35. PROCESS BOOK // Week 8

1. Favorite Quotes


"The constraints of developing countries usually force technological breakthroughs that help innovations crack global markets. The new products become platforms on which companies can add features and capabilities that will delight many tiers of consumers across the world." (A. Winter, "Engineering Reverse Innovations")

I agree with this statement because it's true that having more constraints (as in thinking about non-ideal locations and other physical disturbances) can make designers re-think the solution from scratch to address them, and that can open up opportunities (assuming the product gains success in the local market) on the global arena, since the likelihood of such issues is high in other emerging markets and may even be relevant for first-world countries with local adaptations. 

"Levitt (1983) suggested that the world has become a global market place, or a ‘global village’, where each and every consumer shares similar values, lifestyles and desires for product quality and modernity...Globalization advocates, such as Plocher and Honold (2000), have taken this to their advantage and presented the case for ‘globally-oriented-mass-produced goods’ believing that the homogeneity of global culture, the similarity of thinking and the cost increase in accommodating design nuances of foreign cultures into products would be good reasons for encouraging such ‘global’ products worldwide."  (P. Sathikh and Kumar, "Transitive Culture: How Global Product Design is Changing User Behavior")

I picked this quote because I agree and disagree with it. I agree that there are certain universal truths, needs, and values (such as family, entertainment, comfort) across global markets, but at the same time there are so many individual cultural variations that require adaptation that it's simply wrong to try to forcefully homogenize the world by universal design, as the following quote says, "These global products are produced on the simple idea that it is necessary to ‘homogenize and converge consumers’ needs and tastes in order to create an infrastructure for unified marketing and for the selling of standardized products (Razzaghi, et al 2005)." 


"The concept of emerging markets is usually too general to design a product around, sometimes even if the target market is just one country." (A. Chavan, "The Washing Machine that Ate My Sari - Mistakes in Cross-Cultural Design")


Emerging markets are everywhere. In fact, they are spread across continents - Asia, Africa,  South America, and considering their cultural and historical differences, they can never be merged into a single pile as a "target market". And just like this quote points out, even one country might be too broad to design for - you really need to know your local demographic, as regions/tribes/nations do differ even within a single country. Take Russia - it's a huge developing (Second World) country with over 160 nationalities, each of which has its own customs, languages, religions, and culture. 

"Standard economic measurements like expected growth rate are certainly useful in evaluating an emerging market, but the history of emerging market design is littered with the wrecks of product launches that foundered on subtle nuances like speech protocols or the ways dining implements are used " (A. Chavan, "The Washing Machine that Ate My Sari - Mistakes in Cross-Cultural Design")

I think evaluating case studies within the emerging market space you are entering is particularly helpful as you can learn on somebody else's mistakes instead of making your own. Case studies, news, anecdotes from people who had conducted research or designed in that market previously - any of these would help in preparation.

"The story of how Guard came to be illustrates the balance companies must strike when creating products for emerging markets: It's not as simple as slapping a foreign label on an American product." ("How Gillette execs spent a fortune developing a razor for India using MIT student focus groups...without considering the country's lack of running water")

This speaks to the importance of being immersed in the environment and getting firsthand experience with the local users. Without being present, it's very easy to "assume" and start "slapping labels on", especially coming from the dominant culture. 

2. Notes

Reverse innovation is the design products and services in developing economies and, after adding some global tweaks, exporting them to developed countries (A. Winter, "Engineering Reverse Innovations")

• failure of existing reverse innovation projects stems from a failure to grasp the unique economic, social, and technical contexts of emerging markets
• this failure is avoidable if you adhere to certain design principles
• success comes when engineering creatively intersects with strategy
• do not minimize the upfront risks - don't downplay the importance of reducing the product's cost and improving its performance. In emerging markets, your product must match or beat the performance of competitor products at a lower cost (100% of the performance at 10% of the price)

Five traps to avoid when reverse innovating

1. Adapting existing Western products to the local market instead of designing new ones from scratch

• Design principle: Define the problem independent of solutions. E.g., when the MIT team analyzed the wheelchair market, it found that of 40 million people with disabilities who didn’t have wheelchairs, 70% lived in rural areas, where regular wheelchairs wouldn't work, so they designed new minds with that in mind. The team designed design requirements for the local market: a price of $250, 3 mile travel range/day, indoor usability and maneuverability, and easy, low-cost maintenance/local repair.

