Cultural Mismatches in Technology

What cultural norms and values does technology exhibit? How may these be perceived and impact its users? And how does culture influence how people use technology?

Technology is often designed with specific norms and values in mind, many of which are based on their designers' cultural background. We study how technology incorporates and "expresses" such norms and values through various design decisions, how people perceive those values, how they use technology differently (sometimes appropriating the technology to fit their own cultural norms), and how technology can be part of the cultural cycle in which sociocultural patterns inform, influence, and reinforce people's values and actions.

Publications

Amanda Baughan*, Nigini Oliveira* (*=equal contribution), Tal August, Naomi Yamashita, and Katharina Reinecke, "Do Cross-Cultural Differences in Visual Attention Patterns Affect Search Efficiency on Websites?", Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2021.    Honorable Mention - Top 5%   PDF

Nigini Oliveira, Michael Muller, Nazareno Andrade, and Katharina Reinecke, "The Exchange in StackExchange: Divergences between Stack Overflow and its Culturally Diverse Participants", Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), 2018.    PDF

Manuel Nordhoff, Tal August, Nigini Oliveira, and Katharina Reinecke, "A Case for Design Localization: Diversity of Website Aesthetics in 44 Countries", Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2018.    PDF

Judith Yaaqoubi and Katharina Reinecke, "The Use and Usefulness of Cultural Dimensions in Product Development", Case Study, Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2018.    PDF   

Nigini Oliveira, Nazareno Andrade, and Katharina Reinecke, "Participation Differences in Q&A Sites Across Countries: Opportunities for Cultural Adaptation", Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI), 2016.    PDF

Philip Guo and Katharina Reinecke, "Demographic Differences in How Students Navigate Through MOOCs", ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, 2014.    PDF

Katharina Reinecke, Minh Khoa Nguyen, Abraham Bernstein, Michael Naef, Krzysztof Z. Gajos, "Doodle Around the World: Online Scheduling Behavior Reflects Cultural Differences in Time Perception and Group Decision-Making", Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2013.    PDF