In Berkun’s talk picked by the audience of Puget Sound SIGCHI, he ran through the biggest issues and advice. He goes into details on the mistakes in the post, so instead, here’s a table to see both the mistakes and the advice at the same time.

I thought it particularly interesting how he approached the talk:

Rather than talk about tactical mistakes, such as in prototyping and running studies, I focused on the ones we overlook the most, about attitude and culture.

So what do you think? What other mistakes do UX designers make?

The Johnnies have asked me to write a monthly column about culture and concerns as they relate to cross-border user experience (UX), in Europe and beyond. This is an honour for someone born in Texas, USA (me) but probably seems odd to most everyone else (you). Let me share some background.

My father was Austrian. My mother’s family was German. The “Old World” wasn’t just a place in the memory of an aging grandparent and we certainly didn’t worship our ethnicity (as third- and fourth-generation Americans are apt to do). We travelled extensively every year (Rome and Florence were almost always on the itinerary). After university, I moved to Denmark to become a director at the Danish Royal Theatre and have remained in Copenhagen for 33 years. Here, I feel I’ve closed a cultural circle. Although our family tree has been pruned considerably, I’ve made sure the Reisses weren’t chased out of Europe forever. The Nazis have finally and definitively lost.

(Curiously, my father knew that he would never be returning to Vienna when the SS literally kicked him down the stairs of his gymnasium in March, 1938. Yet I have known since preschool that I was somehow destined to return.)

So what are you, Eric?

A New Yorker

Well, my work ethic is clearly Central European (I focus on getting the job done). My politics are decidedly Scandinavian (socialized and empathetic). But I also believe in the American Dream (bootstraps and the rewards of hard work). My temper is Latin (no idea where that came from). And as a Texan, I cherish cultural identity but reluctantly accept that I am part of something larger. (In comparison, New Yorkers don’t really acknowledge the rest of the world. The Steinberg cover for the March 29, 1976 edition of the New Yorker sums this up admirably:

As to language, I sometimes feel like the crazy monk, Salvatore, in Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. Salvatore speaks “all languages and none”. Returning from Geneva recently, I realized I’d muddled through in seven languages that day: French to pay the hotel and manage my airport check-in, Danish and Swedish to the SAS flight crew, German to my seatmate on the plane, English to an inarticulate taxi-driver of uncertain nationality, plus greetings to two of my neighbors – diplomats from Egypt (Sabaa’h el kheer) and Serbia (Dobro jutro).

So much for the long-winded introduction. I hope you’ll follow my cultural journey. And I hope I can justify the faith placed in me by the Johnny Holland editors.

Note: I tend to say “we” and “our” about Americans, Europeans, Texans, Danes, Germans, Austrians, Chicagoans, and eyeglass-wearers. Please forgive and bear with me.

What is “Europe”?

Listen to CNN and you’ll probably conclude that Americans think the European Community is a funny-accented version of the United States (and 33 years of empirical observation on my part suggests that this is exactly how they think). But we (Europeans) know this analogy only serves to make “Europe” easier to understand to folks who aren’t terribly interested in understanding us to begin with. I guess we shouldn’t really care, but hey – North Americans have their own “defining the damned thing” debate. We might as well have ours.

Let’s face it, “Europe” exists on a map, but nowhere else that I know of. Honestly, when are we actually “European”? – except when we’re forced into a convenient stereotype by another geographic group (Americans and Aussies, for example). Otherwise, we’re Danes and Poles and French and Italians and Greeks and Germans and Dutch and Belgians and Romanians and Brits (and you Brits really are a case unto yourselves – and irritatingly proud of it. The rest of us haven’t yet figured out how to tease you into submission but we’re working on it). How many nations are there in “Europe”? I can argue for about 40. (Or 400. Or even 4,000.)

Within each nation, there are incredible regional differences – a Dane from Himmerland sees the world differently than a Dane from Djursland. A Swede from Halland is different from one from Blekinge. Is Galacia part of Poland, the Ukraine, Austria – or Spain? In Zagreb, Croatia, they’ll tell you “The Balkans start on the other side of the river”. Dalmatia and Istra are Balkan; Slavonia is not. Most folks have never heard of these places. But that’s what makes Europe so exciting, right?

