Culture and (i)literacy as Challenges to Scandinavian Cooperative Design Janni Nielsen, Mads Bødker, Ravi Vatrapu Center for Applied ICT Copenhagen Business School jn.caict@cbs.dk ABSTRACT With the development in the global market collaborative user centred design becomes a competitive factor since successful diffusion and up-take of systems lie with the users. But users have different IT competences and are culturally different. These are challenges that collaborative design methodologies need to address. We describe the development within HCI through a general introduction to User Centered Design then focusing on the Scandinavian Approach. We argue that the Scandinavian tradition too is embedded in its specific cultural understanding and we discuss this by introducing the concepts of conflict and culture. In a final paragraph we return to the networked society, and reflect on the role of collaborative design. ACM Classification Keywords K.4 Computers and Society. Miscellaneous. J.4. Social and Behavioral Sciences General Terms Design, Collaborative, Scandinavian tradition, culture INTRODUCTION Addressing the process of globalization Castells [1] has described the transition from the industrial to the network society and the associated new societal structures through three dimensions. One of these dimensions is Informational: the capacity to generate knowledge and process information determine productivity and competitiveness. The general understanding is that a society meets the challenge when the citizens and employees possess the competencies of the self- programmable labour. In this development, ICT plays a constitutive role, because the development of a world-wide IT-infrastructure and a networked new form of organization have as a pre-requisite technical literacy among the world citizens. Hence five out of twelve factors that constitute the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index 2008-2009 are: Institutions, infrastructure, innovation, technological readiness and education. IT and (i)lliteracy More than 50% of the populations in Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh are illiterates (in the traditional sense, they cannot read and write), in Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, and Gambia it amounts to more than 60%, and in India it is around 42% of the population. UNESCO [2] works with a definition of literacy that includes IT as well as written, visual, and digital forms of collaboration, expression and communication. UNESCO’s concept of literacy also includes cultural identity and stresses that literacy can be understood only within a wider social context. IT-literacy is defined as “the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society” [2]. IT-literacy is to use digital technology, communication tools and networks to solve information problems and to think critically about information. It also includes abilities such as to use technology as a tool for searching, identifying, understanding, analyzing, creating, evaluating, organizing and communicating information. In a Western context, design for technical illiteracy and cultural diversity is tied to the idea of universal usability [3] and universal access [4]. However, most common HCI methods are not capable of handling illiteracy problems or radical cultural differences – not even between designers and user [5]. In a Global Networked Society two challenges stand out: (1) Users come from different cultures and (2) Users come with different IT-competencies. The question we ask is; How may we conceptualize collaborative design approaches so that they may better address issues of cultural difference and (i)literacy? We address this question by describing the development within HCI through a general introduction to User Centered Design then focusing on the Scandinavian tradition. We argue that the Scandinavian tradition too is embedded in its specific cultural understanding and we discuss this by introducing the concepts of conflict and culture. In a final paragraphs, we return to and reflect on the role of collaborative design in the networked society. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. ICIC’10, August 19–20, 2010, Copenhagen, Denmark. Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-4503-0108-4/10/08...$10.00. 271