Cultura: A communication toolkit for designers to gain empathic insights across cultural boundaries

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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 languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the IASDR Conference RE: Research
EditorsLora Alberto
Place of PublicationCincinnati, Ohio, United Sates
PublisherUniversity of Cincinnati
Pages497-510
Number of pages13
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2017
EventIASDR 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 20173 Nov 2017
http://www.iasdr2017.com/

Conference

ConferenceIASDR 2017 the Seventh International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityCincinnati
Period31/10/173/11/17
Internet address

Keywords

  • Cultura
  • Communication
  • User research
  • Generative techniques
  • design tools
  • persona

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