Granularity, European style

The most amusing case-in-point is that of the “Swiss” – you don’t really exist at all, do you? There are French, German, and Italian “Swiss” – but you stick together mostly for the sake of economic expediency, not because you like each other very much. And let’s not stop there – you further divide Switzerland into 23 states or “cantons”. And the individual cantons don’t like each other very much either. Now, these cantons also have cities – and here’s the punchline – in the city of Chur, there’s an old joke: “There are three qualifications for becoming Bishop of Chur: 1) you must be Roman Catholic, 2) your must be a consecrated priest, and 3) you must be a native of Chur (or at least from Kanton Graubünden). But in truth, the first two requirements can be dispensed with.”

The joke is, it’s not a joke!

The rest of the world wants us to act like a homogeneous group. But basically, none of us “Europeans” really and truly want to assimilate (you Swiss are just more up-front about it). Let’s face it, the more our nation-states become part of some larger global alliance, the more we cultivate our ethnic and geographical roots. In fact, this could be our common denominator. We are a group united by geography and mutual distrust – which is the surprising basis for many successful collaborations. We’ll put up with a fair amount of cultural diversity – as long as it doesn’t get in the way of our personal or national interests.

Don’t talk about the [war/food]

Our granular identity shows up in the oddest places. For example, here’s a direct transcript of a conversation between Northern Italians at an IT conference I attended a couple of years back:

Man from Piemonte: “My mother makes the world’s best Bagna Cauda.”
Man from Veneto: “Ahh. But but does she use Bianco Veneto?”
Man from Lombardia: “Well in Milan …”
Piemonte and Veneto in unison: “Shut up. You know nothing about garlic!”

Our politicians think that if they change the labelling enough, they’ll eventually describe the product correctly. Sorry, this is a tactic doomed to failure. Happily, no one cares very much. Throughout my years in Denmark, I’ve seen the political community move from (and to):

- The Common Market (CM)
- The European Economic Community (EEC)
- The European Community (EC)
- The European Union (EU)

Ahh…progress. Thank goodness for “search and replace”.

Anyway, let’s explore “Europe” (whatever that is) and examine how our user experiences play out across historical borders that represent more than just arbitrary lines on a map (hey, North Americans, look at all the razor-straight lines on your map. Then look at our map. This is why Nebraska and Bulgaria can never be equated).

Thanks for reading this far. Now tell me what your thoughts are.

Over roughly the last 10 years, China and India have given way to a huge rise in technology outsourcing. Jobs are outsourced from companies like Microsoft, Google, T-Mobile, Honeywell, and many others. In Microsoft I’ve worked with teams in both India and China developing software for a variety of uses. Having our headquarters in the US, I usually work with small satellite teams in these countries. I couldn’t help but wonder why these countries who had become huge in the area of software technology, struggled so much in the area of user experience and UI innovation.Note: this article refers specifically to software UX. Both of these countries have very innovative and creative aspects in other areas of their culture, and I’m not expressing these comments as blanket statements.

Specifically I noted a series of different challenges with each team. For example the team in India has appeared weaker in developing the details in their work. While they grasp large issues, nuances often have to be explained in painstaking detail, which more or less involves giving all the specifics of those nuances.

Justin Maguire, a Creative Director as Frog has dubbed this the 70/30 effect. The first 70% of the process around big and broad thinking is great, but the last 30% of the details is like squeezing blood from a rock. Even with these explained down to “dotting the i‘s and crossing the t’s” we often found ourselves coming up short in the last 30%.

The China team has several similar shades, but in a slightly different flavor. While the nuances we needed often had to be detailed out in exact specifications, China seemed to be great about copying those details in an amazing and precise method. The last 30% was pristine when given all the specifics. When design specifics were enumerated out, the team could carry through the task with a level of detail rarely seen. This was especially apparent in visual UI work. Conversely the initial 70%, or big thinking, was slightly rougher to achieve. Two countries, both huge in technology, with somewhat opposing problems. This became my curious head scratcher, and I wanted to learn more.

Given the issues and connections I was seeing, I decided to go straight to the source and start to ask the offices I had worked with, as well as other designers I found through my various networks about these issues. These are just the initial thoughts I’ve started to gather. I plan to interview many more people with what I’ve deemed my curiosity research project, but thought it would be interesting to share a few of the insights I’ve gathered thus far to give a view to others who work with these countries. Given the format of Johnny Holland, I’ve kept these short, but often there are great (and sometimes very amusing) stories behind each point.

