10b Culture and Technology
App Prototyping Studio
28 Oct 2026
Week TEN
What is culture?
- In 1952, anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn published a book that compiled more than 160 different definitions of the word “culture”.
- Should we add any?
- How about if we look at one current definition, from Kashima and Gelfand (2025)?
- 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!
- The useful part for us: culture is information, including information about how things are done. A prototype is full of that kind of information.
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!
- Today you will find the design half of what they are studying inside your own prototypes.
Culture is already in your prototype
- You can’t see your own culture for the same reason a fish can’t see water.
- Every prototype in this room makes assumptions that feel like common sense to the person who made them.
- Name fields with a first and last name. Dates. The week starting on Sunday. A thumbs-up. A checkmark. A mailbox icon for email.
- Swiping left to right. One person per phone. A credit card as the way to pay. A stable connection.
- Red for error. A photo of a face as a signal of trust. A “family” that means a household of parents and children.
- None of that felt like a cultural decision when you made it. That’s the point.
What are some obvious 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.
A riot of color, revisited
- My reaction was a reaction, not a fact. What would evidence look like?
- Reinecke and Gajos (2014) collected about 2.4 million ratings of website screenshots from roughly 40,000 people in many countries.
- Preferences for colorfulness and visual complexity differed by country, which matches my experience with the Indian site.
- But preferences also differed by age, education, and gender within countries.
- So “Indian users like saturated color” is already too coarse. Culture is real, and it is not the same thing as nationality.
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 …
- All true. And almost never what breaks an app. Most people everywhere have learned that a red banner in an interface means something went wrong.
What actually breaks an app
- Text expansion. German runs roughly a third longer than English, and short labels can double. Your button that fits “Save” does not fit “Speichern”.
- Script and direction. Arabic and Hebrew run right to left. Devanagari, Thai, and CJK scripts need more line height and different fonts.
- Forms. One-word names, no surname, no street address, postal codes with letters, phone numbers of varying length.
- Formats. Dates, decimal separators, currency position, 12- versus 24-hour time, the first day of the week.
- Infrastructure. Cash on delivery, shared phones, prepaid data, no persistent connection.
- Who you tested with. More on this at the end.
Culture is not just nationality
- Most of your users are in Austin, so the national axis is the least useful one for your project.
- Twenge (2025) argues that culture changes over time, and that technology is a main driver. A 72-year-old and a 19-year-old in the same zip code have different cultures of “obvious.”
- Professions are cultures. Nurses, mechanics, and lawyers have different norms for what counts as careful, fast, or polite.
- Organizations are cultures. Your client has one. You met it on Tuesday.
- Disability communities are cultures. Deaf culture has its own language, norms, and history, not just a need for captions.
Tight and loose
- The dimension applies to organizations and professions, not just nations. A hospital is tight. A startup is loose.
- A tight-culture user wants visible rules, confirmation steps, clear states, and an obvious right way to do things.
- A loose-culture user tolerates ambiguity and wants to be left alone to explore.
- Which is your client? Which is your primary persona? Does your prototype match?
Not every difference is culture
- When you see an app from another market that looks strange, sort the strangeness into three bins.
- Culture. Values, norms, aesthetics, what counts as trustworthy or polite.
- Infrastructure. Payment rails, connectivity, device cost, regulation.
- Accident. Path dependence. QR payments dominate in China partly because many people skipped the desktop and credit-card era entirely.
- Super-apps like WeChat, Grab, and Gojek look cultural, but a lot of the explanation is infrastructure and accident.
- The skill is not noticing difference. The skill is explaining it.
WEIRD and your personas
- Henrich et al. (2010) pointed out that most psychology research was done on people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies, which they abbreviated WEIRD.
- Generative AI has the same problem, with the same initials. It was trained mostly on WEIRD text and images.
- That is why your persona posters kept being named Maya, and why they all shop online, live alone or with a partner, and have a smartphone and a credit card.
- An AI-generated persona is a cultural default dressed up as a person. You have to push against it on purpose.
Exercise
Find the culture hiding in your own prototype
Part 1: Assumption audit
- Open your team’s current hifi prototype in Figma.
- Go screen by screen and list ten assumptions your prototype makes about its users.
- An assumption counts if a real person somewhere, including in Austin, would be excluded, confused, or offended by it.
- Then pick the three that would actually break the app for a specific user you can name or describe.
