Technology in culture : a theoretical discourse on convergence in human-technology interaction

Abstract

Technology touches so many facets of contemporary life that one is not necessarily conscious any more of how and why it affects daily experience. Awareness of technology’s role often surfaces only when something goes wrong with a product. At that moment, people become aware of a misalignment between their ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, and the form/function of a product, presumably designed to make life easier. Equally ubiquitous and beyond daily awareness are cognitive, affective, and behavioural processes patterned by culture. It has been noted that cultural factors influence the perception and usage of technology. Understanding these processes is important to researchers, designers and engineers. They try to create products whose functions are aligned with people’s needs. Achieving alignment means fundamentally helping people to realize goals and well-being. However, the processes employed towards this design goal need support from theoretical models that account for cultural similarities as well as differences. The scarcity of theoretical models, which could guide a culture-responsive technology design, has been identified as one of the root causes of the alignment problem. This dissertation addresses the facets of that problem from the interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science. It explicates the relations between technology, culture, and life, and it synthesizes a theoretical understanding of a culturally-responsive human-technology interaction (HTI) research and design. This theoretical model suggests that awareness of similarities and differences in culture’s influence on people’s ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving with regard to technology would help mitigate the problem of misalignment. It could also open possibilities for innovations, which improve the quality of life. It proposes designating culture as a point of convergence for current research and design approaches in order to facilitate the integration and accumulation of knowledge on design-relevant cultural factors.