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Value of culturally oriented information design

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Abstract

Cultural issues play a substantial role in the design process. This study aims to empirically prove a meaningful relationship between cultural context-oriented information and information design. It includes a literature review to identify the attributes that make information high quality. Several surveys were conducted to investigate the relations between these attributes and a set of cultural context-oriented information design cases. An open-ended evaluation from the respondents was also conducted to interpret the results of the previous survey stage and identify the properties of high quality information that were difficult to uncover in the previous survey stage. A universal design sample was utilized particularly for comparison and contrast and can illustrate cultural context-oriented information designs’ pros and cons. By conducting a survey and statistical techniques at the same time, for objective and subjective interpretations, this study resulted in several conclusions. First, compared with universal information design, cultural context-oriented information design shows its limitations more or less in the pragmatic/rational aspects concerning conveying information meanings appropriately and objectively. Second, however, cultural context-oriented information design has a striking value in terms of aesthetic experience and emotional experience. The aesthetic experience aspects are important for making information attractive, creative, or innovative, and the emotional experience aspects work on information users’ subjective and conscious experience, such as in being attractive, interesting, humorous, funny, joyful, pleased, bored, or uninterested. Third, under some restrictive conditions, cultural context-oriented information design also shows the strengths of cognitive aspects such as interpretability, accessibility, understandability, and lack of errors. Lastly, cultural context-oriented information can be incorporated with the concept of universal information design to be high quality information design available in the so-called glocalization context.

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Notes

  1. idX = Development of International Core Competencies and Student and Faculty Exchange in Information Design, a project initiated by Prof. Jill Dacey, University of Idaho, and realized within the EU/US Cooperation Program in Higher Education and Vocational Education and Training, August 2007.

  2. Excellent: α ≥ 0.9, Good: 0.8 ≤ α < 0.9, Acceptable: 0.7 ≤ α < 0.8, Questionable: 0.6 ≤ α < 0.7, Poor: 0.5 ≤ α < 0.6, Unacceptable: α < 0.5.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by research funding from Chosun University, South Korea, 2013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Design, KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

    Sicheon You, Myung-suk Kim & Youn-kyung Lim

  2. School of Informatics and Product Design, Chosun University, 309 Pilmun-daero, Dong-gu, Gwangju, 501-759, Republic of Korea

    Sicheon You

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  1. Sicheon You
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Correspondence to Sicheon You or Myung-suk Kim.

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You, S., Kim, Ms. & Lim, Yk. Value of culturally oriented information design. Univ Access Inf Soc 15, 369–391 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-014-0393-9

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