Cross-Cultural Design Community
I have always been curious about how culture shapes design. In June 2016, I started a cross-cultural design meetup in the SF/ Bay area that grew to 390+ members. It was called Japanese Design Community (Although the name contains a specific country, we have touched on different countries including Korea and China). Over the past year, I have organized seven events including speaker sessions, panel discussions and design workshops. Speakers have included designers from Google, Apple and Sony Creative Center. Past sponsors include Oracle, TOTO USA, Btrax and EchoUser. I felt happy to have the opportunity to give back to my community in the form of education, networking, career building (a few designers have found their next jobs through our events), and promoting diversity in the SF/Bay area design community.
Showcased below are some highlights from past events.
Design Thinking Workshop - Improving the Bathroom Experience
The design workshop consisted of a presentation about user research on bathroom experiences from Yalu Ye, UX Designer at Chegg, Inc, followed by a design thinking workshop and a prototyping session. This photo here was taken during the divergent thinking phase.
Designing Conversational User Experiences in Cross-Cultural Settings
We had industry experts as speakers: Ultan O'Broin, Senior Director at Oracle Applications User Experience EMEA, Anthony Lai, Senior Development Manager at Oracle, Deb Aoki, Senior Content Designer at PayPal, and Mary Constance Parks, AI Product Designer at Facebook, specializing in conversational and voice experiences. Here is a photo of Anthony presenting. A demonstration of his voice controlled robot was one of the highlights for our participants.
Homepage Redesign of the Google Play Store for Japan and Korea
Hanna Jung is a User Experience Designer at Google. Her talks on how her team at Google redesigned the Google Play Store experiences for the Japan and Korea markets was intriguing and insightful. It highlighted that expectations from users in different countries could be very different, and designing for local markets can be lucrative for a company in the long run.
Panel Discussion on Cross-Cultural Design
Panelists from left to right: Brandon Hill, CEO of Btrax, Stacey Baradit, UX Product Manager and Roxy Chaney, Senior UX Designer at Sony. The event touched mainly on design patterns and working environments in Japan and China when compared to the U.S (the SF/Bay area). I wrote about the retrospective of the event on my blog.
What it Takes to be a Global Web Designer
Joe Rong, Visual Designer and Brandon Hill, CEO at Btrax had shared their views on the fundamental differences in web design between the US and Japan.
Product Design in Japan and the US
I spoke about product design in Japan. This marked our first event. Below, you can find the slide deck that I used for this talk.