10 Culture and Technology
App Prototyping Studio
19 Aug 2026
Week TEN
What is culture?
- In 1952, anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn published a book that compiled 164 different definitions of the word “culture”.
- Should we add any?
- How about if we look at one definition, by Robert Axelrod in 1997?
- Culture is the set of information socially transmittable in a population of the same species, which can potentially influence psychological processes, including cognition, affect, and behavior.
- Whew!
Why care about culture?
- Your counterparts among the developers are currently studying globalization and localization of software.
- They are considering questions that are bound up with culture, whatever that is.
- I switched Apple Car Play to an Irish accent, and I found that it was not just the pronunciation that was different—the expressions for different traffic conditions were also different! That’s software localization and that’s culture!
What are some obvous examples of culture in technology?
- Years ago, I visited an Indian website with expertise on a software package I was using.
- That website displayed a riot of saturated colors and a profusion of typefaces (an example in the next frame).
- My first reaction was that it was amateurish, but I slowly realized that it was influenced by a different aesthetic than I was used to.
Color as an example of cultural difference
- You’re probably aware that colors have different meanings in different cultures.
- For example, white is a color of mourning in some cultures, while it is a color of celebration in others.
- In the United States, red is a color of danger, while in China, it is a color of good fortune.
- And so on …
END
References
Colophon
This slideshow was produced using quarto
Fonts are Fira Sans, Fira Sans Light, and Victor Mono Nerd Font
Math is set in Fira Math via MathJax 4
