Cross-Cultural Design course, taught in the Human-Technology study program and Fitech, is an exploration for a cultural flavor in design. During the course we learn about different cultural models and understand cultural differences, and what possibilities there are for the UX design based on the cultural knowledge. In the project part of this course the students work in small teams and each team selects one culture to be explored with different methods (models, articles, other state-of-the art, and cultural probes). From the exploration phase the teams enter the design space phase, where they analyze and collect together all the cultural understanding and inspiration they have, and they make a service concept design based on the gathered understanding. Finally, they present their design outcome in the final presentation session, and conduct a peer-evaluation for the concept.
This spring, we are happy to be back at campus, and we have a weekly co-work session to support the project. It is not facilitated by the course staff as such, but support and discussion is available on these sessions. So far, students have participated these co-working sessions very actively. All course activies, however, are arranged in hybrid settings, so it is flexible for the students to attend.
Today, it was time for the mid-checkpoint of the project results so far, and we all gathered in a session called Cultural Show. The idea was not show any power points, but the students could adopt more innovative and creative way to demonstrate their cultural learnings. We were happy to see innovative and dramatic performances, very interesting cultural stories and virtual tours invented by the students, and also paper theater! It is sometimes very good to go a bit out of the comfort zone and present in a memorable way.
Check out this Lego show about the Finnish working culture:
In the end of each team’s show, the other students gave feedback on canvas “on the icebergs”, utilizing one of the cultural meta-models. The feedback was given depending on how deep each team went in their cultural exploration.
Very well done students! Just the hybrid setup was (again) a bit complex to handle in this type of a little bit different and creative session..
Cheers, the CCD course staff Aino Ahtinen, Aparajita Chowdhury and Valentina Ramirez Millan