- Write them in a shared doc. You will hand this list to another team.
Hunting grounds
- Text. Length, direction, script, reading level, idioms, humor.
- Forms. Names, addresses, phone, gender, honorifics, required fields.
- Formats. Dates, times, numbers, currency, units, first day of the week.
- Icons and metaphors. Mailbox, floppy disk, thumbs-up, checkmark, hamburger, house for “home.”
- Color and imagery. Who is in the stock photos? What does the palette signal?
- Gestures. Swipe direction, long press, what “back” means.
- Social norms. Sharing, privacy, family, who owns the device, who pays.
- Infrastructure. Connectivity, payment, device age, storage.
Part 2: Swap
- Trade prototypes and lists with another team.
- Spend ten minutes finding assumptions in their prototype that they did not list.
- Other people see your water better than you do.
- Report the two best catches back to the owning team.
Part 3: Localization stress test
- Back in your own prototype, pick your two densest screens.
- Run every string through a machine translator into German or Finnish and paste the results back in. What truncates? What wraps? What pushes an icon off the edge?
- Now mirror one screen for right-to-left reading. Flip the layout, then decide icon by icon what should flip.
- Screenshot before and after. These screenshots are something to show your developers, who are working on exactly this problem from the other side.
Which icons flip?
- A back arrow flips. A forward arrow flips. A progress bar flips.
- A clock does not flip. A play button does not flip. A checkmark does not flip. Numerals do not flip.
- A magnifying glass is debated. A speech bubble depends on its tail.
- The rule: if the icon depicts direction of reading or progress, flip it. If it depicts a physical object, don’t.
- There is no rule that saves you from looking at every icon.
Optional: Persona variable swap
- Take your primary persona poster from week eight.
- Change exactly one thing. The persona is 72. The persona grew up in Lagos. The persona is Deaf. The persona’s parent is the real user and the persona is doing it for them.
- Walk the onboarding flow as that person. Find the first screen that fails.
- Compare notes across the team. Did everyone find the same screen?
Your beta test sample
- Your beta report is due a week from today. It asks you to justify who you recruited.
- Who is not in your sample?
- If you used Usertesting.com participants, what do they have in common with each other?
- Name one group that would have seen your prototype differently, and one specific thing they would have seen differently.
- Write that paragraph now. It belongs in the methodology section of your next report, and it is the honest version of “why these participants made sense.”
Literature
- Kashima and Gelfand (2025) is a current handbook chapter on culture in social psychology. The definition on the first slide and the tight-versus-loose discussion come from it.
- Twenge (2025) is a companion chapter on how technology drives cultural change over time, which is the argument that generations are cultures.
- Gelfand (2018) is the book-length, readable version of tight and loose cultures.
- Reinecke and Gajos (2014) is the large-scale study of visual preferences around the world.
- Henrich et al. (2010) is the WEIRD paper.
More literature
- Marcus and Gould (2000) is the classic attempt to apply Hofstede’s national dimensions to web interface design. Read it as history. It is widely cited and widely criticized for treating nations as single minds.
- Alsaleh (2024) surveys the relationship between technology and cultural change, including the digital divide and homogenization.
END
References
Alsaleh, Abdullah. 2024. “The Impact of Technological Advancement on Culture and Society.” Scientific Reports 14: 32140. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-83995-z.
Gelfand, Michele J. 2018. Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. Scribner.
Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. “The Weirdest People in the World?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2–3): 61–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X.
Kashima, Yoshihisa, and Michele J. Gelfand. 2025. “Culture.” In The Handbook of Social Psychology, 6th ed., edited by Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, Eli J. Finkel, and Wendy Berry Mendes. Situational Press. https://doi.org/10.70400/VMTM7805.
Marcus, Aaron, and Emilie West Gould. 2000. “Crosscurrents: Cultural Dimensions and Global Web User-Interface Design.” Interactions 7 (4): 32–46. https://doi.org/10.1145/345190.345238.
Reinecke, Katharina, and Krzysztof Z. Gajos. 2014. “Quantifying Visual Preferences Around the World.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York), CHI ’14, 11–20. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557052.
Twenge, Jean M. 2025. “Technology and Cultural Change.” In The Handbook of Social Psychology, 6th ed., edited by Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, Eli J. Finkel, and Wendy Berry Mendes. Situational Press. https://doi.org/10.70400/BZNV4498.
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