Culture-based design research and the decolonizing future
How might we respect the cross-cultural research communities to embrace the alternative ways of knowing?
The story of a foreign researcher
A few years ago, when I started my design research career, I was involved in a research project that contained several rounds of contextual interviews. The clients came with me for contextual interviews in Sydney. In the first research day, I met with one of the clients at the train station and walked to the participant’s workplace.
It was a beautiful morning, but the atmosphere pulled us into some awkward mist. The client and I had a polite catchup while walking. We talked about the weather and the busy morning train. However, the conversation went into a dead end because it became stiff. I clearly felt a cultural barrier between us (Australian and Chinese). We didn’t have many common topics except for the superficial one — weather, or at best, the restaurants near the office.
I still remember when I joined in a conversation with Australian locals in a social occasion — they were strangers at first, but they know how to lead the conversation to a relaxed and positive social situation.
I spoke English but the tone, the rhythm, the facial expression and gesture all signaled that I was a foreigner. It was not much about the volume of words or fluency that made the conversation delightful, but more of the resonation coming from similar cultural backgrounds. When people have common cultural and social norms, they resonate; then they are happy to talk to each other, and they become open and honest. Either for research purposes or not, this would be a good start for data collection.
That morning when I stayed with the client, I tried everything to figure out a solution to save the awkward air, but of course, it didn’t work out. As a new graduate who spent 25 years in China and three years in Australia, if I were facing a Chinese client, I could’ve easily connected with them right away. Unfortunately, this is a different cultural and social system. Even the ways people say Hi to each other in the two cultures are far from the same. In some northern part of China, such as Beijing, it’s too normal to hear people saying “您遛弯儿呐? 吃了么?” (You taking a walk? Have you had a meal?). It’s similar to say “How you doing” when one guy bumps into an acquaintance. But it doesn’t make any sense if we translate it into English and apply to a western social context. Food have been a critical part in Chinese culture. There are thousands of ancient and modern literatures introducing the theories and rules on what to eat, how to cook and why make certain combinations of food for a specific meal. Then it’s not surprising to start a conversation with meals.
The different philosophy of thinking
I’ve been practicing English before moving to Australia because I realized that good communication skills almost make a good design researcher — you need to first listen to your stakeholders or research participants, and then speak to them or to a broader scope of audiences.
But communication is not all about language skills. A big part of communication is resonation. People talk by using logical thinking and languages yet resonate through cultural identities — simply think about the moment when your friends, who’re from a different culture, laughed their head off after telling a joke or watching a video, but you just had that poker face and thought how the hell is that funny?
There are no absolute right or wrong opinions towards design research methodologies, but there is a supreme and secondary way of knowing in the design and UX realm. In a cross-cultural workplace, the non-western design researchers strive for restraining their original cultures and alternative ways of thinking to adapt to the Eurocentric cultures, world views and ideologies. They do so because the entire knowledge system of UX was built and grew up in the modern western industries, and the majority of researchers were trained and educated in the western academic traditions. If the bi-cultural researchers expect to grow their career in the western industries, they have to accept the cultural assimilation. That is, where there requires communication and knowledge generation, could there be an occasion where the bi-cultural researchers have to overcome the cultural gap and present themselves as someone more “western”.
The fact is, the way of communicating and thinking is more about being disparate rather than supreme and inferior between the West and the East. For example, the European and Chinese philosophical perspectives have shown opposite stances since the Axial Age — as I’m originally Chinese, I think it’s only appropriate to talk about the Chinese culture rather than any of the other Eastern cultures that I don’t belong to.
Conceptual thinking is the most important western philosophical activity, yet Xiang (象) thinking was formed in traditional Chinese culture and leading the main philosophical perspective in ancient China. Conceptual thinking and Xiang thinking are opposite stances although they learn from each other.
Conceptual thinking is the basis for the knowledge system of logic that contains the definition, judgement and reasoning. It pursues the generalization and universalization of objects. For example, the snow is white, and a horse is also white. A universal character of “being white” was abstracted out, thus, the concept white was coined.
However, Xiang thinking refers to a dynamic whole or non-substances. It is related to perception and rich in poetic association (Shuren, 2009). It pursues the connectivity of objects rather than reasoning. The usage of metaphors in Chinese classic poems is an embodiment of Xiang. In Classic of Poetry (221 BC), known as《诗经 · 小雅》in Chinese, the poets took objects as emotional symbolizations:
昔我往已，杨柳依依。今我来思，雨雪霏霏.
Arthur Waley translated it into the English version in 1937.
Long ago, when we started, the willows spread their shade.
Now that we turn back, the snow flakes fly.
Many classic Chinese poems like this one refer the willows to the long separation and sorrow, thus through Xiang thinking the poets created a non-logical connectivity between an object and emotion. However, in conceptual thinking, there is no reasoning process showing a tree caused sadness.
