Local Culture, Global Habits

As I wait in the lounge of Berlin’s Tegel airport, I’m three feet but half a world away from a woman tapping away on her cell phone. We’ve exchanged enough pleasantries to discover that we don’t speak the same language, but I’m convinced I can learn her story from the dance of her ngers across the screen and the movements of her face. Between bursts of action with her thumbs, her right index nger lightly sweeps over the screen, showing me that she’s either texting, emailing, or using social media. Her smile is simple and relaxed. Her eyes expand when a new message arrives. Her head cocks as she processes the information. She seems to be having a conversation with a friend, someone with shared interests and a common background. Yet I also know that these actions are likely not unique to her. I spent the fall semester studying how German organizations develop and deploy computing technology. While visiting universities and think tanks, supercomputer centers, and companies that insisted I abide by strict nondisclosure agreements, I witnessed the unifying nature of technology. For example, I noticed habits in Berlin that were similar to those in Bangalore and the Silicon Valley. But I’ve also seen technology decisions that only make sense in a narrow cultural context. For example, a German train reservation website won’t produce results for “Lüneburg” when you search for “Luneburg” without the umlaut. The di erence seemed insigni cant to me while performing my search, but as it turns out, there’s a Luneburg in South Africa—so the umlaut represents a distance of more than 8,580 miles on the globe or 42 integers on the ASCII table. Such experiences remind us how much local culture can be contained in computing technology. In the middle of my visit, a large German rm showed me how it captured local culture for its mobile shopping apps. Its large user experience lab had all the modern tools: data-gathering systems, eye-tracking sensors, analytic renderings, and predictive models. The lab workers said they used these tools to develop a narrative for their app that was fundamentally German. “We have very few customers outside of Germany,” one explained. Yet, if their design had any German elements, it acquired those elements through an innate process rather than through explicit design. The developers used their equipment to tailor speci c elements of the app to their varying customers’ habits. For example, they carefully re ned how they used pictures of female models. They found that men and women look at female models in di erent ways: women tend to look at the model’s eyes, while men tend to look at the mouth. Starting with those two points, the designers used graphic design, text, and button placement to guide the two cohorts to the services that each was more likely to use. Women visited pages designed for them while men moved to their part of the site. Each gender behaved as if they were following written instructions. The designers were especially proud of this aspect of the site, but it utilized a habit that didn’t seem to be uniquely German. North American researchers have discovered the same phenomena.