Robert Edsall is an assistant professor in the School of
Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University. He
received his PhD in Geography from Penn State University
in 2001, and holds an MS in Meteorology and a BA in
Music.
He is active in the ICA Commission on
Visualization and Virtual Environments and is a Director of
the Cartography and Geographic Information Society in the
USA. In addition to mapping, Dr. Edsall also enjoys tripointing, or visiting point where three political units meet.
GLOBALIZATION AND CARTOGRAPHIC DESIGN:
IMPLICATIONS OF THE GROWING DIVERSITY OF MAP
USERS
Robert Edsall
Assistant Professor
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, USA 85287-0104
Introduction
In 1967, Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village,” referring to his prediction
that electronic media will serve to homogenize experiences across cultures and create a
unified society – of which he did not necessarily approve – of cultural compatibility
(McLuhan 1967). However, the global village would also serve to blur diversity by
ignoring individual cultural identities. His prescience was revealed by the ubiquitous and
standard ways that technology is presented to worldwide users, in particular the ways
humans interact with computers. Users of computers vary widely worldwide in terms of
language, values, traditions, and other dimensions of culture, however, much of the
software that allows us to interact with computers (and by extension, the Internet, and, by
extension, virtual communities, and, by extension, each other) was designed by and for
Westerners in the US or Western Europe. To what extent do these designs limit the use of
– and insight from – computer systems for members of the global village who, because of
their culture, may not interact with the computer in ways that the designers expect or
intend?
This paper suggests that culture should play a larger role in the design of
representations and interfaces used in geovisualization. This concept informs a larger
research priority of user-centered representation design; the ubiquity of maps and other
representations of space on the Internet and in digital formats requires that attention should
be paid to the relative effectiveness of various representation strategies. A research
framework that is rich with testable and important hypotheses concerns the influence of the
cultural background of the target user(s) for geo-representations. This paper reviews
literature that might inform such an emergent framework. In this essay, my focus is on
effective communication of ideas through digital representations, and effective provision
of interactivity through interfaces mediated by cultural dimensions. While I do not
specifically address methods for providing technology to (and subsequently empowering)
diverse users, the ideas herein may serve to open communication between cultural groups
that would lead to empowerment. I review the literature concerning the significance of
cultural differences on both user interface design in general (primarily from the discipline
of human-computer interaction) and GIS and spatial representations (developed by
geographers and psychologists).
Cultural dimensions of interactive computing: research from
Human-Computer Interaction
Culture: components and scales
With the rapid and global spread of computer use and the Internet, the human-computer
interaction (HCI) community is very interested in the influence of cultural differences on
interface design. Of course, to discuss cultural differences, one must first define what
“culture” is in this context, and at what scale cultural differences should be considered. In
human-computer interaction, the focus of “culture” is finding the commonalities and
differences in the way humans communicate with one another and, in turn, with a
computer (Yeo 1996, Callahan 2005). There is a broad spectrum of definitions of the term
“culture” in the literature, most of them seeking to describe or classify human activity
including elements of society such as beliefs, knowledge, morals, art, and traditions (Hoult
1969, Ciborowski 1979, Hofstede 2001). One way of differentiating cultures is through
their symbols, including material, religious, and customary (Cohen 1985), and for
communication among a group, cultural symbols make ideas intelligible to others. Using
this definition of culture as a system of symbols through which a group communicates and
interacts, the implications for the human activities of using maps, computer interfaces, and
visualization environments, with their highly schematized and symbolic languages, are
obvious.
