The influence of the designers’ own culture and the influence of the target user’s culture on the design process was examined in Chapter 3 with the help of 1:1 design studies with two groups of seven design students from India and Germany using the think aloud protocol. The design students were asked to design through concept sketches the vehicle cluster instrument for the provided Indian and German personas. The data from the design activity, along with the notes and sketches from the activity was analysed quantitatively (total percentage time, no. of transitions, no. of explorations, etc.) and qualitatively (strategies for layout and posi-tioning of elements, kinds of transformations during sketching, sources of inspiration, etc.).
6.1.1 Influence of the designers’ culture on the design process
The analysis of the data to examine the influence of the designer’s own culture on the design process revealed that Indian and German students both followed similar steps during the course of the design activity. This similarity is attributed to the history of design education in India, which is based on European design philosophies and pedagogy such as Bauhaus and Ulm (Kuriachan, 2014). This similarity in background means students from both cultures were educated according to similar philosophies, therefore similar steps were followed. The similarity in the steps followed in the process could also be due to the “tight” design brief and associated documentation used in the activity. This is discussed later in Chapter 7.
The major difference in the steps followed was that Indian students performed the mood board exercise to help guide their design, whereas none of the Germans used mood boards.
The reflective interviews with the German students revealed that they would carry out the mood board activity in their typical process, but it was not one of the steps they relied heavily upon for design. Further probing during the reflective interviews revealed that design with the help of mood boards was not specifically encouraged in the design school the students came from (all the German students who participated in this activity came from the same design school). Another reason for the students not to perform the mood board was that some Ger-man students considered the images provided in the persona document and the state of the art studies they carried out as providing sufficient information for design. This was different for the Indian students, where mostly all performed the mood board exercise in various ways, such as attitude-based mood boards, culture-based mood boards, preference-based mood boards, etc. This difference in applying the mood board exercise (or not) had a cumulative effect on the other analysis measures such as the number of transitions considered for analy-sis, the number of exploration sketches, etc.
Another curious difference in the design processes was observed with regard to the sources of inspiration for design. It was observed the Indian students used the technique of image map-ping where there was a tendency to directly translate the inspiration into the design. This can be attributed to the practice of using mood boards, which the German students did not do.
Although there was a direct translation from inspiration to design, the Indian students said the inspiration form would typically be translated into the design in an abstract way and/or only certain elements of the inspiration would be considered for design. This abstraction of the inspiration was consistent with what the German students said they would do in their typical design process.
In addition to the similarities in education background discussed above, the fact that the par-ticipants of this study were students and are still in the process of developing their own design philosophy and process is another reason for the similarities in the steps followed in the de-sign process i.e., they tried to employ what they had been taught in class. This agrees with Lawson (2005), who says that the decisions designers make depend on their own knowledge, experience, education, and the impact of others, including colleagues, clients, and end users.
Therefore, it is recommended that future research in this area involves professional designers where stronger influences of the designer’s own culture can be expected, possibly leading to greater differences in the design process.
From a qualitative perspective, differences were found in the interpretation of the design brief and persona. The German students looked to incorporate additional functional features to sat-isfy the persona, whereas the Indian students only looked to incorporate the persona’s aes-thetic preferences. In addition, there was a tendency for both groups of students to interpret information about the persona in relation to their own context. This seemed to have influenced the inspirations chosen for the final design and the design itself. In this regard, a further study with different products and cultures needs to be carried out to determine whether it is a design brief/persona specific trend or a tendency for students/designers belonging to a particular cul-ture to interpret briefs and personas in a certain way.
Further qualitative differences were in the approaches to sketching, where German students considered the whole context of the car before sketching the CI but the Indian students con-sidered the CI as an independent unit. However, similarities were observed in the kind of transformations used by the students during the sketching activity. Both groups of students used lateral transformations while exploring aspects related to the form of the CI and used vertical transformation for aspects related to the layout and positioning of the individual ele-ments within the CI. These similarities can be attributed to the nature of the design brief, where the positioning and layout of the individual elements is influenced by the overall form and therefore tends to dictate vertical transformations. On the other hand, since the form as-pects are relatively independent, they enable easy lateral transformation from one exploration to another.
