Rethinking Culture as Infrastructure: A Boundary Object for Diversity in HCI

Meanwhile, HCI developed more politically precise vocabularies.Feminist HCI foregrounded pluralism, embodiment, participation, and positionality [1]; postcolonial computing examined empire, development, and unequal epistemic authority [2].Decolonial, more-thanhuman, data justice, and planetary approaches further expanded accounts of diversity, knowledge, power, and interdependence.This necessary shift produced a paradox: Culture became less visible as an organizing concept just as cultural questions became pervasive.Whose knowledge counts?Which values enter systems?How do classifications reproduce inequality?Which forms of From the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, culture occupied a visible place in HCI.Researchers examined cross-cultural interaction, localization, international usability, and national cultural models.This work challenged the assumption that users, interfaces, and interaction principles were culturally neutral.Over time, culture lost some of its intellectual appeal, becoming associated with national categories, checklists, and simplified accounts of difference.In their weakest form, cultural models converted probabilities into portraits of people: Indian users are collectivist; Western users prefer individual control.Recurring patterns can inform design, but a first approximation was too often mistaken for a full explanation.Insights → Culture can act as a boundary object connecting diverse HCI perspectives without reducing differences to national stereotypes.→ The cultural infrastructure framework links heuristics, situated meaning, and power across three levels of analysis.→ Cultural assumptions become infrastructure when embedded in interfaces, datasets, workflows, institutions, and forms of authority.