Of course, defining and differentiating groups of people is a difficult and
controversial task. To simplify matters, national boundaries are often chosen to discuss
cultural factors in human-computer interaction (Sukaviriya and Moran 1990, del Galdo
1990, Shen et al. 2006). These studies, describing the differences, for example, in the
interpretation of interface icons and metaphors from country to country, typically
acknowledge the methodological shortcomings of this generalization – clearly national
boundaries are an oversimplification of culture, with much within-nation heterogeneity and
between-nation commonality. “Internationalization” often is discussed as a way of making
web applications accessible and understandable for international markets (Fernandes 1995;
Luong et al. 1995), and in a marketing context nationality (and by extension, official
language and currency) may be an appropriate cultural scale. However, decision making
with maps and graphics may depend more on education, values, and cognitive schemata –
all aspects of culture apart from specific nationality – of the decision makers themselves
(Edsall and Larson 2006; Rhoads 2006). In most applications of geovisualization, then,
culture should be seen as a shared schematic experience that transcends national
boundaries, influencing communication between humans (and between human and
computer) though learned constructs,
Cultural adaptation and computer interfaces
In part because of methodological complexities such as defining “culture” in terms of its
manifestations and its scale, there is no consensus regarding the level to which interactive
computer applications should be altered and adapted for users from diverse backgrounds
and cultures. There is little doubt, however, that interfaces should be sensitive to culture at
least at an “objective” level, that is, the visible and tangible dimensions of culture that
could influence usability of computer systems. Translation of interface elements into
appropriate languages, use of correct date and number formats, and creation of graphic
icons that make sense to users in other cultures are examples of “localization” of standard
interfaces that are “basic and necessary” (del Galdo 1990; Marcus 1993; Fernandes 1995;
Yeo 1996; Rau et al. 2004). Some believe that, beyond this level of cultural consideration,
it may not be necessary or desirable to customize interfaces. Bourges-Waldegg and
Scrivener (1998) point out that meaning can very often be inferred from context, despite
unfamiliar and culturally exclusive interfaces. Assuming that meaning can often be
inferred from context helps designers avoid specific and potentially rigid guidelines,
“paternalism,” and stereotyping. Others convincingly argue that culture is overemphasized
as an explanatory variable for understanding a representation (Rhoads 2006) and that other
factors, such as function of the representation and experience of the user, are more
important factors to predict how effective a certain representation will be.
However, many believe that going further than adjusting an interface for visible
and tangible elements of culture is necessary for usable design; designers should also
consider elements of “subjective culture” that are more abstract reflections of culture
(Stewart and Bennett 1991). Utilizing these elements creates a “cultural user interface”
(Yeo 1996) or a form of “culturization” (Bourges-Waldegg and Scrivener 1998; Shen et al.
2006). Abstract characteristics of a cultural group can have a significant influence on the
perceptions, connotations, and understanding of representations such as graphics, color,
metaphors, and mental models (Yeo 1996; Marcus 2001). It is easy to find a mismatch of
connotations from group to group: on a national scale, a blue ribbon in the U.S. is first
place while in the U.K. red is the color for first, red is a color of joy in China and of danger
in the U.S., the “trash can” icon on a Macintosh interface is frequently misinterpreted in
southeast Asia as a wicker basket for storing items, and using an “OK” hand signal from
the US might be offensive to some European users. At other scales of culture, we can look
to geography, not nationality, as a source of confusion – a snowflake would be a confusing
icon to use for “cold” in a place that never has received snow – or to social structures and
values that transcend nationality – the “My Computer” name in Windows OS implies an
ownership status that may be confusing (del Gardo 1990; Yeo 1996; Callahan 2005; Shen
et al, 2006).
Much of the literature on the subject refers to various models seeking to explain the
dimensions that define and differentiate cultures on an abstract level. The model that is
most frequently implemented is that of Hofstede (1997), whose famous culture model is
based on nationalities, categorized according to five factors: power distance, uncertainty
avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and time orientation. These dimensions are often
used to guide interface design, particularly for web sites (Marcus 2001; Ford and Kotze
2005; Shen et al 2006). For example, individuals from those countries, such as China and
Mexico, identified by Hofstede as having a “high power distance,” where less powerful
members of a society expect and accept unequal power distribution and are unlikely to
question authority, are more likely to want highly structured and top-down access to
information, with a strong focus on authority. A web site designed with this target
audience in mind might include items arranged in (and found by potential consumers
using) a hierarchical classification determined by the company. Individuals from some
countries, such as Singapore and Ireland, show “low uncertainty avoidance,” where
uncertainty and risk are acknowledged as important and ambiguity is not discouraged.
Web site users from these cultures would prefer interfaces that encourage exploration and
provide multiple menus and perspectives (Ford and Kotze 2005). Hofstede’s models are
not without significant critique (Gooderham and Noordhaug 2001; McSweeney 2001),
indicating that the differences found in his study may be on the decline, and, more
significantly, that Hofstede’s empirical evidence (responses from IBM employees from
many countries) are not representative of the diversity or character of the nation as a
whole. However, the computer industry has found enough evidence to put his framework
into practice, attempting, in particular, to boost worldwide e-commerce (comScore 2006;
Luna et al. 2002; Saimee 1998).
