Reshaping Crossroads Into a Design Square

The concluding chapter summarizes the culturally localized user engagement and empowerment (CLUE2) approach and calls for reshaping the crossroads of global social media design into a design square where a spectrum of thoughts, design traditions, discursive conventions, and epistemological orders converge and interact to spark new ideas. This chapter consists of two parts. The first part reviews the three keywords of the CLUE2 approach—discursive affordances, technological genres, and local uptakes—and discusses how they serve as an agent for change and transformation in routinized everyday practices on a global cultural circuit. The second part highlights three design and research heuristics for this critical, global approach: articulating practice-based human–technology relations, piecing together fragmented experiences into global processes, and enabling and engaging cultural differences out of positionality and reflexivity. This critical social practice view of the CLUE2 approach links design and innovation on the global cultural circuit and promotes a relational view of design, contributing to an uprising school for a relational approach of design that comes from multiple disciplines.

War of Social Messaging Platforms

This chapter studies four social messaging platforms, including WhatsApp (United States), WeChat (China), LINE (Japan), and KakaoTalk (South Korea), and applies a relational view of design to explore how the material and the discursive are fused to articulate culturally sustaining value propositions and global mobilities. Based on a multiyear, multisited transnational study and bilingual literature research, it traces the genre development of four local uptakes of a global technology assemblage from the angle of affordances. In exploring the culturally constructed and technology-mediated process of global mobilities, the chapter discusses how discursive affordances of the local uptakes presented culturally sustaining value propositions to spearhead businesses in global competitions, and how the artifact-based and distributed affordances together enhanced individual users to form identities of global mobilities within their communication ecologies for engagement and empowerment. It asks us to consider how we as designers should address the tension between cultural diversity and cultural sensitivity as part of today’s global cultural diversity reality for social media design.

Understanding the Criticality of Differences in Cross-Cultural Design

This chapter articulates a practice-oriented critical vision of cultural differences to global design and explores how we should productively engage differences in global design practices. Cultural differences in this book refer to the differences that emerge from various categorical identifications such as ethnicity, race, age, class, religion, gender, sexuality, and ability and manifests as ways of life. A practice-oriented critical vision sees cultural differences as dynamic, relational, emergent, contingent, and liminal, in contrast to a simplistic interpretation of cultural differences presented by multiculturalism and other theories. This chapter first reviews why cultural differences matters and then organizes the discussion around four sets of questions: First, how does difference come into being? Second, what is the nature of difference ontologically? Third, how should we treat difference methodologically and practically? Fourth, as designers, how can we turn differences into design resources? And how should we design with, across, and for cultural differences? Based on the articulation of a practice-oriented critical vision of differences that turns communication deficits into design resources, the culturally localized user experience (CLUE) approach is thus developed into the approach of culturally localized user engagement and empowerment (CLUEE), simplified as the CLUE2 (CLUE-squared) approach. Examples of race construction and social media design cases are provided to enrich the discussion.

Designing for Empowerment With a Critical Practice Approach

This chapter articulates a practice-oriented critical design approach for empowerment. It situates global design issues concerning structure and agency in a discourse of redistributing power and privileges. It first paints a big picture of the social justice–oriented design scholarship in the disciplines of human–computer interaction (HCI), technical and professional communication, and informatics with its key issues. Then it reviews the development of critical design movement and the turn and re-turn to practice in HCI and design communities. Built on that discussion, it integrates the two into a critical practice approach for empowerment—a relational view of design that centers on everyday practice and aims to transform its inequalities of power.

Weibo of China

This chapter studies the design case of Weibo from China and explores how a local social media service, which at first was regarded as a copycat of a Silicon Valley technology, arose in the Chinese social media market and beat its Western competitor on Wall Street with its culturally sensitive design features. It reviews Weibo’s two stages of development to explore the complicacy of technology design and the dynamic and dialogical structuring process behind the formation of a technological genre for microblogging. Through the case, it unpacks three sensitizing concepts of the culturally localized user engagement and empowerment (CLUE2) framework for coming up with empowering global designs: a genre of technology as normative and performative practice, a dialogic model of communication, and hybridity as creative mixing for empowerment. Together they outline a pathway to connect the macro and the micro in cross-cultural design: A rhetorical genre view helps us to see how a culturally sustaining technology functions as a technological genre, instantiating both normative and performative practice as local uptakes. The local uptake develops and evolves by following a dialogic model of communication in design practices to generate new meanings and produce new practices, and it forms through the process of hybridization as a creative mixing for agency. Various local uptakes make up an open, globally networked technology assemblage with dialogic relations flowing between.

Facebook Japan

This chapter explores why Japanese users were never crazed about Facebook and illustrates the value of a practice-oriented critical approach to global design with design tools. It begins with the case background. It then develops a nuanced and multifaceted discussion to uncover the hidden relations between power, ideology, and identity surrounding the local uses of Facebook Japan: Built on the findings triangulated from primary and secondary research, it reviews the different networked sociality between Japan and the United States within the postcolonial discourse, and then presents a design instrument of discursive affordances to redress asymmetrical power distribution for culturally sustaining design. It concludes the discussion by situating the Facebook Japan case within the political economy scholarship: The asymmetrical power structure demonstrated in the design and operation of the Facebook platform shows the importance of moving from the micro to the macro and connecting both toward a practice-oriented critical design with the culturally localized user engagement and empowerment (CLUE2, or CLUE-squared) approach. This chapter also introduces a few sets of social media notions to frame the design discussion in this book and to use them as sensitizing concepts to inspire social media technology design. Concepts include networked sociality, social capital, ties, and connectedness versus connectivity. Two design tools are introduced, including the activity-based affordances model for design inspiration and the design heuristics of discursive affordances.

A Move to Global Design

This chapter establishes the importance of a global approach to social media technology design. It demonstrates interconnectedness as its core feature, as its methodology, and as its cultural logic. In explaining why a global approach is needed for user experience design, it reviews the historical tradition of three main design paradigms (i.e., applied arts, engineering, and human-centered paradigms) and connects this global move with similar paradigm shifts in other fields like global media studies, social informatics, and technical communication. It then describes what this approach entails and unpacks the concept of interconnectedness. It concludes with a case from fieldwork to illustrate how interconnectedness and interdependence work in global social media design.

Introduction

This chapter describes what motivated the author to write the book with a critical, cultural approach at the intersection of professional and technical communication, human–computer interaction, cultural and media studies, rhetoric and writing, and social informatics, guided by the question of how we should design usable, meaningful, and empowering social media technology for culturally diverse users in this increasingly globalized world. It explains the urgent call for a global approach to cross-cultural social media design at the crossroads of social media design; introduces a set of fundamental concepts for critical design used in the book for cross-disciplinary conversations; and previews the book structure. The critical, global design approach applies a macroscopic understanding and critical vision of culture and structure from the broader sociocultural context to drive microscopic design implementations in the immediate context. It is a new development of “culturally localized user experience” (CLUE) presented in the author’s 2012 book, but readers don’t need to read the former book to proceed with this book.