India

In interviewing people thus far there have been three points that have so far come forward

1. The “Does it work?” principle: This appears to be the strongest rationale the attributes to the lack of detail I discuss above. In talking with designers in India they stressed that with Indian culture, given their daily life, the details are often a luxury. For example, in the morning they must think of how to get work, making food, washing clothes, getting fresh water, and taking kids to school among other things. Simply from a cultural and living conditions standpoint there is a strong focus on getting by. Details are a luxury that many don’t have in this society. Europe and America have the basics taken care of, which allows them to culturally focus on the details of what a water bottle looks like, having a specific cut to jeans, or separate forks for salad, soup, and cereal.
2. Schools have become a common thread in most of my interviews. For the most part I’ve only found three schools named when discussing design and user experience specifically, with the National Institute of Design (NID) being the top. This school was more of less started by C&R Eames during their work with the Indian government. Secondarily within schools that exist for teaching design, there appears to be a lack of process and design thinking, with a stronger weight on the final product. This type of oversight may account for the lack of innovative software UX. In the end, there just isn’t a strong student community or education around design, which would then carry into the workforce culture.
3. As a last and very logical point, we just haven’t used India as a country to outsource software and technology design experiences, so there has been no reason for them to exercise that muscle, as a result, it’s never been grown. The corollary I was presented with when talking with a designer in India was to think of UX in the US around the 1980’s. It was there, but just barely. It had just started to be cultivated as a solid field.

In the end, we’re asking India to apply Western techniques that have been developed from specific cultural surroundings but have never been part of daily life in their culture. While we tend to overlook it, when I hear people talk about it, it’s almost a “duh, how did I miss that” moment. To be reminded of this, has certainly been an eye opener.

China

With China I’ve been able to get to less people, but found these two points of interest.

1. Waiting for commands/chain of command/questioning commands. I’ve seen this in several Asian countries, so it’s not without expectation that China has the same issue. Chain of command and management plays a very strong role in corporations. When you’re handed a command from your manager, you are attentive to that command, and you are more or less at the mercy of your superior in a way. In addition, decisions made by superiors are often less questioned. This means less room for rigorous debate of ideas or pushing back on potential bad decisions. Often with the UX field, the debate can make or break a product. It gives way to new ideas and innovation. Without that, it’s somewhat expected that products may not be as innovative and strong as they could be. If your ultimate goal is to please your manager, it’s easy to see how the details can play a big factor. Ideas and principles are hard to measure, but the physical details are much easier, making a UX culture ripe for lack of conceptual play, and tight on measurable specifics. With the focus on details, can often come a lack of being able to see the 10,000 foot view, playing into the idea of the last 30% is strong, whereas the broad 70% can be a struggle.
2. Second, I’ve found in my discussions, success is often achieved from mastering old techniques. For example, calligraphy is mastered successfully from studying old masters, but there isn’t high praise given to striking out your own path and finding new innovative ways to approach the discipline. Therefore, the desire is to achieve parody of something, not strike out to create something new. With what I’ve seen working with various teams, this echoes true for me. The ability to create great work from a detailed system is amazing, but to blaze new trails is a long, difficult, and tough road.

I’ve discovered a wealth of cultural information from these discussions and as I mentioned, these few points are just the start and the most interesting I’ve found. I’m not exactly clear what my desired outcome is, as this started as a simply curiosity issue, but I hope it’s also piqued others interest from reading this.

Global focus

If we really want to move towards a more global focus in our teams, and a better age of thinking and design, we must develop a strong appreciation and understanding of the other cultures we work with. It’s not a nicety, but a necessity. Especially if you manage teams across these countries. The rise of these two specific countries, with cultures so different from Europe and the US, points to a specific need to understand what drives them, and why they have developed into what they are. This understanding will help everyone in finding the path to greater partnerships.

These links may provide some additional thoughts for those interested

• Hans Rosling talking at TED about Asia’s rise
• Devdutt Pattanaik discusses east vs west; the myths that mystify
• Charles and Ray Eames on design for India

Do you feel I’m incorrect on these cultural statements? What to give your perspective? Are you part of the workforce in one of these countries mentioned or worked with them? Let me know and I’d love to set up some time to chat over the phone and continue collecting information.

