Every gesture, habit, and object exists in a cultural network of meaning.
While Human-centered Design focuses on users , Culture-centered Design focuses on the force that shapes those users.
C. R. E. A. M.
Culture Rules Everything Around Me
Culture sets the overall framework of our identity. It is the most defining influence on human interaction. Humans learn to organize their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in relation to their cultural context. A culture sphere doesn’t have any borders. It’s more like a fluid organism that growths and shrinks, depending on different intern and extern factors. Inside the Culture Centered Design Process the context is defined as a fluid sign system.
The invisible operating system that shapes all Human Interactions:
The mastermind that creates and evolves all Culture Elements:
Culture is both context and content. Everything humans make is embedded in its cultural sphere.
Design cannot exist outside of culture; it either aligns with or disrupts it.
A society can be seen as a network of sign users. A civilization is a collection of texts. A mentality is a set of shared codes. In this system, people rely on codes to interpret texts and navigate meaning. As a designer, you become a semiotician of culture—reading signs, decoding systems, and uncovering what drives perception. The real challenge is to master these signs to design with intention and impact. This is why semiotics is not theory, but a tool of creation.
All members of a Society are a set of Sign User. Semioticians define Society as culture carrier. Society outlines a fluid culture sphere that outlines all institutions, collectives, and locations. It is the environment your product/ service will be used in. In an institution all members are able to communicate, their relation and interactions are defined by the Mentality of the Society.
Every Society develops its own Civilization and Mentality.
Every Society is defined by its Mentality. Mentifacts are conventions and codes, which represent their culture, an idea of how they interpret themself and their reality. This includes notions, values and beliefs, which form a mental picture of the society. The mentifacts define how to interact, communicate and how they use their artifacts. Some artifacts are absolutely useless for other cultures without the knowledge of how to use them.
The Mental Culture defines the way your design solutions is perceive and how it is going to be used.
Every society comes up with individual problem solving artifact as a carrier of their culture. These artifacts are influenced by their Mentality, including the skills of producing and using them. As culture carrier they have a very specific appearance with unique characteristics, which are a perfect inspiration for your product/service requirements. Take their aesthetic, which are most familiar for the user!
An artifact could be everything but always a result of intentional behavior: instruments, tools and objects.
As a designer, you become a semiotician of culture—reading signs, decoding systems, and uncovering what drives perception. The real challenge is to master these signs to design with intention and impact. This is why semiotics is not theory, but a tool of creation.
Culture is always in progress of transformation. There is a dynamic cultural change of development and discovering new elements in interactions with other cultures. On one hand, culture is shaped by its society, and on the other hand its society is shaped by the culture. This graphic shows the mechanism of culture exchange during a clash between two different cultures. Inside the center of a culture there is the identity, The dynamic mechanic are very static and dominant, where the culture doesn't change much over time. It gets more dynamic and fluid towards the borders.
Moving torwards the „border“ of a culture the dominant gravity is geeting loose. The society is defined by the mainstream, where dominant elements resist, improve and even get transfered to other cultures. (Semiotisation) But unfortunetaly more rezessive elements tend to disappear and get replaced by counter culture traits, when they are more efficient or just trendy. (Desemiotisation).
If you want to make a culture more resistant to other cultures, you may think of a sustainable match inside your culture image.
Design is not neutral; it always communicates. When irritation happens, it’s often because a sign or system doesn’t align with cultural understanding. Culture Design means:
Reading those sign systems.
Understanding how meaning flows.
Design that look & feel familiar yet fresh.
Culture is a special sign system. Every single sign is a bearer that influences the system. Semiotic, the science of signs guides us to understand the dynamics of a culture. Only if we get the big picture of the contextualized culture image, we can implement an improvement. With the approach of semiotics we get a scientific analysis tool to structure the culture we design for on an ethnomethodology level.
The science of signs helps us to understand the challenges and its context. The problem-solving answer is always inside the system and probably an re/-arrangement of existing signs or an evolution.
“Semiotics is important for designers as it allows us to understand the relationships between signs, what they stand for, and the people who must interpret them — the people we design for.”
As an expert of people, a designer should read the culture like a semiotician to become aware of the sign system, called culture. The challenge is to master all signs to get the true power of design. This is why semiotic is the key of creation.
