Culturally Diverse Design

Designers shape our world.

Design is fundamentally a cultural activity. Different cultural paradigms of design utilise different design processes, leading to the design of different artefacts and the stories that are told about those artefacts.

However, the Western cultural design paradigm dominates design schools and education, leading to a world that has been shaped less richly than is possibly should other cultural design paradigms be more widely recognised.

Culturally diverse design is a movement that attempts to address this issue. It is also the core theme I explored in my PhD research on cross-cultural design and innovation, between First (or Indigenous) Australians and Later Australians. I am particularly interested in design at the cultural interface between different cultures, and the capabilities that support these new understandings of design.

People in societies around the world may be equally well equipped with the biological first principles required to do design (Dong, 2010), that is, to intentionally shape their environment for specific needs. However, I propose that the expression of these first principles, and of design in general, will vary considerably in the myriad cultures sharing this planet. Similar to the evolution of different languages, each culture will have a unique expression of these biological first principles to design, shaped by their interactions with, and knowledge of, the local environment, culminating in a unique understanding and expression of design. As a consequence, different cultures will have different representations of what it means to design that are inherently and intrinsically valued, with each telling a different story of what it means to be human. Therefore, I propose that it is not just different design styles that may emerge in different cultures, so much as entirely different ‘conceptual mappings’ (Hall, 1997) of design, leading to the production and use of different designed artefacts, and the stories that accompany them.