An alternate way of structuring abstract cultural dimensions to meet the needs of
marketing and advertising is proposed by Luna and Gupta (2001), who modify a definition
of culture from Hoult (1969) and apply it to computer interaction. They identify four core
forms that culturally determined knowledge can influence design: values, heroes, rituals,
and symbols. This definition of culture can exist at a sub-national, national, or
international scale. One example of putting this model into practice is in product
testimonials: the choice of individuals to pitch a product should be based on the heroes
specific to the target culture (Michael Jordan, a religious leader, a military veteran, etc.).
Additionally, because maps and other graphic representations rely on symbols to tell their
story, the choice of symbols appropriate for the culture is as important as the choice of the
language of the text used to describe and direct interaction in the application.
Given the tremendous financial opportunity of opening e-commerce markets in
East Asia, it is again not surprising that a focus of research has been on determining ways
to make access to information and goods more convenient and intuitive for Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean individuals (Choong and Salvendy 1999; Rau et al. 2004). Among
the many fundamental differences in perception between Asian and American subjects
found in a series of studies by Nesbitt and colleagues, several are directly relevant to
geographic representation. When shown an animation or a series of images, Westerners
tended to focus on individual (“focal”) objects in the scene while East Asians were more
likely to consider relationships between focal objects and their context. This was
illustrated in a fascinating set of studies using an animation of a group of fish; in describing
the scene afterward, Western observers described characteristics and behaviors of
individual fish, with East Asians discussed the entire school of fish, its environment, and
movements relative to the environment in much greater detail (Nesbitt and Masuda 2003;
Nesbitt and Miyamoto 2005).
These (and earlier iterations of) abstract categorizations have survived as defining
structures for international social interactions despite a common concern that they are
overly simplistic. For example, “culture” is not bounded by national boundaries (Montello
1995; Fernandes 1995; Callahan 2005), nor do cultures operate independent of each other
(del Galdo 1996). Interface and representation research in HCI is faced with a large
number of possible explanatory factors. The influence of cultural background is likely
modulated by that of gender, age, social class, education level, and other factors (Dillon
and Watson 1996; Mraznek and Baldacchini 1997). Callahan (2005), while arguing the
ethical value of “attending to cultural variables, if only out of respect for other groups of
users” (p. 300), acknowledges that as this realm of research in HCI matures, and “our
knowledge of cultural differences increases, it will be essential to re-evaluate our working
definition of culture and to account for other variables through multifactor studies” (p.301).
Certainly software companies and designers would welcome research that showed
that redesign of tools for the cross-cultural markets is unnecessary. In the realm of
marketing on web sites, however, there is evidence that companies, whether the choice is
conscious or not, align their interface strategies with models of culture such as that of
Hofstede. Wurtz (2005), for example, examined the web presence of McDonald’s
restaurant in different countries, and found important differences in design elements such
as simplicity, imagery (in terms of symbols and values shown in the images), the use of
images vs. words, and the use of animation; these elements fit neatly in Edward Hall’s
(1990) model of cultural dimensions. The connections between these interface and
representation methods, aimed at specific cultures, and cartographic research, for which
generalization, animation, and imagery are key themes, seem important to explore.
Cultural dimensions of spatial representations: research from
GIScience
In the context of spatial representation and geographic information science, the level to
which interfaces should be inclusive of culturally mediated elements is also the subject of
debate. Over ten years ago, Montello (1995) raised concern that, at least in the context of
GIS, the call for adaptive user interfaces for diverse users was exaggerated. GIS use is
more specific and esoteric than the applications about which the HCI community typically
is concerned. Montello persuasively argued that “culture” as a grouping variable is
arbitrary and perhaps less important, for example, than considering technological expertise,
gender, education, and a number of other explanatory variables. Central to his argument
was research that shows that spatial cognition is, in general, universal in humans regardless
of culture, given the physical similarities among all humans and our environment (e.g.,
gravity, upright stance, locations/directions of sunrise and sunset) (see also Mark et al.
1999; Tversky 2003). Maps, too, seem to be universal ways that humans organize spatial
concepts externally; the abstract reasoning necessary to translate the earth’s surface on a
larger-than-human scale to a map – namely, reduction of scale, rotation of perspective to a
plan view, and selection and symbolization – is learned and implemented at a very early
age (as early as four years old), and is invariant of culture (Spencer et al 1980; Stea et al.