I mentioned this not to claim that the ancient philosophical perspectives has an impact on design research (I’m happy to see the temporal connectivity if there is), but to show that cultures lead to different philosophical perspectives, patterns of thinking and ways of communication, furthermore, different methodologies to approach arts and science.
Cultural values and its potential influence in design research
The world-renowned anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, claims that
“[b]elieving, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz, 2008).
Hofstede (1991) considers culture the software of the mind, that is, the patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting are mental programs.
Design research has borrowed the theories and methodologies from anthropology. I believe the current design research conduct is influenced by and modified through the researchers’ cultural values and is an adaptive process to the western tradition of knowledge generation.
Design research seeks to find and interpret the “webs of significance”, which is users’ behaviour and perspectives that shaped by their cultures. To be more specific, people have experience towards a product, be it financial services, health insurance services, design software, or instant messaging app. The reason that there are good or bad experiences from the users is not only because of the product itself. It’s also because users have vast different patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting.
For example, a user from Aomori, Japan could have no common attitude towards using a driving navigation app compared against a user born and raised in Oslo, Norway, who is using the same app— although both cities are cold in winter. The geographic characteristics, national history, languages, and politics have formed the users’ original cultural values, and further shaped the users’ minds and behaviours.
Too often, from my observation, companies related the diversity of insights to the users’ software skills, age or personalities. Once after the stakeholders observed an interview session, they had an impression on the participant: “Hmm… this participant is not good. She’s quiet’’, or “She was not as elaborate as the last one”. It sounds like a personality issue and the participant was clearly not an “adorable” one to the stakeholders.
But as the person running the interviews, I was sure it was just language skills. English was not her first language, so it limited her expressions and thoughts. The language issue is a problem, but it reveals a more foundational cultural difference. The pattern of organizing and expressing thoughts in English culture was different to that participant’s original culture. She had a hard time figuring out how to support her viewpoints on the product with accurate English words. All she could do was showing her attitude with the most basic English words — this feature was good, that feature was not useful etc. The missing elaboration made her a quiet and reluctant participant from the stakeholders’ perspective.
In terms of research subjects, design research methodologies lack the awareness and management on cultural differences. This potential cultural inclination brought in consequences. Most of the “good insights” come from people who grew up in western cultures, speaking English as the first language and open to share thoughts. Any research participants that don’t come with these conditions are not as supreme as those from English cultures in qualitative research sessions.
As a result, the insights that inform the design decisions are culturally identical. But would companies make an announcement: our product is only designed for the users from a western culture who use English as the first language?
The way that people use languages represents cultural values. Political scientists Inglehart and Welzel designed the cultural map of the world through sociological research. The map describes the variation of cultural values among different societies in two predominant dimensions: traditional versus secular-rational values on the vertical y-axis and survival versus self-expression values on the horizontal x-axis (Inglehart & Welzel, 2014).
The map shows that countries have more than just geographic distance, but also the cultural distance. We could look at Australia and China in the map. Australia is located among the other English-speaking countries like US, Canada, New Zealand. Similar to the Protestant Europe such as Sweden and Norway, who have high self-expression values. These values embrace environmental protection, growing tolerance of foreigners, homosexuality, gender equality, rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life, etc.
By comparison, China is located far away from English-speaking cultures. It locates at the high survival values area. The survival values are the mainstream value opposite to the self-expression values. These values emphasize economic and physical security and are linked with ethnocentrism and low levels of tolerance.
Interestingly, the majority of design research theories, methodologies and professions were created among the English-speaking and Protestant European countries. These countries embrace high self-expression values and high secular-rational values (i.e. less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority). As we can see, these countries also have a more mature design research industry and a bigger amount of trained researchers than most of the other countries in the map.
When the western cultural background among the design research community became the mainstream, there was a problem. Human experience was understood from a single Eurocentric perspective. Not saying this cultural perspective is wrong, but it’s limited.
During cross-cultural research, some of the implicit but significant information can be missing from the western researchers’ interpretation, such as societal structures, languages, world values, social norms, body gestures, symbols, family values, and so on. People from different cultures are sensitive to different types of information. That’s natural. It’s extremely difficult to realize this implicit knowledge by overcoming the cultural differences.
“Being silent”, for example, could refer to a certain meaning in an East Asian culture— politely hide the disagreement or dissatisfaction, but misinterpreted by North American or European researchers. The misinterpretation happened not because the researchers didn’t ask the participants that “what does your silence mean?” but the researchers may not realize the silence was meaningful at all.