If there is a future for designers and marketers in big business, it lies not in brand, nor in “UX”, nor in any colorful way of framing total control over a consumer, such as “brand equity”, “brand loyalty”, the “end to end customer journey”, or “experience ownership”. It lies instead in encouraging behavioral change and explicitly shaping culture in a positive and lasting way.

Brand is a phenomenon that has emerged over the last century as a method of differentiation and control, with marketing beating a drum of “brand messaging”, “consistent impressions”, and a single “brand value”. User Experience is a more recent unicorn to chase, with designers claiming to drive business success through a focus on a prescriptive customer experience. There is a long history of extremely fragile collaboration between the offices of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and the traditional shepherds of behavior-by-design, as designers become enamored with brand embodiment in products, and marketers striving to “own” the product specifications, features and functions. The fragility of the bond is obvious, as both groups frequently disparage the other in both private and public venues. As blanket generalizations, designers describe marketers as less honest then themselves, and disparage the Product Requirement Document as a laundry-list of jargon and nonsense. Marketers, in turn, often view designers (and by proxy, the product itself) as a means to an end; the goal – revenue, market share, and brand equity – will be achieved through business rules, not through creative endeavors.

Both groups are to fault, and both groups are perilously ignoring the huge potential at their fingertips. As members of both groups cling to brand and UX as differentiators, they have mistakenly focused on control as a means of generating revenue. In fact, neither brand nor UX will serve as the driving force behind financial success in the coming decades. “User experience” is just a new name for old thinking, and “User experience practitioners” exhibit the same hubris that has long plagued “brand thinking”: the large name-as-mindshare mentality that a company can own a space, a segment, or even a consumer.

clients struggle with the reality of brand complacency

The Problems of Brand and User Experience
For most of the twentieth century, brand – and the marketing machine that created it – ruled the culture of developed countries. The earliest parts of the 1900s boasted brands built around industrialism and production, and these acted as literal and figurative crests, positioned as major pillars of production. The mid part of the century led to the family-focused brands positioned as domesticated icons of class and consumption. And the late 90’s exposed global brands, dominated by large, faceless and relatively unknown holding companies making profit simply by waiting for an opportune time to offload a company to another company. Yet the rules of the game are in deep flux, due to sustainability, a credit meltdown, and an awareness of humanitarian efforts in developing countries. The basic, fundamental properties of major brands are increasingly questioned, as evidenced by the disparaged and embattled Ford and Citibank, and the questions of these mega-brands are more commonly rhetorical and pejorative.

In spite of this, brand equity facilitated by market share is still a goal of the Fortune 500, and it is common to hear clients – both marketers and UX professionals – speak of “winning” in relationship to the user experience.

Brand complacency indicates a trend towards commoditization

Simultaneously, however, clients struggle with the reality of brand complacency. They describe how their customers have become familiar with a particular brand-purchasing behavior, and continue to perform that rote behavior based on circumstances. This includes placement on the shelf, color of a label, and the realization that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. There is no “relationship” with the customer; this is a fragile connection that is the consumptive equivalent to taking the same route to work each day. This is a scary reality to face, as brand complacency implies a dependency on switching-costs as a means of retaining market-share. Brand complacency indicates a trend towards commoditization.

The Threat of Commoditization
A commodity is something that has no qualitative differentiation. Mass production drives commoditization within a particular product line, while the traditional “bunch and swarm” mentality of the marketplace drives commoditization across product lines. A desire to create a new set of interactions is an urge to escape this push towards sameness. Innovation is a business goal to produce products that have qualitative differentiation, and there are various forms of innovation – such as disruptive innovation – which are intended to produce massive qualitative differentiation.

In western civilization, the artifact is continuing to diminish in relevance and importance. While people continue to consume things, these things are increasingly a means to an end. Our relative wealth has positioned even the lower-middle class in a position where there is time for leisure, entertainment, and emotionally charged experiences.

