On the role of in-situ making and evaluation in designing across cultures

There is a growing interest in designing products and interactions across cultures. In this paper, we report on our attempts to use in-situ making and evaluation to facilitate a short co-design process with outside designers in an ethnic and rural community. We found that rapid prototyping in the local context provided a mechanism to quickly engage designers with locals in informing iterative design refinement. Our research suggests that using in-situ making interlaced with evaluation is a feasible approach to drive designers to immerse, exchange and design within a cultural different context in the early stage of design exploration. We found that the rapid nature of our process makes it more suited for cultural product design led by designers than cross-cultural design.