcomes. Reference to a real world ‘out there’ is substituted for a sense of internal – or diegetic – consistency.
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How? Speculative Design processes often start by projecting the current social, cultural, and technological trends into the future. Future possibilities are then crafted into provocative, imaginative scenarios, and these scenarios can be materialised through a variety of design