Interesting, too, is the speed at which the digital artifact has moved from being exclusive and expensive to nearly free and ubiquitous. Software, once priced at hundreds of dollars and appropriately as scarce, is now widely available for no cost; networked services have enabled content feeds across artifacts, rendering even some services as irrelevant in the larger scheme of the competitive landscape. As an example, for many years, Microsoft offered a for-fee product called Outlook, which manages electronic mail. Google then offered a free service called Gmail, which also manages electronic mail. Then, as Google externalized the Google mail feed through a series of APIs, mail can be embedded in unlikely places – including other products, such as an instant messenger client (like Trillian), or even on other websites. The “designed product” has become less interesting and relevant, and no matter the innovations pushed by Google or Microsoft in their products, the data itself has been shifted to a champion position of value.

Behavioral Change: The Goal of Our Work
The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact, and it references a dated model of dominance – one where a company produces something for a person to consume. This is the McDonalds approach to production, where an authoritative voice prescribes something and then gains efficiencies by producing it exactly as prescribed, in mass. The supposed new model is to design something for a person to experience, yet the allusion to experience is only an empty gesture. An experience cannot be built for someone. Fundamentally, one has an experience, and that is experience is always unique.

The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact

Interaction design is the design of behavior, positioned as dialogue between a person and an artifact. A person commonly doesn’t talk to an object; they use it, touch it, manipulate it, and control it. Usage, touching, manipulation and control are all dialogical acts, unspoken but conversational. Conversation is only a metaphor for interaction, but it’s a useful one. Many of the same ways we “read” an actual, spoken conversation have parallels in describing and discussing interactions between people and things. Consider:

• Both conversations and interactions have flow, and often have a beginning, middle, and end;
• Both conversations and interactions act as intertwining of multiple viewpoints. In a conversation, the viewpoints come from people; in an interaction, viewpoints are embedded in an artifact by a designer;
• Both conversations and interactions act as both methods of communication and methods of comprehension; participants both contribute to, and take from, the activity;
• Ultimately, both conversations and interactions serve to affect behavioral change in participants.

This is powerful, as it describes an implicit way of extending a designers reach – and personal point of view, or message – into the masses. It is this mass distribution of dialogue that describes culture; we build culture through our objects, services and systems, as we define behavior through interactions. This is of equal prominence to the claim of “designing experiences”, yet leaves open the potential – the need – for the people (pardon, the consumers) to actually participate and contribute in a meaningful way. The things we do in the design studio have grand significance in the world. Our design decisions – even small, detailed, nuanced design decisions – resonate for years, and usually in a phenomenally large scale. Yet because these design decisions have an impact that is diffused and quiet, our impact is hard to notice and pin down. Culture is something that’s not immediately describable; the question “where does culture come from?” is almost as large a question as “where does life come from”, and is equally as evasive.

Cultural Change: The Implications of Our Work
This is a fundamental point that serves to elevate the importance of a designer, and also serves to articulate the implicit responsibility a designer has to the world around them. It’s such a fundamental point that it’s worth making again, in a more overt manner:

1. The interaction designer designs various aspects of an artifact;
2. The designer either explicitly or implicitly hopes to change behavior in a user;
3. This behavioral change is “baked” into the artifact, and then disseminated, in mass;
4. The artifact serves as a stimulus to change behavior in society;
5. This combination of artifacts and behavior describes culture.

Every design decision – from the large and strategic decision to design accounting software, to the small and nuanced decision to use a checkbox instead of a radio button – contributes to the behavior of the masses, and helps define the culture of our society. This describes an enormous opportunity for designers, one that is rarely realized. We are, quite literally, building the culture around us; arguably, our effect is larger and more immediate than even policy decisions of our government. We are responsible for both the positive and negative repercussions of our design decisions, and these decisions have monumental repercussions.

Our Deep Responsibility
For most designers, this responsibility is hidden by the celebratory claims of designing experiences. This claim almost abdicates the long-term responsibility, as “an experience” has an end, at which time the designers’ role seemingly ends. The work is meaningful only on an immediate level of craft and creation, and while designers often take pride in a product once it has launched, they do not frequently make the connection between their creations and the culture that surrounds them. “They’ve stopped using my product – their experience is over.” Convenient – but utterly false. Because emphasis is placed on innovation or brand, designers learn to value their work based on newness or recognition; metrics for success are tied to profit and marketshare, rather than positive and long-term culture change. As the causality is extended over a long period of time, it is diffused as a single product mixes with the rest of the milieu. The individual contribution of a single designer feels muted and insignificant, as there is no feedback loop to indicate the role of an individual design in shaping culture and society.

