28 Dec 2006 2029H

Design, Globalization, LukeW: a rant

Y’know, I generally like Luke Wroblewski’s stuff, but there are times when I’m reading his blog that I’m left shaking my head. For instance, there’s this paragraph from his article on the Complexity of Simplicity, which goes probably 90% unchallenged by the predominantly white American audience:

In many Asian countries, for example, congested spaces are quite common, and the benefits of collectivism, or integration with strong, cohesive groups, may outweigh those of individualism, or loose cultural ties. In this context, a lot of whitespace or an overall reduction in visual activity may be warning flags that a product lacks substance and thus requires significant investment with little payoff. In these cultures, information density is an indicator of activity and, therefore, an incentive for use. So dense visual information, like that shown in Figure 3, may be more attractive than the sparse layouts that invite exploration in the Western world, because of their perceived simplicity.

Everyone is nodding at this sage wisdom, I’m sure. He’s out-confused Confucius!

Excuse me? Luke, where’s the evidence to support these assertions, which seem, frankly, borderline racial, never mind patently wrong, when you look at the traditional use of negative space and simplicity in East Asian art, architecture, crafts . . . and, does anyone remember the days when Netscape looked like Grand Central Station at rush hour? Or Yahoo or Amazon or eBay now? Like these aren’t busy? Dude. I got news for ya. Portals are busy no matter what culture they’re in.

I hate to think what he might say about African information density. . . .

Then there’s a sort of feel-good discussion about design globalization involving, again, mostly white guys, sure, you have Niti Bhan formerly of IIT’s Design School is in the mix, not a token at all, fortunately, but, somehow, I think they missed out on a really important and valuable opportunity to move the fuck aside and let the global designers, i.e., the Lebanese, the Chinese, the South Africans, and the Brazilians do the talking. And not let the white people say these irrelevant things about, say, how Korean soap operas are doing well beyond the Korean audience in designing products for Taiwan by non-Taiwanese. Jeezus. I almost half-expected someone to start saying, Everybody Loves Kung Fu FIGH-TING! HAH!

This kind of thing takes me back to when I was an undergrad at Illinois. I remember sitting with some friends at a computer lab in my residence hall and there was a tour being given to a group of Japanese engineers. One of them pointed to an ethernet hub and said, “Ethernet?” And I remember the lab admin saying, “Yes. That’s right. WE invented it.” As an Asian American, I felt taken aback. The WE clearly did not include me, or perhaps, did not know enough to include me. But more to the point there was a kind of smug arrogance there in his words that was prideful, yet resentful, suspicious, defensive, provincial. Ultimately, he was forced to admit, there wasn’t a monopoly on smarts and couldn’t do a damn thing about it in spite of his smug insecurity. I think that’s been vindicated in the consumer electronics and automotive markets. Now we use terms like kaizen and poka-yoke, but they still haven’t taken hold on our imagination.

It’s almost like this story I heard on This American Life about Brand America, and the ill-fated attempt of an American ad agency to talk to the Muslim world about the benefits of truth, democracy and the American way. And, along the way, tries to figure out whether black children have swimsuits or not. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. Mostly you’ll cry.

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7 responses to "Design, Globalization, LukeW: a rant"

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29 Dec 2006 0200H

LukeW writes:

Hi Gene,
Sorry the article hit an unpleasant nerve with you. Just to clarify where my comments are coming from. They are not assumptions made by indirect observation on my part. For the better part of 10 years I’ve been closely working (both locally and remotely) with International product and design teams including offices of large corporations with established local/national offices. It is from the on the ground product teams in Hong Kong, Taiwain, Korea, Japan, Shanghai, and more that I’ve continually heard about the cultural differences between US design considerations and those found in Asia. It these local teams and their designers that cry out for more visual activity on pages and cite cultural difference as a strong motivating factor. The research I have seen and been a part of in these countries also support many of these distinctions.

Shoot me a note if you are interested in links to more details. thanks~

29 Dec 2006 0910H

me writes:

Luke, thanks for taking the time to write back. Like I said, I’m a fan of your work, and I think there are serious issues here to be discussed. I’m not a big fan of sweeping generalizations and oversimplified ideas, since I think we live in an age where these behaviors can be quite nuanced and we are in a privileged position to observe them.

Aligning on Garrett’s planes of UE, as someone who grew up with one foot in East Asian culture, and who has also worked in Hong Kong, I’d agree that the way the surface is expressed is different, but not characterize those differences as somehow unique or characteristic of urban East Asians. What I would say is that the way the surface has been expressed, as with any other place, has been shaped by movements among aesthetic idea marketplaces, which have been globalized in Asia for nearly three to four centuries now due to the imperial influence of the West, and modern capital forces.

