On the theory and design of culture

Globalization has undoubtedly become a fact and trend. People in the "Global village" communication and exchanges has long been beyond the real life offline. The internet connects all corners of the globe and forms a virtual online community, making it a reality to communicate across cultures and nationalities at anytime. Rejoicing, people have also found that the design of an online community to accommodate global users, in line with the habits of users around the world, face enormous challenges. These challenges, of course, include the most basic languages, currency symbols, units of measurement, and so on. But much more is how to solve the problem that people from different cultural backgrounds have different psychological responses to the same design. In this article, I try to explore the following questions: What is culture and what are the characteristics of culture? What are the areas covered by cultural studies? What is the relationship between culture and website design?

The concept

of

culture and cultural studies

The culture is a very big concept, generally divides the material culture, the system culture and the spiritual psychology culture from the structure. The founder of Cultural Studies, Edward Tylor (1832-1917), described it as: "Culture or civilization, in its broad national sense, is a complex whole encompassing knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any capacity and habit acquired as a member of a society." "Culture has the following characteristics:

1 Human nature and mass: it is created by human beings, and is related to the activities and results of people and people. This feature provides a possibility for us to study a particular group and nation.

2. Common-Sex and diversity: by the nature of human beings, manifested in the different time, space, nationality, time, class background, there are some universal and commonalities of cultural phenomena. On the other hand, the culture in different conditions and there are considerable differences, showing a wealth of diversity, such as national, class nature, regional and times and so on. The same sex allows all nationalities to communicate with each other, understand the reality is feasible, but the diversity and difference has created many obstacles to communication.

3 Inheritance and variability: intergenerational generation in specific groups. is acquired by the individual. However, the culture will continue to change. The inheritance and variability of culture show that the cultures of different nationalities will change with time, and when we do cultural research on a country, we should pay attention to which age the study culture belongs to.

4 Functional and systematic: human culture is a huge system, by a number of cultural elements with specific functions in accordance with a certain structure of the organic whole. So culture is a law to be found, these laws can be mastered by us and applied in specific areas.

Cultural studies have been a hot field in the last century. It is not a pure discipline, and it is in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, cultural criticism, art theory, philosophy and political science. In other words, cultural studies have included any theory that can be used to analyze cultural phenomena, and the concepts of culture have been incorporated into all areas of research. To help you understand the areas that cultural studies can cover, the author draws a picture:

In this picture, we can see that culture is like a gene (different genetic innate), is infiltrated into people's bone marrow, culture affects people's ideology, communication, communication, cognition, aesthetic and other aspects, thus affecting our habits and attitudes towards things. Website design This area of course is no exception. Different nationalities have different expectations for interaction, aesthetics, search and marketing. For example, many designers have such intuitive experience, the Western Web site design is often concise, clean and our Chinese website is often information density, design fancy. I have with a lot of Western friends, they agree to tell the author, the Chinese website feeling information density is too large, animation elements too much, their eyes do not know where to look. Why is there such a difference between Chinese web design and western websites? Can we analyze the reason from the cultural point of view? The answer is yes.

theory and design of cross-culture research

Hofstede, the famous founder of Cultural theory, said: "Only through comparison, culture exists (Culture only exists by comparison)". We only through comparison, to find different cultural background design in the content, function, aesthetics, visual information, page layout, interactive navigation on the different, in order to get to the enemy, with the design to compensate for differences, integration, so that the international web site to serve the global audience. In fact, cross-cultural theory in the last century has shown a blossoming, hundred birds contend the scene. But until recent years, some scholars began to study the cross-cultural dimension of Web site design, such as Aaron Marcus's research in the past few years has been focused on cultural research and design. So far, most of the academic citations have come from three tycoons: Geert Hofstede, Edward Hall, frons trompenaars and Charles Hampen-turner.

Hofstede and cultural dimension of 2.1 Geert

Hofstede's theory of cultural dimension began in the 70 's, and after several decades of replication experiments by scholars from various countries, it proved that the theory is still valid. His five dimensions were as follows:

1 the right distance (power Distance): In an organization (family, school, community, etc.), the degree of centralization and dictatorship of the leadership, and the extent to which a society can accept this unequal distribution of power.

2 collectivism and Individualism (collectivism vs. Individualism): Individualism--valuing the individual's own value and needs, and relying on individual efforts to gain benefits for himself. Collectivism-from birth to a combination of internal groups and hope to receive care and maintain absolute loyalty. To differentiate between "within the group" and "outside the group"

3 the degree of masculinity and femininity (masculinity vs. femininity): The value standard of the dominant position in society. Male Society-dominance has masculinity (such as assertiveness, aggressiveness, perseverance and calm). Female society is the opposite. The higher the evaluation of masculinity in a society, the greater the difference in values between men and women.

4 uncertainty avoidance (uncertainty avoidance): The degree of panic that cultural members feel about uncertain or unknown situations.

5) long-term and short-term tendencies (long-term vs. short-term orientation): whether a society makes decisions will be influenced by the moral standards of historical accumulation. Asian countries tend to use historical standards, whereas Western countries tend to use their beliefs and the pursuit of truth as a yardstick.

Hofstede through more scientific experiments, to the world more than 70 countries in various dimensions have played a point, for us to study a country's culture to provide an important reference. The following is a comparison between China and the United States, Russia, Brazil and other cultures. From this we can see that American culture in the distance of power, individualism scored far more than China, which also explains the spirit of "freedom" and "equality for all" in America, and China's long-term propensity to score much more than the United States, that is to say, we are accustomed to using historical accumulated moral standards to judge things, This, of course, is inseparable from the history of our Chinese more than 5,000 years.