1996; Blades et al. 1999; Blaut et al. 2003).
While mapping and spatial cognition have some general characteristics that allow
GIS designers and cartographers to create intuitive representations for worldwide users,
specific aspects of symbolization and representation are dependent at least on the context
of the use, if not also the user, of the products. Stea et al. (1996) compare stick maps of
Polynesians to representations of land-based native societies in Australia to illustrate their
similarities, but many of the specific and fundamental properties of these maps are
different (Downs and Liben 1993), including what is mapped, how scale and direction is
preserved, and how the values and priorities of the culture are reflected in them. The
importance of cultural context in spatial representation is illustrated in a clever study by
Suzuki and Wakabayashi (2005), who analyzed the different ways in which spatial
information is presented between tourist guidebooks produced by and for Japanese
individuals and those published in the U.S. The authors found systematic differences in
symbolization, abstraction, and description of places, “confirming the existence of marked
differences of the usages of reference frames and referents between countries” (p. 161).
That maps are universally used as a spatial organization method does not, thus, make them
invariant with respect to context and experience of their users and creators: just like text,
maps reflect those social and spatial dimensions of the world that are significant in a
particular context (Downs and Liben 1993; Tversky and Lee 1999).
Campari and Frank (1995) criticize GIS – at least as it was a decade ago – in a
similar way, stating that GIS is a “culturally bounded technology… understood to be able
to treat worldwide shared meanings while, currently, it treats meanings that belong to a
specific professional and cultural tradition” (p. 252). The authors exhibit foresight by
using the word “currently,” for they saw GIS as a dynamic technology that was (and still
is) likely to evolve in the character of its use and its users. Mark (1995) tempers his
conclusions similarly: when pointing to evidence of minimal cultural differences in spatial
reasoning, he states that the studies “bode well for cross-cultural transfer of GIS
technology in the short term, when users are expected to have specialized training.”
(emphasis added; p. 248). Indeed, not long after, Mark et al. (1999) specifically
acknowledge the transformations in geographic representation for general users and the
need to consider metaphor for a more global audience: “Metric scale or representative
fraction, the measure of geographical detail dominant in the cartographic world, has no
well defined meaning in a digital world of seamless perspectives on geography in which
the user is free to zoom and pan at will. Other metaphors, such as the view from space,
may replace metric scale with less familiar dimensions such as the distance of the
viewpoint from Earth, as they do in Microsoft’s Encarta Atlas” (p. 761). These researchers
anticipated by five years the arrival of Google Earth: while not a GIS by definition, this
near-invisible interface on spatially referenced information has the potential to
revolutionize and popularize spatial thinking like almost no other medium (Butler 2006;
Goodchild 2006).
Discussion: implications for geovisualization design
An analysis of cultural factors in geovisualization design should start with an assumption
that, simply because a target audience is of a different culture than the designer, the
interface and representations should necessarily be different. One important question is the
extent to which diverse users actually want an interface that differs from the “norm”; in
their usability study of a digital library interface, Duncker et al. (2000) found that subjects
from different cultures did not wish to be categorized and preferred not to diverge from the
standard “British English” interface and menus, though three quarters of the subjects were
not British. This basic question should inform usability studies, with the initial null
hypothesis of “subjects prefer no difference between interfaces.”
However, models of culture like those of Hofstede (1997) have been found to be
useful in studies in HCI (Luna and Gupta 2002; Shen et al 2006), and observations based
on the models have led to further theories of important cultural differences (Nisbett and
Masuda 2003) that would point to the usefulness of different designs for different cultures
in geovisualization studies. I see two possible strategies for incorporating culture-specific
design in visualization applications. Because the strategies represent (to some extent)
opposite ends of a spectrum, they represent a possibly fertile framework for developing
research questions about tool design for visualization. Both involve culturization to some
extent – that is, adapting an application for use by diverse cultures – but possible results of
this research may be that such adaptation does not actually significantly improve
performance or support work and that resources should not be allocated toward that end.
