Designing a Cross-Cultural Interactive Music Box through Meaning Construction

There is growing interest in designing culturally identifiable products for cross cultural consumers. However, literature rarely pays attention to the conflicting needs of these products in terms of cross-cultural usability and their unique cultural identity. This paper presents a design model addressing this problem through a process of meaning construction. By identifying the culture’s shared and unique meaning, designers are able to map the target meaning onto the product attributes - the form, content and interaction - thus presenting culturally identifiable and cross-culturally acceptable products to culturally heterogeneous consumers. A case study of designing a meaningful cross-cultural interactive music box with the Kam ethnic minority culture is presented focussing on the detailed process of meaning construction, and implementation and evaluation. Feedback in the field showed that the shared meaning built in the boxes helped outsiders to understand the interaction. The unique meaning helped to attract the attention from participants outside Kam culture, and improved the cultural identity. The results also showed that participants from different culture preferred different product features, for example the story content attract participants outside Chinese culture, while Chinese participants preferred playful interaction on the sound.