Designing for Joy: Finding Meaning in Industrial Design with Daniela Garcia | S3E04

Yeah.

Wow.

That's some really good points there, Daniela.

And when you think about you being like coming from Colombia and experiencing American cultures and trying to understand like their cultural norms and how that shapes kind of communication, you mentioned to me a book called The Culture Map.

And I'm curious, like, what your perspectives are when designing how to involve either through conversation or topics to understand various cultures to try to empathize with them in their shoes to design better products.

Well, it really affects whoever the stakeholders are on the project.

And I normally try to beforehand see kind of what cultural difference we already have.

to make sure I'm not going to cause miscommunication by something that in my culture is appropriate, but in another one isn't, which happened to me a lot when I came to the US and I was like very, very direct and did a lot of direct translations that ended up on having like a rougher meaning than I meant to.

So what I try to do when like designing is understanding, okay, if let's say our final user is from this specific culture, What are their current expectations for this type of product within their field? And what is different from those expectations to the culture I am currently living at? If there's a gap there, how can I feel it? And is it communication based or is it more like about the context that the product has been used? And if it's not completely product related, but the process of who I'm working with, I normally try to also see in like first talks what...

I feel that it's missing to complete like that trust or to see that they are, let's say, going faster than my pace.

Why are they going faster? Is their expectation to take more time in another part of the process or this is just the full pace? instead of like trying to make an assumption that is personality.

So I stopped trying to any type of action with the personality until I didn't completely understand what culturally is expected from them.

And that's kind of the biggest learning I got out of that book.

I definitely echo that sentiment.

I think, first of all, it takes time to understand someone in general.

But when you're in the thick of it, trying to work through like a brainstorming or you're doing a collaborative engagement and you're working through problem solving for specific targets, it takes time and it takes a little bit of repetition and get over that hurdle to kind of invent some new ideas together and One of the techniques I really like to use is doing live sketching together and collaborating because I feel like even sometimes if there's a language barrier or if seemingly there's a miscommunication, when you're sketching ideas out and having a conversation about it can really...

Help evolve what's inside your head and what's inside of someone else's head.

Really get it out on paper.

And then you can really talk through like those features, those attributes, those varying things that might bring light to new innovations.

This is actually making me remember that recently I held a workshop with my team to basically start a project, but lay out all the constraints with everybody together.

Because it seemed like this project has some history of starting and not getting completed because of lack of this base structure.

the structure that is going to set it for success.

So what we did on this workshop, that it seemed like it's a new thing for our China team, was to sit everyone together in a room for like one hour and all write like... what's expected, what's not expected, and what could be added.

And while we were all together, I passed the paper to everybody and they were all meant to write the things down and making sure that everyone would speak and like talking through each point and assuring everyone like would nod or write it down.

helped a lot to like bridge those gaps in communication that normally happened.