In this entry I will be looking at how designing global
affects development and marking of a product.
When designer or team of designers are designing product,
they keep in mind that product will not just be sold in one country. Good
scenario for this is IPhone, IPhone is designed in California, manufactured in
China and sold wide.
When designing product or even just advert for different
country to be used in which there is different culture, it’s needed to know how
they would react to it. A good example is McDonald’s, every website in
different language is suited for culture in which their restaurants are
located.
First I looked into McDonald’s
website which is for United Kingdom;
Third website was
for French users;
There is big difference between websites, layout of text and graphics and
specially colors. Colours are so different, to suits visitors. Some cultures
might prefer green over red, due to the meaning of colour in that country. For example orange colour in Asia give
positive, spiritually and physically enlightened felling’s while in United
States orange is used for fast food restaurants, traffic delays and hazards
(Mario, Jesús 2001).
When designing something
to be used in different cultural environment, designer needs to understand
culture much better and this can only be done through research. When designing
product a lot of research should be done to ensure that product is designed
well and will be accepted in different culture too. There a lot different
resources anyone can obtain for learning differences in different cultures, one
good website is “Geert-hofstede” (.The Hofstede Centre n.d.)
After research stage designer can start designing idea and
then make prototypes which is as well important as research about different
cultures. Prototypes could be given to people from different cultures to be
tested to see how they interact with product. People from different cultures as
well interact with products differently.
I found useful
explanation of culture and how it interact with design;
In the image you can see that culture can be split into three layers which then can be associated with design features. This deiagram help to design product and not leave any cultural aspect out.
Bibliography
Fig. 1 McDonalds (c.2014) Print screen of McDonalds United Kingdom website. [Online image] Available from: http://www.mcdonalds.co.uk/ukhome.html [Accessed 12/12/2014]
Fig. 2 McDonalds (c.2014)
Print screen of McDonalds German website. [Online image] Available from:
http://www.mcdonalds.de/ [Accessed 12/12/2014]
Fig. 3 McDonalds (c.2014) Print screen of McDonalds United Kingdom website. [Online image]
Available from: https://www.mcdonalds.fr/ [Accessed 12/12/2014]
Fig. 4 Rung-Tai Lin (2007) Three layers of cultural objects in relation to design features.
[Online image] Available from: http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/ijdesign/article/view/46/26
Mario De Bortoli, Jesús Maroto (2001) Context. Elicit 2001:
Proceedings of the European Languages and the Implementation of Communication
and Information Technologies (Elicit) conference, Vol. 1, pp. 4
The Hofstede Centre (n.d.) Homepage [Online] Available form http://geert-hofstede.com/index.php [Accessed 11/12/2014]
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