If we think about a simple event — eating dumplings. What does it mean to you? If you are from a non-Asian culture you may remember the taste and the environment where you had dumplings. It’s mostly about the memory of dumplings as food. But if you are from the Chinese culture, you will likely associate dumplings with emotional nuances like the atmosphere of your families, the festival in winter, and even the TV programs that you were watching while eating dumplings. You have the same symbol, i.e. dumplings, but the meanings are different due to cultural resonation.
From the cultural values map we know that there is a broad scope of cultural differences that shapes people’s behaviours. To see it from the other angle, it also means that people in the same or similar cultural values would be more likely to resonate. This resonation in design research leads to empathy with users.
The decolonizing research future
There is no right or wrong with different cultural interpretations because it is nothing about standardized virtues. But when the new knowledge, or to be more specific, user insights, is generated from a similar or even single culture, and further communicated to the whole world of audiences with diverse cultures, it faces the colonial risk.
Khandwala (2019) argues that Design Thinking is a colonial process as the design thinking rhetoric has been prevalent for decades in design and research industry, it jeopardizes the cultural respect by framing design thinking as a “progressive narrative of global salvation because it ignores alternative ways of knowing”.
Not every culture has a conflict between the western settlers and the indigenous people, but non-western designers worry about the western cultural dominance causing inequality in design conversation.
“To date, mainstream design discourse has been dominated by a focus on Anglocentric/Eurocentric ways of seeing, knowing, and acting in the world, with little attention being paid to alternative and marginalized discourses from the non Anglo-European sphere” (Decolonizing design, 2016).
I think design research, if seen as a related yet independent area to design, is in the same era of decolonization. Some ethnographers have realized the long lasting coloniality in the “researcher and objective” relationship. They initiated the decolonization of ethnography using activists’ theories. They claimed that:
“The formative logic of the colonial ethnographic research relationship prescribes a stance of dominance and subordination between those doing the research and those who are its objects … The idea of ‘the colonial’ here does more than reference the events of a particular historical period. Rather, we use ‘the colonial’ and ‘coloniality’ to mark an entire structure of racialized and gendered power and social inequality within ethnographic research has been, and continues to be, conducted; decolonizing is the process of undoing that inequality, of exposing and dismantling ethnography’s deep coloniality” (Bejarano et al., 2019, p. 20–28).
Design research has been deeply influenced by anthropological theories and methodologies. Therefore, it resonates with this concern of anthropological decolonization.
In the near future, design research communities could aim for decentralizing the research power. Design research power and authority can be spread out across the globe, and assigned to the local and indigenous research experts. The local researchers’ cultural roots gave them the blood and values from that culture, which made them more competent to be deeply empathic with the people (users, customers, clients, or general research participants) in that identical culture than the researchers from different cultures.
Recruiting research participants based on a cultural balance will help researchers and projects to get rid of cognitive bias to some extend, such as to reconsider those research participants who don’t use English well. But recruitment does not help equalizing the new knowledge generation in the international design research area. The key to realizing this decentralized future is to have the research power spread out to the vast and diverse global design research communities.
It is about a fundamental change within the design research knowledge system to seek the
“radical transfiguration of existing power structures through the critical eye of the programmatic imagination that dares to identify the possibilities and conditions that will give us alternatives to the now” (Decolonizing design, 2016).
The future post-pandemic era might facilitate this change. When travel gets very difficult or even impossible, remote work will be the main method for collaboration. It’s already happening and I think remote work will have an even more significant impact on the traditional way of collaboration than today. Remote work will be the new trend in design research work.
In that case, hopefully, there will be a decentralized and fluid design research knowledge flow, where knowledge is shared beyond national boarders, time zones, and global politics. Researchers based in one culture will easily learn the thinking system presented by the researchers from another culture. The fluid knowledge sharing will be a reflective process to help researchers see how cross-cultural researchers use design research as a tool to be empathic with the users in that culture and to generate local knowledge.
References
Bejarano, C. A., Juárez, L. L., García, M. A. M., & Goldstein, D. M. (2019). Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science. Duke University Press.
Decolonizing Design (2016). Editorial statement. Retrieved from http://www.decolonisingdesign.com/statements/2016/editorial/
Geertz, C. (2008). Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In The cultural geography reader (pp. 41–51). Routledge.
Hofstede, G. (1991). Organizations and cultures: Software of the mind. McGrawHill, New York.
Inglehart, R. & Welzel, C. “The WVS Cultural Map of the World”. WVS. Archived from the original on October 19, 2013. Retrieved 6 October 2014.
Khandwala, A. (2019). What does it mean to decolonize design. Retrieved from eyeondesign.aiga.org: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/what-does-it-mean-to-decolonize-design/
Shuren, W. (2009). The roots of Chinese philosophy and culture — An introduction to “xiang” and “xiang thinking”. Frontiers of Philosophy in China, 4(1), 1–12.