2. Trying to reduce the price by eliminating features

• Design principle: Create an optimal solution, not a watered-down one, using the design freedoms available in emerging markets.

3. Forgetting to think through all the local technical requirements

• Design principle: Analyze the technical landscape behind consumer problem

4. Neglecting stakeholders

• Design principle: Test products with as many stakeholders as possible

5. Disbelief in the global appeal of the products designed for emerging markets

• Design principle: Use emerging market's design constraints to create global winners

Transitive Culture

• World's culture is being transformed due to globalization

"Transitive culture is behavior as it is being cultivated, or cultured, that connects the accumulated experience of the past with the present way of life influenced by artifacts and products of the technology era, which is being socially learnt and transmitted" (P. Sathikh and Kumar, "Transitive Culture: How Global Product Design is Changing User Behavior")

• Global products share the same features across all world's markets. "These global products are produced on the simple idea that it is necessary to ‘homogenize and converge consumers’ needs and tastes in order to create an infrastructure for unified marketing and for the selling of standardized products (Razzaghi, et al 2005)."
• The emotional and cultural importance behind buying decisions is often overlooked in this process
• Globalization (forcing universal product features) results in cultural neglect
• Global design often means finding a common denominator that enhances global validity of products 
• One of the first signs of transitive culture came with global mobile phone penetration, which since then has found various local manifestations (news/prayers deliver over sms and new movie releases through mobile phone access in India, cell phone novels in Japan, etc.)

Case Studies

Whirlpool Case Study (A. Chavan, "The Washing Machine that Ate My Sari - Mistakes in Cross-Cultural Design")

When designing for an emerging market, the following segmentation will help establish who the target group is:

• Designing for the other 90percent
• Design for the bottom of the pyramid
• Design for sustainable development
• Innovation for emergingmarkets
• Design for social change
• Design for global development
• Design for emerging markets
• (DEM)

When designing for an emerging market, do not assume that users' needs and expectations are the same as in your own environment. "Kellogg made the error of transposing developed-market experience onto an emerging market, assuming that people in Bangalore started their day in the same way as people in Battle Creek, Michigan" and ate something cold (cereal with cold milk) for breakfast. Kellogg then pulled the cornflakes that would dissolve in warm milk from stores and reengineered them to stand up to warm milk. 

Whirlpool's the "World Washer" (globally designed washing machine) failed in India because traditional Indian garments, Sari, were thin and got caught and torn in the space between the machine's agitator and drum. 

Emerging markets need solutions at affordable price points, since the overall living standard is much lower as in the West, even though there is a local gap between the poor and the rich (in local terms). "Streamlining or eliminating complex features, without reducing core quality, results in a more attractive and affordable product."

Bollywood Method of research can be used in India: " “emotion tickets” are categorized into the nine rasas, each one expressed in a booklet through images and dialogue from Bollywood films. When interacting with products, customers record their feelings using the appropriate emotion ticket." This method helps put the participants at ease and simplifies the feedback process. 

Pampers Case Study (M. Frazier, "How P&G Brought the Diaper Revolution to China")

Disposable diapers weren't the norm in China (cloth diapers were used instead) up until the late 1990s when P&G brought that Western tradition there and changed their market once and forever. 

Chinese diapers had to be cheap, soft as a cloth, and keep a baby dry for 10 hours, to win the market. That's what P&G did - added softness and increased absorption. To decrease price, it moved diaper manufacturing to China to cut on shipping costs. 

