No Comments Written by Robert on May 23, 2008 – 11:56 pm

Cross-cultural design speCross-cultural design aks to the ability of design products, designers, or design-producing entities to traverse cultural boundaries.

Either the products themselves physically and literally traverse cultural boundaries, or designers and design entities cross the boundaries and operate within the domain of another culture.

The cultural boundaries can be aligned according to broad national, ethnic, or geographic categories, but they can also be defined according to smaller-scale, socioeconomic divisions within a culture.

Cross-cultural design raises a number of issues. Among them is the question of hegemony, wherein one culture is thought to have greater cultural power than another, whether because of economics, politics, social standing, or other reasons. As such, discussion of cross-cultural design relies heavily on the theoretical discourse of colonial or postcolonial criticism, which in turn finds its roots in the work of structuralism, poststructuralism, phenomenology, and Marxism, each of which raise questions of epistemology and of connections to underlying power structures.

Within these approaches, design is seen to be the carrier of cultural values that cross borders, so any particular act of design can be the site of contestation between one set of values and another. As an embodiment or carrier of cultural values, design can be mined for information on the dynamic interactions between the central or dominant culture and the marginalized or peripheral culture.

Within this dynamic, design is also seen as a means by which a subjected culture regains its independence. Viewed in less polemical ways, cross-cultural design relates to the concept of trans-cultural design, or the ability of design to transcend the limitations of a specific context and speak to universal or common contemporary values shared by other cultures.

As such, design moves out of the realm of culturally bound language and text and becomes an easily translatable language of communication based on aesthetics, formal qualities, or function.

From this perspective, design constitutes a flexible universal language and a powerful medium of cultural exchange that is rapidly being appropriated for business, politics, and other purposes.

Taken another step further, cross-cultural design moves into the territory of globalism and global culture ( Globalization) in which culture separates from traditional political or geographic boundaries and establishes new global territories of operation.

These new territories, or “scapes” as some theorists have called them, denote new relationships between and among design objects, users, institutions, and systems of commerce that span the globe and connect people in radically new ways unprecedented in history.