These negative qualities of our last century’s focus on brand and experience have been forced upon the business of design and the design of business, but it is only interaction and the ability to change behavior that will serve as fundamental pillars upon which to drive successful new endeavors. We must refocus and reposition our work within major companies away from a marketing-driven focus on brand and a design-driven focus on experiential ownership. Instead, it is up to us to emphasize the value a company can provide in changing human behavior – the lasting, nuanced, intellectual, and deep responsibility we have to the culture we are building.

This requires a conscious tradeoff and reprioritization. Instead of control, we must focus on frameworks. Instead of seeking to own and prescribe a singular experience, we must strive to adapt to the peculiarities and nuances of human behavior. And instead of complicity absorbing the corporate drive towards power and brand positioning, we must acknowledge the huge responsibility implicit in our work and constantly vocalize how our work supports humanity and the cultural landscape that surrounds us. We’ve built that cultural landscape, and we owe it to ourselves and to our work to tend to our creation as it morphs, changes and adapts. As you cringe from someone talking into a Bluetooth headset on the subway, or smile as a child and mother look at photos on their phone, realize that this technological culture is ours in the making. Both the bad and good are our ongoing fault and responsibility.

Interaction 10

If you want to meet Jon Kolko in real life: he is one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 10. It is the third annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Savannah, Georgia (USA).

Photos by: hipposrunsuperfast, Lord Jim & arquera

Organizations are tenuous phenomena; they can fall apart at any time. To navigate the landscape of organizational culture interaction designers need a set of practical tools, language & knowledge drawn from the world of cultural anthropology.

It’s happened to all of us. We walk into what we think is a Web redesign project, only to find we have unwittingly ignited the fires of WW III in our client’s organization. What begins as a simple design project descends – quickly – into an intra-organizational battle, with the unprepared interaction designer caught in the crossfire.

What is it about design projects that seem to attract such power struggles? Contrary to what you might think, being stuck in the middle of an internecine battle is actually an opportunity to effect meaningful change on your client’s organization. But it requires a set of practical tools to negotiate these battles and a more sophisticated language and knowledge to exploit these events to create meaningful change.

The Glue Inside Organizations: Taken-for-Granted Assumptions

Organizations are tenuous phenomena; they can fall apart at any time. It’s quite extraordinary, actually, that organizations don’t spontaneously disintegrate regularly. Organizations have no force of law or violence. They cannot force their members to remain within them. Their members are autonomous adults and can leave, reject, or even revolutionize the organization at any time. Yet organizations endure, held together by taken-for-granted patterns of social interaction.

These patterns of interaction are exactly what the organization must have to survive. Everyone must share what sociologists Berger and Luckman call a “common stock of knowledge” – like using “bandwidth” synonymously with “time” – for an organization to function properly. We could not waste time at every meeting explaining what “bandwidth” or “DTC” or “short selling” mean. Instead we rely on this common stock of knowledge; newcomers must be inculcated with this knowledge for the organization to function.

This common stock of knowledge is exactly what keeps an organization together. The sum of this knowledge is often called “organizational culture.” IBM, for example, would not have the same stock of knowledge as, say, Zappos. What is taken for granted at Patagonia is not the same as what is taken for granted at Ford. Organizational culture is key to keeping an organization intact. Without this sum of knowledge, members of the organization would spend too much time trying to figure out what to do or say in given situations.

An organization simply could not function without its members knowing what to do, say and wear day-to-day. Interestingly, organizations that send out the “dress code memo” are actually reinforcing this argument. If its members are routinely wearing shorts and flip-flops to work, this suggests that the “common stock of knowledge” supports this kind of clothing. The “dress code memo” usually causes tension, derision, and – paradoxically – greater social glue among the casually dressed members of the organization.

Knowing what to do or say in any given moment gives us comfort. It is less stressful. It is efficient. It is even pleasant. Organizations must have a critical mass of its members in this comfort zone to continue to function. In other words, organizational culture must be firmly cemented with a large enough number of its members for an organization to endure.

