Jorge Arango

Entrepreneur Loic Le Meur thinks global. His recent guest post in Techcrunch provides suggestions for startups that includes “Think global as you create the business”, “Hire people from all nationalities as much as possible”, and “Make a site that is language-ready from day one, even if you launch in English”. Seems like enlightened advice, given that so much new content on the web is still targeted exclusively to US (or at least, English-speaking) audiences. While it is understandable that some sites — like mint.com, that must interact directly with banks — remain US-only at launch, it is disheartening when even services that have been successful for years refuse to open up to the global marketplace (37signals, I’m looking at you).

This phenomenon is perhaps most annoying when dealing with media properties, which could clearly benefit from added exposure, and which seem deeply invested in the old broadcast model of distribution. To whit, this is what I get when I try to watch my favorite TV show (_House_) in the newly launched Hulu service:

There are no technical reasons for this; it seems like an entirely marketing-driven restriction, carried over from a world in which geography and distribution were intimately tied.

Culture (pop and otherwise) has been one of the US’s main exports during the past century, and it is an important part of continued American influence around the world. As more of our media usage moves online, this stubborn insistence on limiting distribution by geography is likely to curtail that influence. Putting up artificial borders around cultural artifacts to satisfy old-school business models seems as smart as setting the speed limit at 30 mph to keep the horse-carriages safe from automobiles.

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I’ve started a new blog to explore the challenges and opportunities present in cross-cultural design: designacrosscultures.com. It’ll be a place to capture random notes and ideas on cross-cultural web design theory and practice.

These are some of the questions I hope to explore:

• How should the design process vary when end users are from a different culture?
• How do you communicate effectively with stakeholders from different cultures? (Eg. methodologies and deliverables.)

• What are folks in other fields doing to improve cross-cultural design efforts? (I’m looking for success stories and failures.) How can we apply these learnings to web design?

  Websites are among the most instantaneously globalized of cultural artifacts; all websites are in a way crafted for a global audience. However, many designers (myself included) tend to view web design problems through the filters of our own cultures. It is these filters that I’m hoping to understand, and if possible, fiddle around with.

  Your feedback is most welcome!

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Thomas Vander Wal has been traveling a lot, and he’s finding that the local architecture can have important effects on his feelings of connectedness.

This is interesting to me because one of the hallmarks of the much maligned International Style of architecture is a trans-national vocabulary that is rooted more in fantasies about the machine age rather than in local context. Much of the design work we do online follows similar rules that hint at a global style (or styles), and results in a homogeneousness that is meant to convey “that we, too, can design like North Americans”. Here’s an example: an article by a Russian developer that proposes a categorization of different web UI styles, all based on designs for sites for US-based companies, presumably for replication by other designers.

Perhaps more culturally-aware design can help bring a feeling of rootedness to websites, much like culturally-aware architecture can for cities. How should we approach this, when we’re being sold on the notion of “global commerce online”?