EXPERIMENTING ‘DESIGN’ TO REVEAL CULTURE FACTORS - STEDEX '10

New designs should support the everyday environment and should refer to existing designs that are familiar to users. These would help to motivate designers to develop culturally localised designs that allow products to be manufactured and relevant to users’ current lifestyles. Despite the growing number of studies on cultural factors in marketing research, designers have not been given much opportunities to present their designing skills and thinking in conducting such research related to culturel thus leading to product improvement. This article describes a framework and results of adapting a “practice-led” research-based approach to understand cultural factors of a specific ethnic group in Malaysia whose members migrated from traditional rural life to urban industrial setting. Findings from adapting this method have been generated into a design-research guideline for designers and product planners to understand users’ culturally determined needs when developing a cultural product.

The original motivation for this work was to seek ways for designers and producers in Malaysia, as an emerging industrial nation, to provide appropriate products for local consumers and their culture rather than simply responding to global norms. However, it was soon recognised that the central factor was not so much the particular conditions in Malaysia but rather that the population was experiencing rapid changes. It was seen that similar economic and demographic shifts were happening in many parts of the world and design works moved on to consider the role of designers in this context.