Designing for Culturally Sensitive Cultural Change
Taghreed Alshehri, Reuben Kirkham, Lynn Dombrowski, Patrick Olivier
DIS'22: ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS)
Session: design theory & Critical design
Abstract
Online self-presentation is recognized as a global phenomenon largely influenced by and sensitive to users’ cultural norms. However, incorporating cultural understanding into the design process can be challenging. Designing for culture creates dilemmas between designing for a pre-existing cultural ‘status quo’ or for cultural change. We argue that culturally sensitive design should not be a tool for (i) perpetuating existing cultural inequalities or (ii) empowering the individual isolated from their wider cultural milieu. We propose “designing for culturally sensitive cultural change”—a process in which we support creating a trajectory departing from the status quo, in order to bridge the gap between people’s aspirations and practices related to cultural change. We demonstrate this in a case study on designing for Saudi women’s self-presentation in digital media. We conclude with reflections on cultural sensitivity in designing for cultural change and broader implications for HCI.
DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533540
WEB:: https://dis.acm.org/2022/
Video Presentations of DIS 2022