As we said before, culture is inherited and variability, culture is not immutable, give the culture a static score from this point is not scientific, but the culture in a relatively short period of time will not easily change, so these scores for us to study culture, research culture on people's character, values, cognition, The impact of communication provides a very important reference, so we can further serve the site design, to make more consistent with people's cultural habits of the site.

1.2 Hall and Culture dimension

Hall (Edward Hall), born in the United States in 1914, taught at many prestigious universities in the United States to create "interpersonal distance learning" to study how people from different cultures deal with the relationship between time and space. He divides culture into single working hours and working hours, high context and low context, and directly affects our understanding of culture and the influence of culture on design.

2.2.1 Single work culture and multi-work culture

Simplex is also called single-threaded, one-hour culture tends to deal with one task at a time; many hours are also called multithreading, and people with multiple working hours tend to handle multiple tasks at once. The difference between single work and multiple hours is shown in the following table:

Dimension single work culture

(Western countries)

Multi-working time culture

(Asian and Latin American countries)

interpersonal relationships Less than the existing schedule the existing schedule is less than the interpersonal activities to organize the time for the activities that need to be cooperated; Strictly abide by the agreed time interpersonal coordination activities Time is a flexible time to touch, no fixed work/private time separation work time and private time have obvious demarcation work time and private time have no obvious demarcation the whole of the cognitive activity and the organization separation; The task takes the time invested as a unit of measurement (such as an hourly, per-minute task) and a whole organization. The mission to the organizational objectives of the contribution to the unit of measurement

In human-computer interaction, single working hours and multiple working hours affect people's operating habits, the performance is as follows:

Single work culture multi-work culture tendency to focus on a task or application that may lead to neglect of the overall situation, or even to ignore the response to the warning use of information systems will be between tasks or applications, as far as possible

Fully grasp the overall situation, but may also be due to the transition between the task to produce errors

attaches great importance to the clear process, in the standard procedure is not known generally not according to the new situation change process standard process is not important, they will adapt to browse the same information, the point of the link, long time to browse the same information at the time of the link less, short

Google has a good application for this difference: in the search results page, Westerners tend to click into the next page directly, because they choose their own goals and then browse the depth until they find the information they want. In Asia, people prefer to have a new tab open, because they will open a few more tabs, compare them, and process several search results. So you will find that if you search in China with Google, each click on a link, the page will be opened in a new tab, and in Europe and the United States, each click on a link, will directly open the link page.

2.2.2 High situational culture and low situational culture

In high situational culture, many things are self-evident and left to the culture to explain. Because a few words can effectively convey complex implications to the inner circle (but to the outside, such words are less efficient to convey, so the choice of words and words is important in a high situational culture, and in a low situational culture, the communicator needs to communicate the meaning of words more clearly, And the importance of single words in low context culture is also relatively low. The characteristics of high situational culture and low situational culture are very different, as follows:

High situation culture low situation culture to express more implicit information, using metaphor, there are many words outside the voice of the message to express relatively simple, The direct many nonverbal communication language communication superfluous body language values tend to be in the team consciousness values tend to the tendency of the individual to spend time cultivating and establishing long-term personal relationships tend to develop short-term personal relationships emphasizing that the spiral logic emphasizes that linear logic attaches importance to nonverbal interaction, It is easier to read nonverbal expressions and to focus on direct verbal interaction, it is difficult to read nonverbal expressions that tend to add more "emotions" to the expression and tend to add more "logic" to the expression in favor of conveying a simple, implicit, ambiguous message that tends to convey organized information, giving enough detail, Emphasis on key words and technical signs

In website design, high context culture and low context culture also show different characteristics on the website:

parameter high context cultural tendency low context cultural tendency animation high frequency animation, especially moving characters less use animation, just used to highlight some effects, For example, the value of the image of the majority of the values of the collective community to promote the value of individual values of individual and product separation or integration of products described in the picture of personal use of the picture to express the degree of personal life transparency of the Web site navigation using exploratory methods, link-driven,

Process oriented

to the site navigation using clear and even bloated clue hints,

Goal-oriented

style vs. parallel navigation There are a lot of toolbars and menus, a new page opens in the Browser a new window will open a toolbar and fewer menus, and links are open in the same window

1.2 Cultural research and website design

Network design is the virtual reality of the real world, is a symbol of people's mental state and cultural habits. The cultural dimension has an important guiding role in recognizing the values and behaviors of different nationalities. Through the cultural dimension theory, we should find out the design differences caused by cultural differences and answer the following design-related questions:

1 different cultures of the website page is the information type or visual type?

2 What are the different psychological perceptions of color in each nation?

3 How should text typesetting be the most suitable for public reading habits?

4 How do visual elements, such as logos, pictures and display forms, embody cultural psychology?

5 How do cultural factors and cultural symbols affect people's aesthetic appreciation of design?

6 What is the difference between people of different cultural backgrounds in the expectation of the function of the website?

7 What are the preferences of people of different cultural backgrounds in different interactive and navigational forms?

......

But finding cultural differences is a way, not an end. To do an available, easy-to-use, easy to use the globalized Web site, we must recognize cultural differences, the cultural differences into a design must be considered factors, so that the design of the integration of cultural differences, in order to maximize the load of many users expectations, in order to allow the site to play its value in the global market. How to differentiate, how to let the design fusion cultural differences, how to seek the same in many different, how to find a balance in each dimension, will become a solution to the global Web site's important proposition.

Source: http://www.aliued.com/2013/09/18/2237/