As illustrated in Chapter 3, the reflective interviews of the typical design process also re-vealed highly similar processes being followed. One difference observed between the two groups of students was in the selection of the final concept. The German students said they
would consciously achieve a little distance from their design before making a final selection.
This is once again believed to be strongly connected to the practice at a particular design school, where the faculty consciously encourage the students to achieve a little distance from their design so they can better evaluate and select the final concept. This was in addition to the recognition and conscious effort to value intuitive ideas. Some German students made a conscious effort to express and document all their intuitive ideas before getting into any sort of state of the art or user research. This is in line with the author’s belief that intuitive ideas are sometimes the best ideas, and often get lost during the research and other phases of the process. On the other hand, some of the Indian students consciously performed a semantic exercise on the mood boards to extract relevant elements for design. This again is seen as a practice of the design school: the students were taught a course on product semantics and ex-traction of semantic cues from products for design.
In summary, the design processes followed by the two groups of students were generally simi-lar in terms of the steps followed. Among the differences observed, some were attributed to culture, while others were attributed to the influence of the students’ design education and the practice of their design school.
6.1.2 Influence of the target users’ culture on the design process
The analysis of the data to examine the influence of the target users’ culture on the design process found no major changes in terms of the steps the students followed. However, it was observed that students adopted different strategies within particular steps or spent more or less time in certain steps to deal with the familiar and unfamiliar personas.
Quantitatively, when faced with the task of designing for the unfamiliar persona, the German students spent more time on the ‘form exploration’ step, whereas the Indian students spent more time in the mood board exercise. This indicates that the unfamiliarity of the persona resulted in conscious decisions on the part of the students to make up for the ‘missing’ infor-mation. Throughout the 1:1 design study, use of the mood boards was one of most important steps the Indian students followed before generating a design, therefore it was natural for stu-dents to spend more time here. This difference is further reflected in the increased number of transitions the Indian students made while designing for the unfamiliar persona. Meanwhile, none of the German students used mood boards for design during the activity, which led to more time being spent on the form exploration step. As a result, they produced more explora-tion sketches.
The familiarity and intimate knowledge of a culture resulted in both groups spending more time in the final concept step while designing for the familiar. The familiarity and intimate knowledge with the particular culture meant more explicit assumptions and fewer units of information from the persona document were considered. This could possibly also indicate a general, overall trend where designers believe they are sufficiently familiar with the persona and culture and therefore do not need to pay too much attention to the persona and design brief. This can lead to designs that do not fully meet the persona’s requirements.
From a qualitative perspective, designing for the familiar resulted in a focus on lifestyle as-pects, leading to knowledge-driven designs (Kruger & Cross, 2006). Designing for the unfa-miliar resulted in a focus on information such as the persona’s fashion sense and possessions, leading to information-driven designs (Kruger & Cross, 2006). The German students’ infor-mation-driven design while designing for the Indian persona resulted in a strategy for the lay-out of elements within the CI based on persona preferences, whereas the functionality of the elements was the basis for the layout while designing for the familiar German persona.
Reflective interviews indicated that students would normally perform additional research with regard to competitive benchmarking, lifestyles, communication within the culture, and direct contact with users from the target culture, etc. to better inform and guide their design. As ex-pected, these additional research steps would not be performed/given less importance if the student were to design for a familiar culture/user group. As seen earlier, familiarity and inti-mate knowledge of the target culture leads to more assumptions being made, with the risk of designing for oneself rather than the actual needs of the user. However, intimate knowledge and familiarity is essential to come up with creative workable solutions, as unfamiliarity ei-ther leads to variations of existing designs based on benchmarking, or designs that do not work in the context of the unfamiliar culture. Therefore, a balance needs to be struck between ensuring the designer does not design for oneself and effectively using the intimate knowl-edge of the culture to create innovative, workable solutions.