Indeed, there is intense competition in the local market in addition to the scrutiny of modern results-based management techniques, so that there is a keen intensity in cities as to what works and what doesn’t for their local markets. But there is tremendous variance as well. In the Chinese mainland for instance, which has been doing quite a lot of catching up to global quality standards since economic liberalization, they’re still developing a global aesthetic voice that is still unique to China but which can still compete in the global marketplace on its own. So you’ll find much more sophisticated design work in cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai and places that have either been colonised or have some other historic exposure to the West than you will in the Chinese heartland. That’s true of any place, not the least of which is the US, where for all our own visual sophistication we also have very busy, busy designs and yet, in places like New York, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles where people are also densely populated, the tone of the communication is often more nuanced than it is in say, Pierre, SD.

Yes, it’s true that throughout the big cities in East Asia, there does seem to be a lot of visual shouting. But I’ve also seen people zag when everyone else is zigging and speak visually in much softer, quieter voices. And the example you picked, a very busy portal home page, is not necessarily a good or representative one, since all portals are quite busy, not just Chinese ones, and there are many examples of very elegant design work throughout the region, again, if one takes cities as a kind of benchmark and not necessarily the mainland, since there is tremendous variance within even one country.

I would also agree with Nielsen and others who say that in the end, there are only so many ways to do work. People do seem to determine the worth of an application by the number of functions that it appears to have, and that the behaviors you’ve observed with consumers are not, again, necessarily characteristic of urbanized East Asians. For instance, in creating wayfinding systems for a client, consumers report feeling somewhat overwhelmed by information density, but after grouping and simplifying products into fewer categories, are then observed to complain that they feel there isn’t enough variety of product on the shelves. This seems to be the paradox of more is more, and it appears to be the case as much for the great plains (with category killers like big box stores for instance) as it is for the Kanto plain.

Without discounting the intangible qualities of design, I tend to be suspicious when people throw up the blithe cultural differences defense for their design choices, as if it’s something inscrutible, and I know from my own observations that responses when non-Asians are conducting talks or observations that this tends to have some impact — one designer said to me that “the tongue curls up” — but if the users can complete the tasks within the parameters we’ve set and the sales metrics support their case, there’s not much to argue against. Then we’re talking about tweaking and A/B testing.

And, would it kill you to get a few native voices out in front and let them talk about the state of design — products, information, services — in Korea, Poland, Qatar, Brazil, Shanghai? ;-)

29 Dec 2006 1756H

tim writes:

This is really interesting. I wanted to comment, then read the above two comments and realized I didn’t know enough to a make a real contribution. So I’ll leave it just at….really interesting.

29 Dec 2006 2231H

niti bhan writes:

Having recently attended a Design Summit in New Delhi, and been immersed in Asian design conversations for most of the past month and currently back home with the ‘rents in Singapore, I’d like to add my two cents worth on this topic from the other side of Asia, if I may.

All purely subjective observations, imho:

1. On the topic of busy, dense, flashing websites - I believe there are two key issues at stake here,

one, Luke, who were the people giving you feedback that these portals and websites need to noisy, flashing, busy and dense? The actual users who struggle to download these sites with the ads, popups and what to me seems badly designed dense information - I’m speaking from the point of view trying to surf the net in New Delhi on a dial up or low level broadband connection OR is it the website owners, designers and marketers, who are trying to maximize their return on investment by packing every inch full of google ads, pop ups, banners and information?

two, and this relates to the design of commercial sites such as corporate homepages, design studio portfolios and others who need to present themselves to the world on the world wide web - I found that my visual aesthetic sense has changed much since I left design school in India and also in the past decade since I first saw the visual web, I find that having become accustomed to a certain presentation style or website design or design convention, the local sites seem old fashioned and just not world class or with it. Something that will become increasing crucial as Asian firms, particularly in the creative arena, wish to attract and retain international customers looking to offshore their design services, as my former schoolmates wish to do. In this case, is it not that one should follow the cues and signals of quality as conventionally seen on the world wide web [sorry Gene, first mover advantage in this case dictates norms and cues] in order to be perceived seriously as world class players in the market?

Finally, wrt to token or otherwise, while I appreciate your acknowledgement that I am not a mere token, (heh!) I resent on the behalf of my co authors and LukeW, our host, that any of them are to be considered “white men” in the context in which you have called them so. As a non-white, non-male, I percieve your attitude to be far more racist and close minded than theirs, by virtue of the fact that none of us noticed the race or gender of each other, nor worth commenting or acknowledging, other than yourself. And to clarify, I was neither born nor brought up in the United states, having moved there at age 32. Perhaps, if we Asians are to be taken more seriously we need to rise above these obvious differences and focus instead on debating the merits and demerits of those subjects closer to our hearts - design, globalization, strategy and how we can communicate value across cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic barriers.

