Hello everyone it's my pleasure today to present designing for culturally sensitive cultural change
I'm Taghreed Alshehri and on behalf of my team
I'll be presenting the key points of our paper - published in DIS 2022
The overarching idea in this paper is combining two opposing concepts
into one appraoch we came to call culturally sensitive cultral change
The notion of cultural sensitivity has been adopted in many different design approaches and orientations
Such as culturally sensitive design, cross
cultural design and even value sensitive design The basic point behind it is attending to
cultural values by deeply understanding these values and incorporating
them both in the design process and the outcomes of that process
on the other hand, cultural change by default entails challenging the status quo
whaich is largely shaped by cultural values While these concepts seem to be two opposing
ends on a spectrum we argue in this paper that they're not necessarily
mutually exclusive And in fact, combing these two may be one
of the safest approaches to support creating social change
Without inflicting risks on the population under study as we'll see in our case study
Our case study is on saudi women's visibility in the digital media
In the paper we discuss the cultural background of this population
including the recent reforms in Saudi Arabia to modernize the country
However we argue and demonstrate in our findings that despite the recent reforms in the country
and the increasing visibility of women in the digital media
most women are still concerned about presenting themsevels in the public sphere and the digital media
for various cultural reasons that are discussed in our findings
The findings cover our participants' values, their daily practices and the gap between their values and practices
For their values, we cover things they accept, related to women's visibility, things they support or advocate
regarding other women's visibility, or other people visibility especially their daughters or their future selves
By practices, we refer to their current use of the different digital media platforms
especially how they present themselves, like their profile photos
The value practice gap, is something we identify in the data as the difference between our participants views
How they aspire for future cultral change regarding increasing women's visibility
Whereas - avoiding that by adopting complete invisibility
in their current reality, mostly for fear of cultural criticism
To simplify the findings, we illustrate them on a spectrum ranging from
total invisibility to physical visibility
and we color coded the responses of the 18 participants under the different degrees of visibility
with the 4 colors that you can see on the left side of the screen
the light grey shading represents what participants say they typically do
so, their daily practices mostly fall here under total invisibility
Whereas white shading represents what they accept and consider safe spaces for visibility - even if they don't adopt these levels of visibility
they consider safe
Dark grey represents what they accept but consider challenging so these are not safe spaces
but they're accepted or even advocated spaces for visibility
and black represents rejected levels of public visibility.
for different reasons, probably for religious reasons they wouldn't show their hair
or for personal reasons, like, many participants refused using objects, like flowers, to represent them, they found these dehumanizing
what we care about in this spectrum is just showing where our participants fall
If you want more details on the reasons behind them,
we provided more details in the findings section
so the goal of the spectrum is to identify what we call the proximal point
which is the point that still falls under the safe spaces
so it is the white spaces here, but it's the highest level of visibility, in this case
so the proximal point is a point on the spectrum that represents the boundary
between current practices (the status quo) and radical change (future visions).
It is the point of maximal cultural change (challenge) that lies within the boundary of what is considered safe spaces for creating cultural change
we strive to design for this point but we emphasize in the paper that designing for the proximal point is not our ultimate goal
instead, the proximal point is the first point on a trajectory of a cultural transition to a future envisioned by the population under study.
To sum up and conclude our discussion we provide three design implications
The first is, investigating the difference between public and private values.
so, the combination of cultural sensitivity and cultural change into a unified approach
implies the necessity for incorporating both public (societal or cultural values) and private (individual) values.
By public values we refer to the wider societal cultural values even those that we ultimately aspire to change.
On the other hand, the private are the individual values expressed often indirectly by our participants,
as mentioned before they used references to their daughters as they grow up or “future self” or even other women
The second consideration is creating a spectrum to illustrate practices and values
so we show the different viewpoints on the spectrum
Not only does the spectrum help in affording the representation of diverse practices,
but also supports the design of a trajectory from one end of the spectrum to the other.
In this way, we avoid both designing for the status quo and designing for radical change
- two arguments that have long been discussed in HCI
The final implication is identifying the proximal point for design
and taking in consideration that this point is not the ultimate goal
so we call it the ‘sweet spot’ in designing for culturally sensitive cultural change.
However, this is not the ultimate goal. The goal is to depart
from is as the first point on a trajectory toward creating cultural change
to a future envisioned by our participants
for more details on this approach, the case study, the cultural background,
please refer to the paper or feel free to send me any questions on the email as shown on the screen
Thank you for listening and we'll see you in the conference