[Air-L] New Book: Cross-Cultural Technology Design

[Huatong Sun]

(Apologies for cross-posting)

Dear colleagues,

I’m pleased to announce my new book from Oxford University Press, and
I hope you find it interesting:

Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive
Technology for Local Users

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Psychology/CognitivePsychology/?view=usa&sf=toc&ci=9780199744763

Companion website: http://www.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780199744763/

Please see below for detailed book information.

Best wishes,

Huatong

Huatong Sun, Ph.D
Assistant Professor, Digital Media Studies
Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences
University of Washington Tacoma
http://faculty.washington.edu/htsun/

ABSTRACT
The demand and opportunity for cross-cultural technology design is
rapidly rising due to globalization. However, all too often resulting
technologies are technically usable, yet cannot be immediately put to
meaningful use by users in their local, concrete contexts. Support for
concrete user activities is frequently missing in design, as support
for decontextualized actions is typically the focus of design. Sun
examines this disconnect between action and meaning in cross-cultural
technology design and presents an innovative framework, Culturally
Localized User Experience (CLUE), to tackle this problem.

Incorporating key concepts and methods from activity theory, British
cultural studies, and rhetorical genre theory, the CLUE approach
integrates action and meaning through a dialogical, cyclical design
process to design technology that engages local users within
culturally meaningful social practices. Illustrated with five in-depth
case studies of mobile text messaging use by college students and
young professionals in American and Chinese contexts spanning years,
Sun calls for a change in cross-cultural design practices from simply
applying cultural conventions in design to engaging with social
affordances based on a rich understanding of meaningful contextualized
activity.

This book will be of interest to researchers, students, practitioners,
and anyone who wants to create culture-sensitive technology in this
increasingly globalized world that requires advanced strategies and
techniques for culturally localized, participatory design.

CONTENTS
Part I Grounding
Chapter 1 Approaching Culture in Cross-Cultural Technology Design
Chapter 2 User Experience in Global Context
Chapter 3 Integrating Action and Meaning in Cross-Cultural Design
Chapter 4 CLUE as a Framework for Cross-Cultural User Experience Research
Part II Experiences
Chapter 5 Sophie's Story: New Chocolate at Work
Chapter 6 Lili's Story: Pure Water in Social Network
Chapter 7 Brian's Story: Conversations Carried through My Fingers
Chapter 8 Mei's Story: "Idioms Solitaire" Between Sports Fans
Chapter 9 Emma's Story: More than a Nice Gesture in a Technology-Mediated Life
Part III Implications
Chapter 10 Culturally Localized User Experience as Situated and Constructed
Chapter 11 Future Directions

“This insightful text offers a grounded approach to rethinking
technology design, and gives a framework for creating innovative
design, development, and deployment practices. Sun’s work illustrates
clearly the ways in which traditional HCI and interaction design
methods tend to miss the fact that technology and culture are
intricately intertwined.”
Elizabeth Churchill, Principal Research Scientist, Yahoo! Research and
VP of ACM SigCHI

“Huatong Sun offers an enlightening, but also useful set of
theoretical principles, case histories, and scholarly implications
that should assist researchers and analysts to bring products and
services into being that are more evolved, sophisticated, humanistic,
and successful.”
Aaron Marcus, President, Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc., Berkeley,
California, USA

“Dr. Sun’s book takes culture more seriously than most scholars
working in this area, and she also provides us with some of the
richest portraits of user knowledge that I have read.”
Jeff Grabill, Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Writing, Michigan
State University

****
Feb 2012; 352 pp Hardback; 9780199744763
20% Off Promo Code: 30641