Intercultural Design Workshop 2022

Idea

The assignment for the first team project is to visualize WC pictograms for men and women that fit in the Indonesian as well as in the German culture. To give it a context, we imagined that it is for an Asian-European art center. Therefore, the aim was to create a guidance system that mirrors both cultures. We also set a special focus on cliches, stereotypes and gender roles, which we wanted to break and express that through our design.

Research

Within the workshop we made a collection of WC pictograms from the different cultures and analyzed them according to the aspects in our mind map. We also did some general research on our cultures to find out ways to visualize them. For our final design, we investigated different Asian and European scripts, especially the Javanese one. It was very interesting to see that what's obvious here for the Indonesian students was completely new for the German students.

The Javanese language of "men" is "lanang" so we use "ꦭ" (la) to represent the "men". meanwhile "women" uses "ꦮ" (wa) from "wadon". Since "bioskop" (cinema), "teater" and "loker" are adapted words (don’t actually exist in javanese vocabulary), we used the words as they are. We use "ꦧ" (ba) for "bioskop" (cinema), "ꦠ" (ta) for "theater", and "ꦭ" (la) for locker.

Intercultural Perspective

During the work process, we realized that we have a lot of differences in our culture. According to the culture, already existing WC pictograms were created in very different styles and we also recognized that we had different approaches on how we designed our pictograms. We tried to mix both cultures together by sticking to a constant exchange, talking a lot about our lives, environments, habits and learned every day a bit more about one other’s culture. In terms of the designs, we tried different ways to visualize both cultures and combine them in a creative but understandable way.

Message

Pictograms need to convey a clear message, especially in international locations, such as airports. It is important to make people understand the meaning of the pictogram directly from the first glance and also from a long distance. We tried to make pictograms that can be understood by the general public, even for people from different cultures.

With our series of pictograms for the Asian-European art center, we want to express that cultures can be mixed in designs so that two cultures feel involved simultaneously and be able to merge and harmonize. Furthermore, we wanted to distance ourselves from cliches and stereotypes through the designs we made. Thus, we created an intercultural and gender neutral space for people to get together with tolerance and peace.

Concept

We know that pictograms in the west are pretty straightforward, simple and have a low-context based communication. In comparison to the east, they lean more high-context based communication and are also more philosophical. We combined the concepts of low-context and high-context communication in our pictograms by keeping the idea and the design simple but still communicating a deeper meaning and culture with it.

During the research process, we also realized that pictograms with traditional clothes are too common, so we tried a different approach, which is to use ancient text to insert a cultural aspect to it. Therefore, we chose an abstract way of combining the Javanese script with the Latin alphabets that is used in the Western world to simply speak to both cultures and achieve gender neutrality without following any stereotypes. People will understand the pictograms by form or text. Although Western people may not know the Javanese script, they will combine both cultures and the other way around. This also creates a solution to our aim to break with gender roles and inspire an atmosphere of equality and tolerance for all genders.

Design

The design in European and Asian culture differs in many ways. Taking a look at the Asian design of pictograms, it is very obvious that they are more playful and detailed. Often the traditional clothing or other cultural signs appear in these pictograms. On the other hand, European design is more direct and syntactical. To get both style influences into our design, we used the Javanese script as a representative of Indonesian culture and used black thin lines with similar stroke thickness, for a minimalistic European look. Therefore, the resulting pictograms have a very minimalistic but meaningful design.

Conclusion

In conclusion we can say that it was a really interesting experience to work together, learn about each other's culture and get a view into intercultural work and communication. Although there are big differences between Asian and European designs and workflows, we tried to combine our skills and experiences and experienced a very intriguing and satisfying outcome. It was very refreshing to see how well the combination of the Javanese and Latin letters work. With the black lines for the design, we created very minimalistic and interesting pictograms that fit together.

Presentation