28. PROCESS BOOK // Week 1

🛈 This 10-week process book is going to include my weekly reflections to the readings and discussions in the international communication and UX class I'm taking this term. Since this blog is about culture, I figured it would serve as a great medium for this purpose. 

1. Time Visualization

Different individuals view the concept of time differently, depending on their cultural background and personal philosophy. For this in-class exercise, I paired up with my classmate to graphically show what we imagine time is.

We both agreed to show it as a timeline. I put a human in the center, facing the future on the right. I then added a cloud above him - these are his thoughts. He can think about his past event, including his early childhood memories. But the thoughts about the future cannot jump that far as he is able to imagine/plan for only his near future.

I read this article a couple years ago, and it reminded me of our discussion about time representation. Different cultures not only view time differently, but they also treat other people's time differently. 

2. Favorite Quotes

"The gossip theory might sound like a joke, but numerous studies support it. Even today the vast majority of human communication -whether in the form of emails, phone calls or newspaper columns -is gossip." - Y.N. Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind.

This quote was an insight to me, a revelation, but it totally makes sense. If you analyze all human communication - it's all about discussing what others do or what they did. People love storytelling, and it goes far beyond the media!

"Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a  dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations." - Y.N. Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind.

I like this quote because it states the fact about the duality of our world. There is something real and something intangible, imagined that we believe in -- religions, brands, traditions, politics, beauty ideals, common sense -- and that in my opinion has a much greater effect on the formation of an individual as a social being. That's where culture resides in - the imagined reality. 

"To create experiences that work for many places and cultures, companies and their UX teams have to recognize underlying similarities as well as differences, whether this is similarities in the structure of a task or human truths that relate to their own product." - W. Quesenbery and D. Szuc, Global UX: Design and Research in a Connected World

I like that this statement encompasses both - the need to research user actions (how international users use a product differently) and also the need to consider their motivations, thoughts, potential taboos, etc, which definitely influence their perceptions of a product and the related needs they have.

3. Explorations

In the Sapiens book (Chapter 2), Harari compares humans to other animals, making a point that while they still have the ability to communicate with each other, the human language is superior because we can communicate in much more detail. This was key to our cooperation and survival, and that's what makes us "sapiens". 

This reminded me about human-animal comparisons from one of the books about curiosity (I'm not sure which one it was, as I read a lot of books about curiosity). In that book, the author claimed that what makes us different from monkeys (and chimpanzees specifically, as they are our closest relatives) is our ability to ask questions due to our innate curiosity. This very ability has led us throughout the centuries to innovation. That's how major technology that has shaped our world got invented (and technology surely influences culture) and we've become the society we are today.

I found this Medium article that discusses this phenomenon in similar terms: "Apes don’t ask questions because they can’t form assumptions about the thoughts and perspectives of others." She describes it as the theory of mind (the ability to think and believe in something, but also understand  that others have thoughts and beliefs that may be different from our own) - the ability that only humans have. To build a strong society, one needs to know how to cooperate, just as Harari suggests, but if you aren't capable of understanding another point of view, you can't. The Medium article author states, "We ask questions because we assume someone - someone outside of our own mind - could have the answers. Or at least that they'll be able to help us figure it out."

4. Sketches

5. Personal/Professional Inspirations

The idea of thinking both globally and locally is great because it lets designers and researchers adapt a product for universal use without disregarding local cultural differences and in many cases adapting it for those very specific differences. I'm going to try and do that in my work -  look for similarities and differences between cultures (the Internet offers great resources to study cultures deeply even remotely).