The downside of culture: change is hard

Culture is, by definition, resistant to change. We like to know what is “appropriate” or normal in everyday situations and the more we engage in these behaviours, the more “normal” they become. The French father of sociology Emile Durkheim even had a word for not knowing what to do: “anomie,” or the lack of norms. Modern life was plagued with anomie, Durkheim argued, causing alienation and confusion.

Organizational cultures like to stay the same, even when it seems irrational. In her painstakingly detailed analysis of the Challenger crash, Diane Vaughan showed that NASA’s major failure was not technical at all. Rather, it was systematic denial which lead to a distortion of the real risks involved in using rubber O-rings on a cold morning. NASA’s organizational culture systematically downplayed certain kinds of information because it threatened the way the organization currently functioned. In a sense, it was the organization’s attempt to endure which paradoxically sowed the seeds of its own demise.

Understanding organizational cultures

Interaction designers are accustomed to discerning individual preferences, particularly for interactivity. But they may not be as well versed in understanding cultural preferences. Anthropology offers us a very clear framework for mapping cultures against key values.

Florence Kluckhohn’s “value orientation model” describes culture as a set of values. To that end, she suggested that cultures have five key elements to them.

Figure 1: F.R. Kluckhohn’s Value Orientation Model

A culture’s value orientation to nature, for example, can be one which values being in harmony with nature. Japan’s penchant for miniaturist design, for example, may be explained by its value of living in harmony with nature.

An organization’s orientation to time may hold the key to understanding why your design project is mired in the mud. How the organization collectively values the future has significant implications for interaction designers, which after all are the harbingers of a thing called “change.” Toyota, for example, exemplifies an organization that values “becoming” or ever aspiring. Such an organization values “new-ness” as inherently worthy.  The French wine-making industry, by contrast, values the past (to a fault, if recent market-share figures are an indicator of success). Reverence for tradition, celebrating its members’ long tenures, and elaborate discussions of past examples are key indicators of a past-oriented organization.

Interaction designers should pay close attention to how their client’s organization values activity.

An organization’s orientation to social relations is also important for interaction designers. The typical interactive agency (or management consultancy for that matter) values individualism. Sociologist Alice Lam calls this kind of organization an “ad hocracy,” which is highly innovative and creative. But such organizations are also very vulnerable to its knowledge walking out the door when the latest “rising star” takes her talent and knowledge with her to the next organization.

By contrast, Lam argues, banks are collective in their orientation. They value consensus above all. This may make decision-making maddeningly slow but it also preserves the organization. It ensures that all members of the organization share in the common stock of knowledge and thereby maintains the organization itself. Interactive agencies may be highly innovative, but they are also highly volatile. Banks may not be innovative but they are stable.

Interaction designers are accustomed to discerning individual preferences, particularly for interactivity. But they may not be as well versed in understanding cultural preferences.

Interaction designers should also pay close attention to how their client’s organization values activity. Some organizations care nothing for what may become of a certain project, if only that something is happening. This kind of organization values “doing.” But perhaps more common to Western organizations is the implicit value on “becoming.” German sociologist Max Weber became famous for his analysis of “the protestant work ethic,” which is really an exposition on the Calvinist value of “becoming.” To be a competent Protestant, Weber argued, one must always be aspiring to work harder, accumulate more and above all, delay gratification. This spirit is so key to capitalism that Western, capitalist organizations may all implicitly value this notion. In such cases, interaction designers may find themselves in the midst of an ever-aspiring organization that wants “best in class” wireframes and project plans but seems strangely unconcerned with a relative lack of actual progress.

Interaction designers finding themselves in the middle or an intra-organizational war may be working with an individualistic organization that values competition above all else. This is common to sales-driven organizations, that offer individual incentives and bonuses to their members.

Organization Design: How To Incorporate It Into Interaction Design Projects

Before you start a design project, evaluate your client’s organization. This need not be a detailed research project but an intuitive ethnographic craft. Stakeholder interviews provide a great opportunity to gather insight about the values of your client’s organization. A colleague and I used to call this stage “business ethnographic gathering,” or BEGging. Do ask about business requirements and goals. But pay attention also to what is valued.

