Abstract

Designing digital artifacts for a culturally diverse market implies the thorough understanding of the psychological mechanisms derived from the social and environmental context. The next article introduces a research that investigates the relevance of cognitive and identity diversity (Page, 2007) in the working groups that have as a task the design of interactive services for digital environments. The argument of the article aims to understand how the diversity of the design group could help improve the nature of the interactive services designed for a multicultural market. Considering the craft of a virtual environment in terms of interaction metaphors that have to be understood by the end users, the step prior to the design of the above-mentioned environment is to be taken into consideration. Two pedagogical experiments placed in two different cultural contexts, Italy and China, will be presented in order to exemplify the prior findings of the research inquiry. First the common ground creation in the context of multicultural workgroups will be analyzed, and second the internal dynamic of the group reflected in the creation of the digital working model will be shown. Taking into account all the above, the question asked is: what methods and tools can be used to support an internal communication language of the working team and how the developed skills could then be applied to the process of designing digital interactive artifacts.

Keywords

Communication Design, Work Group Dynamics, Collaborative Projects, Cultural Diversity, Interactive Digital Media.

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Jul 7th, 12:00 AM

Understanding the Complexity of the Multicultural Design Work Team

Designing digital artifacts for a culturally diverse market implies the thorough understanding of the psychological mechanisms derived from the social and environmental context. The next article introduces a research that investigates the relevance of cognitive and identity diversity (Page, 2007) in the working groups that have as a task the design of interactive services for digital environments. The argument of the article aims to understand how the diversity of the design group could help improve the nature of the interactive services designed for a multicultural market. Considering the craft of a virtual environment in terms of interaction metaphors that have to be understood by the end users, the step prior to the design of the above-mentioned environment is to be taken into consideration. Two pedagogical experiments placed in two different cultural contexts, Italy and China, will be presented in order to exemplify the prior findings of the research inquiry. First the common ground creation in the context of multicultural workgroups will be analyzed, and second the internal dynamic of the group reflected in the creation of the digital working model will be shown. Taking into account all the above, the question asked is: what methods and tools can be used to support an internal communication language of the working team and how the developed skills could then be applied to the process of designing digital interactive artifacts.

 

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