Abstract
In Cross-Cultural Technology Design, Sun critiques and offers an alternative to design processes for globally distributed technologies. To facilitate new design processes, Sun dedicates much of her work to developing and elaborating a framework in culturally located user experience (CLUE). Sun has described CLUE in previous publications (Sun, 2006, 2009) as an effort “to craft appropriately localized IT products to meet the cultural expectations of local users and support complex activities in concrete contexts” (p. 81). CLUE thus offers a robust theoretical framework for engaging in user experience research, both in industry and the academy. This book fleshes out the CLUE framework by setting it within multiple case studies that examine text-messaging use in different cultural contexts. Because of the focus on situated technology use, the book has clear value for information technology (IT) practitioners, including designers and researchers involved in cross-cultural technology design. But Sun’s book also offers academics a methodology and a model for performing research in user experience.
The first section of the book (Chapters 1–4) is dedicated to describing the exigency for CLUE and developing the theoretical underpinning for this design practice. Because CLUE is fundamentally a framework for conducting research in user experience, it also works well as a methodological framework. The second section (Chapters 5–9) then deploys this framework in research. Over the course of this section, Sun focuses on different ways in which cell phone users localize text-messaging technology in the United States and China. Localization refers to the ways in which either developers or users attempt to adapt technologies for specific cultural contexts. This section describes daily use practices of individual users as a way of examining how technology users in different cultural contexts localize technologies to develop and support their identities. In the third and final section of the book (chapters 10–11), Sun uses her findings from this research to reflect on key concepts from earlier outlines of CLUE and uses those findings to “build the concrete mold of the CLUE framework” (p. 203).
Sun begins by identifying some of the problems that hinder current research in cross-cultural user experience design and research. According to Sun, much of this research hinges on reductive definitions of culture. Sun advocates for a design process that is underpinned by a dialogic conception of culture. Under this model, culture is neither homogeneous nor static but instead simultaneously changes and is changed by technologies, occasionally in unanticipated ways.
Sun also notes a similar problem in research and practice related to usability and user experience. According to Sun, traditional usability research is saddled with a number of problems. Sun argues that much of this research treats usability as an intrinsic quality of a given technology, apart from the contexts in which technologies are used. Additionally, this research has historically relied on reductive and stereotypical images of users rather than solicited user participation. As such, developers have disproportionately taken on the work of localization without adequately acknowledging the potential for users’ contribution to the localization process. Sun advocates for cross-cultural research and design practices that are informed by user experience and cultural usability research. Such research emphasizes use that is situated in multiple local contexts and encourages user participation to help guide the work of localization.
Based on these exigencies, Sun then builds a methodological framework for cross-cultural design and research from theoretical traditions of activity theory, British cultural theory, and genre theory. Together, these theories form a foundation for CLUE, a methodology for cross-cultural research and design. The defining characteristics of CLUE include a focus on use in local contexts with an attention to the dialogic nature of culture. Within this framework, user experience is culturally situated and constructed, mediated both instrumentally and socially. Hence, affordances of technologies cannot be entirely designed but emerge from diverse users’ situated practices. Thus, CLUE advocates for a design process that is “an ongoing conversation between technology and users, technology and its surrounding conditions, the local and the global, and designers and users” (p. 83).
While the first section of the book is deeply theoretical, Sun also provides examples that demonstrate the implications of this theory for technology design. For practitioners, these examples demonstrate the importance of coherent theoretical stances for design and production. For academic readers, these concrete examples offer a constant reminder of the pragmatic ends toward which theory can be used.
In the second section of the book, Sun adopts the CLUE methodological framework to examine text-messaging practices of different users in the United States and China. For Sun, this particular technology use is interesting for two primary reasons. On one hand, text messaging is a global practice that differs dramatically in different locations. On the other hand, in both the United States and China, ways in which people use text messages depart wildly from the intended use of this technology. Sun explains that texting was originally designed and marketed as a voice-mail alert service for businesses. But at the time of Sun’s research—and still today—the majority of actual text messaging happens for different purposes and between different users. Hence, text messaging provides a particularly appropriate example of the gaps between design and use and between action and meaning that Sun carefully describes in her elaboration of problems with current cross-cultural design practices.
Sun focuses closely on the daily use practices of five users in Albany, New York, and Hangzhou, in the Zhejiang province of China. All of these users demonstrate unique ways of taking up and localizing the technology of text messaging in ways that support simultaneously their social lives and their individual senses of identity. Sun also places these specific case studies against the backdrop of a larger set of other observations, not detailed in this book, that provide a glimpse of larger patterns of text-messaging behaviors in each location. Additionally, this portion of the book exemplifies and models research projects that are grounded in the CLUE framework, which should be useful both for the book’s academic audience and for practitioners interested in taking up the CLUE framework for their own research and design practices.
In the final section, Sun reflects on findings from her research to provide a more concrete way of understanding the value of the CLUE framework for research and design and offers some more specific implications for the technology-design process. This process, she advises, should be more attentive to local uptakes of technology and receptive to user participation in the localization process, with the knowledge that these local experiences of technology are part of the consumption of those products. Although Sun does not offer specific procedures for how practitioners might follow this advice, she does point to some concrete examples of companies who have integrated these stances into their user-experience design, such as Twitter, as well as others who have failed.
Overall, Cross-Cultural Technology Design offers a rich and coherent framework for examining user experience, especially in cross-cultural contexts. This framework has clear implications for research and design in industry. For academics, the book is also valuable for Sun’s demonstration of how theory can be parlayed into pragmatic ends.