Modality
on-line
Target Audience
Design-minded HCI graduate students and practitioners and any HCII attendees who are interested in topics such as critical design, speculative design, speculative reality, design ethics, diversity and inclusion, global design, cross-cultural design, and in empowering users for more inclusive communities and societies at this globally divided time. They will be exposed to critical design methodology and methods. Even people who don’t do design work regularly could still learn from this course since we live in a world made of designed artifacts.
Abstract
Should the principle of simplicity and minimalism be the standard for interaction design? How can we avoid unintended stereotyping with user personas in daily design practices? What AI algorithms and design mechanism made “digital blackface” phenomenon on social media so popular? Why were women’s voices used as default for digital assistants ranging from Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa? Why did Facebook's signup page remain a binary gender option for another five years after the 50+ gender options were introduced in 2014? Why was Indian’s indigenous Arattai launched a decade after the “mobile messaging war” between WhatsApp and meta’s Asian competitors including WeChat, LINE, and KaKaoTalk (Bloomburg, 2014)?
Objectives
- Decode design ideology behind everyday design artifacts and routine design practices
- Understand cultural differences as dynamic and relational concerning cultural values, identity, race, and gender at this globally divided time
- Acquire essential skills to engage cultural differences and turn differences into design resources
- Evaluate designs and explore design and innovation opportunities with a “discursive affordances” design framework and sociotechnical whiteboards
Benefits for attendees
This course introduces strategies and techniques to create culturally meaningful and empowering designs to bridge cultural differences in a globalized world at a divisive time.
It teaches participants to a) reconsider some commonly held design beliefs and routine design practices through a lens of cultural differences, and b) develop a deep understanding of critical design and speculative design with design research from the Global South.
Course Content
In this interactive course, a new critical design framework of discursive affordances (Sun &Hart-Davidson, 2014; Sun, 2020) is used to trace the interconnectedness of grand narratives (such as ideologies and cultural institutions) and everyday interactions, and to uncover design and innovation opportunities. Discursive affordances stress affordances as dialogic discursive relations. It connects critical design considerations for empowerment, such as identity and values, agency and structure, ideology and power (and sovereignty) on a macrosocial level, with design implementations for efficiency and effectiveness on the micro level in everyday life. Therefore, it connects macro-HCI with micro-HCI (Schneiderman, 2011).
In the same vein of Actor-Network Theory and a new wave of relational approach of design theories (e.g., Kimbell, 2012; Sun & Hart-Davidson, 2014; Sun, 2020, 2022; Escobar, Osterweil & Sharma, 2024), discursive affordances enacts, demonstrates, and performs a network of relationships between human and non-human elements, entangled in ideological clashes and geopolitical competitions.
Taught by two researchers from the Global South, case studies from our research will be provided to understand cultural differences portrayed in this globally divided time. Cultural differences emerge from the various categorical identifications such as ethnicity, race, age, class, religion, gender, sexuality, and ability and manifest as ways of life. They provide design challenges because they are often regarded as a deficit or a threat to harmonious communication for understanding. Based on instructors’ longstanding work in cross-cultural and global design, critical and speculative design with a Global South perspective (Sun & Hart-Davidson, 2014; Sun, 2012, 2020; Loutfi et al., 2025, 2024; Nascimento et al., 2023), this course shows that cultural differences are dynamic, relational, emergent, and contingent, and often framed in a global power hierarchy, driven by transnational corporate interests and stuck in the murky ground of ideological clashes and geopolitical tensions.
The course will demonstrate ways of engaging cultural differences and turning communication deficits into generative design resources for “togetherness-in-difference.” It aims to help participants combat social inequality embedded in our digital technological platforms, catalyze agency within our sociocultural structure for healing, and stimulate social changes.
Agenda
Part 1
- Workshop intro with design icebreaker activity
- What is a practice-oriented critical design approach: Participatory lecture
- Break
- Understanding cultural differences: Participatory lecture & Workshop activity
- Mapping affordances with sociotechnical whiteboards: Workshop activity
Refreshment Break
Part 2
- Turning differences into design resources: Participatory lecture & Workshop activity
- Practice session: Group workshop
- Group demo
- Inclusive design in a globalized world: Participatory lecture
- Review, take-away, & feedback
Bio Sketches of Course instructors
Huatong Sun: Full Professor in cross-cultural, multi-cultural, and global UX design at University of Washington Tacoma, U.S.A. Originally from China, she started her practice out of her frustration about the design problems of interactive technologies shaped by Western design mindsets. Multi-award-winning book author of “Cross-Cultural Technology Design” (2012) and “Global Social Media Design” (2020) with Oxford University Press, she writes for public media including Fast Company, The Conversation, and ACM Interactions. Her community-engaged teaching innovation with marginalized user communities made her Winner for Excellence in Teaching from the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and the Distinction in the Practice of Diversity and Inclusion Award Winner of the Association for Business Communication (ABC) in the U.S. She has served on the Program Board of HCI International Cross-Cultural Design (CCD) Conference since 2014.
Sean Wolfgand Matsui Siqueira: Full professor at the Department of Applied Informatics, Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro - UNIRIO), Brazil. His research interests include social and learning technologies, speculative design and entanglement theories. He has participated in international research projects and written more than 200 papers for conferences, journals, and book chapters. He was the coordinator of the Graduate Program in Information Systems at UNIRIO from July 2012 to September 2014 and from October 2022 to April 2025. He coordinated various Program Committees on Information Systems and Technology-Enhanced Learning. He is a member of the steering committee of the Brazilian Congress of Computers and Education and of the special committee on Computers in Education, both from the Brazilian Computer Society. Currently enthusiastic about Philosophy and, more specifically, the Philosophy of Technology, with an approach applied to Information Systems and Educational and Social Technologies, exploring the development and use of more ethical, socially and environmentally aware technologies.
https://salt.uniriotec.br/