Past-orientation

Does your client spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the ways things have been done in the past? This may reveal a past-orientation. Honour that client’s value of the past. Celebrate past successes. Build “rituals of reverence” into your design process, where the organization’s members can savour the beauty and grandeur of their organization’s venerated history. Carefully frame innovation as putting icing on an already delicious cake. Above all, do not attack foundational elements directly. This is akin to throwing away the Mona Lisa.

Individualistic

Does your client take you into “confidence” frequently and reveal that everyone else in his organization “doesn’t get it”? Does he discuss how he would like to best his rival department? This client’s organization is individualistic and competitive. Consensus is still needed for collaborative design but this kind of organization makes collaboration difficult. For such a client, frame collaboration as an opportunity for him to be a “champion of innovation,” which all the individual glory thereto. Encourage him to be a “hero” for the organization and construct a narrative that allows him to be “victorious” but only if he becomes a collaborative, transformative leader.

Becoming

Does your client’s organization have many symbols of future plans? Perhaps the walls are plastered with posters of its “next generation” goods or services. Perhaps your client spends much time talking about her future “vision” and how she wants to “inspire” her colleagues and her customers. The value here is placed on “becoming,” and not necessarily on “doing.” Your challenge as an interaction designer is actualizing her vision. The idea with this kind of culture is to create some material reality out of the constant visioning, but at the same time allowing the client organization to engage in this imagination process continually. Allow them to savour future “dreams” in concrete form.

In this case, frame your need for concrete deliverables and milestones as “best in class project methodology,” or an “innovative service delivery process.” Convince her that being a “next-generation organization” is about constantly materializing her visions. Show her prototypes. Bring her evidence of the first-mover’s advantage. And above all, show her current, existing evidence of how innovative companies continue to produce innovations instead of simply thinking about it.

When Culture Isn’t Enough

Even sociologists tire of organizations that are continually dysfunctional. As an interaction designer, you can learn to recognize when these organizations are beyond the power of one designer. If the organization has a critical mass of values that are antithetical to your own, then it may be time to move on. Even better, however, is to use the value-orientation model to pre-screen potential clients. We may not all have the luxury of picking and choosing only the clients we want but using a systematic approach beforehand will surely reduce the number of wars we unwittingly ignite within our client organizations.

“Every Thing Bad Is Good For You” is the title of the book Steven Johnson wrote in 2005. In this book he claims that “Against popular belief, pop culture is actually making us smarter”. And he explains this theory by using the term “The Sleeper Cuve” derived from the movie Sleeper by Woody Allan.

Johnson writes how TV shows have evolved from shows like Dragnet and Starsky & Hutch with a single plot line per episode to shows like The Sopranos and Lost with multiple plot lines intersecting and over 21 episodes. These new shows are challenging us to remember and connect multiple relationships over an entire season instead of just one show. This complexity was unthinkable 20 years ago. But in today’s society its different for we have been secretly trained to accept this complexity for the last decade. This is the Sleeper curve hard at work.

For decades we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steady declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the “masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. But in fact, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less.

Complex games
Another fascinating thing which struck by me in this book is the way computer games influence us and affect our daily lives. Like popular TV computer games have become more complex for the last 20 years. Where Tetris and Donkey Kong require little time to “get”, we now have Grand Theft Auto IV and Medal of Honor. These games can be maddingly hard and present us with a lot more freedom and complexity then those early games. Computer games have been flexing our mental muscle for the last two decades which in turn has been helping us see the world a bit clearer.

Tetris for example trains our pattern recognition skills, while Sim City teaches us about the way economics work. Games in general help us with decision making and the way we analyze and solve problems.

Visual recognition
The book descibes a study at the University of Rochester where subjects were asked to perform a series of quick visual recognition tests like picking the color of a letter or counting the number of objects on a screen. The results showed that regular games consistantly outpreformed the non-gamer group, that the gamers turned out to be more social, more confident, and more comfortable solving problems creatively.

We as a culture are increasingly demanding more complexity and more intelectual challanges. We’ve grown to expect a certain “toughness” in the games we play and the things we watch on TV. We’re actively fostering a new generation of problem solvers, smarter, faster and more capable of filtering massive amounts of information, putting a strain on the way we develop new things. Creating a sort of “more-cleverer-then-thou” kind of culture among the designers and creative people alike. Always trying to one-up the competition with a newer snazzier way of doing things. How are we going to keep this up?

Top photo by: Jay Dugger