Unresolved issues
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what do people mean when they say culture?
What aspects of culture are relevant in service encounters?
Which aspects of culture are important to study
What is the “right” way to describe culture?
Evaluation – how do you bring revenue management in light of cultural
management?
Assuming a financial model and market…is cultural
What are the measures for evaluation?
How to balance values –
o Volvo seat belt innovation example – they developed it, but
did not patent it
Methodologies for evaluating services
How does technology change culture?
How is culture modified (destroyed) through technology?
What are cultural markers / factors to include in modeling for making decisions –
change the utility vector?
National Academy – Engineer 2020 – engineers must be more educated as global
citizens
How to make engineering/service design processes transparent – help people
understand decision making and design processes
More equitable in design processes
How to get more people involved in engineering processes (overcome bring me a
rock – need to co-create products that are culturally relevant and usable)
How to get engineers involved in eliciting and using information (about use,
culture)
How to explain to engineers that the problem definition involved culture?
Do we know enough about culture to be prescriptive? Can we develop a Cultural
Design Handbook?
Broader issue – communication between engineers and society – values and
culture to engineer, and technology options to society, social interaction
Teamwork – service provider, service consumer, co-creating value, but there are
different cultures.
How do you foster collaboration between provider and customer to best co-create
value?
How do we evaluate the “value” objective function in service settings?
Methodological issues
- 5 methods
o Computational Modeling / simulation
o Empirical studies, including ethnographic observation and others studies
of service encounters
o Design – contextual design, perspectives (more emphasis on cultural
perspective needed?)
o Case study method – research (passive, active learning) and teaching
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o LSA/LSI – latent semantic analysis/latent semantic indexing
How do you teach and market this to engineers?
Limitations
- Is culture represented in these methods?
- How do you quantify culture?
- What factors should be in our decision making (especially in our equations /
models) to explain relevant cultural differences? How do we inform engineering
of cultural factors, issues and constraints?
- How do you deal with people who do not want to address culture?
- How do we evaluate the “value” objective function in service settings?
- What does the definition of culture used in Holtzblatt’ Contextual Design not get?
What assumptions are made by engineers and designers?
- How can we teach engineers designers to understand / apply assumptions?
- Designing technology that mediates interaction
o How do engineers design technology so that it considers culture?
o Example – hand held translator
Advance
- Education
- Cultural sensitivity training for STEM
o How will people respond to artifacts / service encounters
o Ethical responsibilities to understand that what they create goes into the
world and may have impact on / damage culture
- Marketing – need to incorporate culture into marketing/message (HF), as well as
design
- Need to understand that this is an essential design of the design process
- Other examples that we can draw on – Quality of Life (Health Care)
- Need interactive simulations to experiment and prototype service systems (could
include service encounters, but could be larger than service encounter)
- Experience Design – designing service experiences and service systems that
support these experiences and outcomes
- Formalized, unified language for describing service systems (to do this, we need
to know what cultural aspects belong in and how to describe them)