To market them, P&G conducted a study that proved that babies fell asleep faster and slept longer in these Pampers diapers, which they extensively advertised and even linked that with improved development - which was a hit in the culture obsessed with academic achievement.  

Gillette Case Study ("How Gillette execs spent a fortune developing a razor for India using MIT student focus groups...without consideringhe country's lack of running water")

After an initial failure to test with the locals (Gillette tested with MIT students), Gillette team went to India. Trough several hundred observations of Indian men shaving in their local habitat (small huts with rare access to running water or mirrors), Gillette redesigned its razor (Gillette Guard) to make it cheaper to buy and convenient to use in such environments. It now represents two out of three razors sold in India. Before that, Indian men were using double-edged razors with no protective guards to protect the skin from cuts. It turned out that for Indian men, not cutting themselves is far more important then getting a very clean shave. With that in mind, Gillette designed the new razor's protective guard and removed the second blade to cut on costs and further improve safety. 

3. Exercises

Machine Translation of a Russian poem (Esenin, 1923) to English

Machine translation (MT) did a pretty good job at translating almost all the words that had a straight meaning, without any regard to the original rhyme or poetical (elevated) language though. 

What didn't get translated well was:

• Metaphors ("seeing the eyes of the golden-brown pool" was used instead of a metaphor like "your eyes the color of a gold-brown lake" and "hair color in the fall" instead of "your hair the color of fall"). 
• Words that have multiple meanings in Russian (wrong meaning was selected in the translation of "have forgotten dear gave"). "Gave" as the past tense of "give", in plural, has the same spelling as the Russian word for "distance/destination," which in that context should have been used instead. Another whole line that got a wrong translation because of the spelling/wrong meaning selection was "tread a gentle, easy camp" for what should have been translated as "gentle step, graceful waist". The Russian words for "step" and "waist" have multiple meanings, and MT didn't consider context to select the appropriate translation
• Possessive pronouns (in translation of "свои/свою"- "lose your life" is used instead of "lose my life" and "in their own" instead of "in my own". The Russian possessive "own/self" (singular and plural -"свой/свои") is spelled the same way when used in conjunction with personal nouns/pronouns and will adjust to the gender and plurality depending on that noun in the context. For example, "у меня своя жизнь" means "I have my (own) life", but "у него своя жизнь" means "he has his (own) life."

The translation could be better if MT used context to determine the right translation of words when their spelling yields different meanings. That can be done by further testing language processing algorithms of the AI system used. For example, AI could be "taught" different metaphors and simple language rules by letting it scan the literary translations done by professional literature translators that are in open access and revising MT's algorithms based on such cross-comparison. 

It looks like Google MT lets users edit translated text if they feel like there is a better word choice. It says, "your contribution will be used to improve translation quality and may be shown to users anonymously"  but it's unclear what happens if multiple people submit different edits, and some of those edits are not correct. It's not very clear how MT would prioritize these edits and based on what exactly the translation quality will be improved. 

Here's my poetically translated version (not word-for-word, but very close) of the poem's first lines:

"Blue fire flamed up

Erasing my home destination.

It's the first time I've sung about love

It's the first time I've stopped my contention. 

I felt like an arrogant brat,

Drinking and loving beyond fixation.

Tired, I've moved past all that,

Gaining my life's foundation."

4. Inspirations + Explorations

This week's case studies were very insightful as they highlighted what work well and not well in designing for a local culture and why, and what strategies companies applied to improve their products. Reading through their insights and solutions has inspired me to look at some other cross-cultural case studies. So far I have looked at one by Airbnb, which was also interesting to read as it described some strategies (storytelling, user-generated designs) that the company used to drive its multicultural presence and global appeal. I hadn't thought about that before, but now I can see the value of case studies as something really easy to read and absorb, since they are pretty short but full of important insights. Also, I think it's important to document your process (all phases), so that in the end it can all be put together as a nice summary of "learnings", just like this company is doing. They are using "case studies" to build their agency's portfolio.