An obvious approach, if consensus is reached that some form of culturization is
useful to enhance the usability of tools for geovisualization, is to foster the type of learning
and thinking characteristic of the culture. Marketers, web site designers, and engineers of
software for the popular market use this approach, for it would be counterproductive to
have users uncomfortable with their interfaces. If a culture, for example, is more likely to
accept uncertainty, or more likely to understand less structured information, then the
representations provided for that culture should be designed accordingly (Marcus 2001;
Aykin 2005). Users in a “low power distance” or “low uncertainty avoidance” culture
should be given the opportunity to see information in an interface that allows for many
perspectives and ways of organizing space. Also, in such cases, designers should be wary
of expert-driven representations with top-down directives for depicting spatial information,
or tree-structure interfaces for organizing and visualizing categorizations.
The opposite approach may also be appropriate for visualization applications,
running counter to the “conventional wisdom” of designers of applications for which there
is a well-defined goal (e.g. a web site designed to sell a product or a map designed to help
a tourist reach a destination). In designing geovisualization environments, cartographers of
the 21st century are asked to provide ways to privately explore and understand large
quantities of geographic data for which few hypotheses or conclusions have been made
(MacEachren and Kraak 1997). As such, perhaps it is useful for cartographers and other
designers of methods for representing spatial data encourage unconventional thinking
about a problem (Edsall and Sidney 2005). Obviously, to create such applications, it is
important to determine what exactly is conventional for a specific set of users. In one
study, we discovered that, regardless of cultural origin, subjects viewing an animated map
preferred a conventional left-to-right timeline animation control, but those that were
presented with an unconventional right-to-left control spent more time with the problem
and answered data exploration questions more accurately (Sidney and Edsall 2004).
Strict adherence to conventional metaphors – some of which may be culturally
determined – for representing geographic information may serve to confine (or “blinker,”
as Gentner and Neilsen (1996) call it) a user to a specific way of approaching a problem or
observing and exploring a phenomenon. In a context of visualization (and visual
analytics), this may not be the ideal situation for creative problem solving. This notion is
not new in the HCI literature: Nelson (1990) warned against over-reliance on interface
metaphors such as the “desktop” and other familiar everyday objects because they may
serve to constrain the mental models developed.
Application of concepts from HCI to geovisualization design might take the form
of a redesign of animated maps for American users in such a way that the context and
relationship among objects in the representation are emphasized (Nisbett and Masuda
2003). In doing so, we would design counter to the theoretical focal-object attention
typical of American users. However, perhaps it is this sort of intentional unconventional
design that will (subconsciously?) foster the sort of creative, out-of-the-box thinking that is
a goal of visualization. If nothing else, such a design could form the basis of a rich
research agenda regarding the influence of alternative visualization environments and
tools, with differences based on dimensions of culture
Summary
The past decade has witnessed a tremendous expansion and cultural diversification of
computer use and interaction, and with it has come a similar change in the use and users of
geographic representations. The globalization of computer interaction has led to
theoretical and empirical research in both GIScience and Human-Computer Interaction
concerning the extent to which cultural differences (and similarities) should govern the
design of representations and interfaces. Just ten years ago, many of these tools, including
GIS specifically, and computers in general, were being used primarily by (relatively)
educated and expert individuals who spoke Indo-European languages. However, today, the
“typical” user is harder to define; more commonly, the creators of interactive systems need
to consider that some of the linguistic and graphic metaphors and visualization tools will
be confusing and counterintuitive to a significant segment of the target audience.
Several authors warn about the methodological difficulties of studying cultural
effects in human-computer interaction. First, the concept of “culture” as a controllable and
isolated variable is overly simplistic (Montello 1995; Bourges-Waldegg and Scrivener
1998; Callahan 2005), particularly if nationality is used as a proxy for culture (as it was in
Hofstede’s original study). There may well be covarying factors, or simply other
explanatory independent variables than culture (or nationality) if differences in
performance or preference are found. Cultures are also highly dynamic and, as cultures
interact, some of the theoretical distinctions between the cultures could fade (Thomas
Friedman called this “glocalization” in 2000; see Shen et al. 2006).
Given these caveats, cultural differences should no longer be ignored in geographic
information science. Without basic and necessary alterations of interfaces and tools such
as language translations and date and number format adjustments, creators of visualization
environments and geographic representations could be seen as imperialistic and
presumptuous. Consideration of subjective cultural elements such as values, connotations,
symbols, and perceptions not only reflects sensitive and responsible system design, it may
prove to actually encourage the intellectual approaches in users that are desired in
geographic visualization. If nothing else, the developing theoretical frameworks for
cultural differences in human-computer interaction will provide rich research questions as
we seek to improve the effectiveness of systems for the visualization and analysis of
geographic information.
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