What Is Culture? Toward Common Understandings of Culture in HCI

What is culture in HCI? This article presents how the term culture has been used and discussed by authors in the discipline. Since culture is a complex concept, there is no aim to establish the term as a fixed definition in this paper. Instead the purpose is to enlighten some previous discussions and uses in order to ask questions, encourage new discussions and give motivation for searching common understandings of the term culture among HCI researchers. This article also includes a discussion of how such a change can be launched. Geert Hofstede’s thoughts about culture are discussed out of a complementary perspective and a suggestion to use the dimensional thoughts on different cultural and societal levels is given. Notably, this paper does not answer questions. It asks them.