Abstract
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.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | Proceedings of the IASDR Conference RE: Research |
Editors | Lora Alberto |
Place of Publication | Cincinnati, Ohio, United Sates |
Publisher | University of Cincinnati |
Pages | 497-510 |
Number of pages | 13 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Oct 2017 |
Event | IASDR 2017 the Seventh International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference: Re: Research - the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, Cincinnati, United States Duration: 31 Oct 2017 → 3 Nov 2017 http://www.iasdr2017.com/ |
Conference
Conference | IASDR 2017 the Seventh International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference |
---|---|
Country/Territory | United States |
City | Cincinnati |
Period | 31/10/17 → 3/11/17 |
Internet address |
Keywords
- Cultura
- Communication
- User research
- Generative techniques
- design tools
- persona