29 Dec 2006 2232H

niti bhan writes:

As for design in Qatar, Brazil, Shanghai and Pretoria, consider visting the illustrated weekly of world design, http://www.readymade.co.za/news.htm

30 Dec 2006 0017H

me writes:

Niti, thanks for your reactions and for the link. I value both yours and Luke’s input, I think this is an important dialogue and I think it’s been a productive one. Since I tend to be long-winded, to your points, I may have to start inserting “Back to Top” links. . .

1) Again, to reiterate, a Chinese portal being “busy” is not necessarily characteristic of East Asian urban population density, of so-called Confucian cultural values of collectivism, or these other “area studies”-derived notions that the West has held about Asia and its peoples, which is what Luke had originally claimed in his post.

He is saying that there is a “more is more” effect due to East Asian urban population density and collective, Confucianised cultural values. My first response to an assertion like that, as a social scientist, is to say, alright, where’s your evidence to establish that there is such a connection? Because the null hypothesis for that would be that there is no such effect, so the observations he must have made must have been sufficient to reject that hypothesis. I’m just saying that Luke doesn’t have the evidence to indicate the “more is more” effect is a function of East Asian urban population density, or heck, let’s take it to the extreme, Japanese office workers being packed into the morning commuter trains by officers with white gloves. There’s simply no relation there.

My experience and observation is that portal homepages regardless of cultural origin simply are busy places. They’re busy because they are political entities, they have to accommodate the multiple needs of many kinds of users and many kinds of internal business interests. And often times designers of information and presentation encounter the paradox of “more is more,” which I’ve observed here as well, Don Norman has, Joel Spolsky has, Luke has: people want and respond to more choices and when they don’t see them, engagement falls. That’s not necessarily East Asian!

2) You’re certainly right about first mover advantage dictating norms and cues. There’s certainly no getting around the explosive growth and development of web design as led by Americans, or by American-trained designers (who themselves are most noticeably influenced by Swiss modernism). It is a kind of American design hegemony the world is experiencing online. It’s true that the American online design vernacular has been influenced by a number of different influences, including East Asian ones, which have been pastiched quite visibly in recent years. As designers have begun to learn how to transfer skills from print to the web, regional vernaculars in the global design market are also being asserted. When you are saying that you feel local sites have an “old fashioned” look and feel and “just not world class or with it,” what you are expressing really are tacit preferences about design language and vernacular, but because design is a product of human expression, it is a myth to think there is a kind of universal design language that somehow transcends nation, class, race, ethnicity, caste, since these ways of looking onto the world find themselves worked into design vernaculars.

3) Niti, I’m glad you qualified your statement about race, not having been born or grown up here. As you no doubt are aware, race and ethnicity unfortunately have a very long shadow here in the US, particularly here in Chicago, one of the most segregated cities in America, and white privilege is something that is both a fact of life as well as a condition of modernity. You can see it just standing on the Red Line of the Chicago El at rush hour.

Like influences on an emerging global design vernacular, to pretend that racial privilege doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that it’s not there, especially in a conversation about global design but not featuring native voices of designers within their contexts, their audiences, their content. Instead of doing the speaking about the Other, with often “colored” notions about the Other, whites in positions of privilege and power could use their prominence and visibility as thought leaders to bring those native voices to the forefront, but then step aside and let them do the talking. Now, if you believe that native voices should not be allowed to speak for themselves, that they should be taken out of their context, and that non-natives should do all the speaking for them, I’d be worried. I am worried. But people come from different places and bring only what they know to the table, so. Shrug.

30 Dec 2006 1933H

Wataru Ebihara writes:

I just wanted to say that in terms of an aesthetic minimalist style, the use of negative space in artwork (or “nothing” or “empty space”) is a predominant visual and philosophic aspect in Zen which is a combination of Taoism and Buddhism. It’s something that’s very traditionally and culturally Asian that goes back many “thousands” of years…

I feel that it’s a little over generalizing to say that visual “busy-ness” is culturally Asian, or to say that Asian people are unfamiliar with the use of whitespace. It might say something about the web designers/artists (whether Asian or non-Asian), though, but not Asian cultures or people in general. Some of these choices might not even be dictated by aesthetics, but as corporate business decisions to cram as much content on the site as possible. Who knows?

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