The Problem: Lack of Tools, Knowledge, and Standards

A human being, when communicating, uses a multitude of subtle communication mediums to express thought, feeling, identity, and action. Some examples are: language, writing, gesture, art, music, color, artifacts, iconography, protocol, social hierarchy, and spatial relationships, etc.  In the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), multilingual and multicultural features are usually not enabled automatically and therefore there is a plethora of applications and interfaces that are monolingual or hard-coded into a single language or cultural interface (usually American English).  This is not due to a lack of markets, when over half of all software sold today goes to non-English speaking regions and users, but appears to be due to an insufficient development framework or lack of knowledge of multilingual and multicultural requirements in interaction design by product managers and software developers. 

Possible Solution: Framework for Modular Multicultural Interaction

Generic cultural interaction design is a sub-set of the field of customization.  The behavior of each interface should be based on cross-cultural ethnographic study and designed to handle a range of cultural modalities.  With component and distributed architectures, each interaction design should be designed with a modular cultural interface that is easily modified without changing core functionality.  An interaction should have the goal of Cultural Authenticity, in that it should have a look and feel to the end user as if it were designed in their language and culture from the ground up.

A Framework should provide a form of modular "Playdough" to aid in easy modification of cultural interfaces.  Existing internationalization (I18n) frameworks should be updated beyond the current simplistic locale models to include a wider range of cultural modalities.  The framework provides a conceptual platform from which effective design can be based.

Goal of the Workshop: Towards a Framework for Modular Multicultural Interaction Design and Recommended Methodologies for Effective Multi-cultural Feature Integration

There are several works that attempt to help the development community with respect to i18n issues.  However they fall into two broad categories of data handling and textual displays [3][6][5], or offering a detailed discussion of abstract level sociological and cultural issues, expecting the developer to implement the behavior attributes themselves [1][2].  There is very little to cover the area in between.  We believe that it is necessary to come up with an acceptable framework that application and HCI development tool vendors can use to ensure that the cultural needs of the global market can be met.

We will explore the cultural and linguistic issues of:textual display design, visual design, intelligent agents, social interfaces, learning modalities, information retrieval, language handling, distributed systems, and integration of Unicode features. The workshop will focus on how frameworks and methodologies can aid in providing modular multicultural interaction design and seamless cultural and linguistic feature integration.

Further Reading

1. Del Galdo, E. M. and Nielsen, J.  International User Interfaces. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996.
2. Fernandes, T. Global Interface Design. Boston: Academic Press, Inc., 1995.
3. Hall, P.A.V., and Hudson, R., Software Without Frontiers.  Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
4. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG20 ISO/IEC TR 11017:1998: Framework for internationalization, Geneva, 1998.
5. Jerman-Blazic, B. Transparent Language Processing: User Tool or a Network Service for the Global Information Society. Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1997. http://www.e5.ijs.si/staff/borka/ publications/publications.html
6. O'Donnell, S.M. Programming for the World : a Guide to Internationalization. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: P T R Prentice Hall, 1994.