Full Circle Associates

Anne Elliott, PARC
Physical Artifacts for Promoting Bilingual Collaborative Design

Problem: bilingual design meetings are a tiny fraction of all meetings you need in a tech design process. Interleaved with other kinds – contract negotiations, intellectual property rights, cultural meetings speaking only in English. For full disclosure, I am not Japanese, my language skills are not strong and I have to work through interpreters. One main responsibility has been communicating with Japanese technology companies.

The key things are linguistic issues, about interleave translation. That means one person (always a Japanese woman) who paraphrases what people say from English to Japanese and back, every few phrases. Not the same as simultaneous. When you need to collaborate, like brainstorming. The notion of brainstorming as jumping in, chiming in. If you can’t do that, there isn’t much to fall back on. The interpreter becomes a bottle neck. No shared language. Pressure to sit back and listen. Easy to disengage and become a passive observer. Loss of momentum. Takes 3x as long. Some people already understood in English and got it the first time. So bright and want to be heard and get worn down from things happening twice all day.

Another problem is self-censorship and loss of spontaneity. Always have time to judge.

Use of simple artifacts to help:

Personal posters
Hats and bags
Everyday objects

Helpful because they make conversation visible.

Persona posters – three examples. Brought in piles of magazines and Tokyo maps. Pretend you are the director of a movie. Showcase your technology. Wild success. It worked because by having these Japanese language magazines made it seem more normal. Gave people confidence. Unexpected side effect was the images were used as trading cards. While waiting for interpreter, holding it up, comparing with others.

Hats and bag – act out a day in the life of a person. Use hats and bags to advertise your character. The bags related to mobility fashion and how people present themselves. Hats were for ice breaking and zaniness. The picked a hat and bag and acted out the persona’s in pantomime. Hats and bags helped: acknowledge that you aren’t designing for yourself. Our collaborators are Japanese, but are not the target users. Middle aged Japanese men designing for 17-year-old girls. Help advertise that. The silly hats normalized other kinds of behavior. Not ties, wear a sweatshirt, get crazy. When your only way to interact is through an interpreter loose personal nuances. This gives more cues

Everyday objects, pull one out and tell a story . Other people can see what is in front of you. Direct qu4estions and by pass the interpreting to draw out self-censorers. Avoid the problem of loss of momentum. Make conversations visible. You need rules, make sure they are followed. Translators do the translating. Zany behavior is normal. Reform small groups of different people. The choreography is critical. Everyone has to be within reach of the artifacts. Within arms reach. Example picture – people on floor around post it notes, all can manipulate the artifacts. It took some doing to get people into this configuration. One participant would always flee to the corner, draw his own notes then come back and hijack the interpreter. I’m tall and loom over him, and herd him into the artifacts. I would not let him get away. I kept putting sticky notes on his pad and capture them on the standard framework.

Categories: EPIC2005, bilingual, cooperativedesign, artefacts