Por que não podemos deixar a tecnologia americana dominar o mundo

14/12/2013 15:08

Whenever an app, a website, or a physical product like a gaming console is exported, it ships with a side of cultural influence. Technology in particular is a great leveler of culture, and the more engaging and embedded it becomes, the more pernicious its influence. Even more so than the jeans and movies America ships around the world, our interfaces spread the values of those who designed them — whether intended or not.

Our iPads, Fuelbands and Xboxes may be made in China, but they’re the products of an emphatically American cultural mindset. Sony’s recent success with the PS4 is framed as an American-led effort, despite being designed in Japan. Even the major electronics innovators of Asia have centered their user experience design efforts in the U.S.: Lenovo has consolidated much of its R&D in North Carolina, and Samsung’s UX Innovation Lab is now in Silicon Valley. The designers and technologists themselves may sometimes hail from around the world, but the interactions they design overwhelmingly reflect a perspective native to modern, affluent, urban America.

That our smartphones can be customized through the installation of apps assumes we want a device that is unique and personal. That our wearable devices track and analyze physical movement — as opposed to, say, proximity to friends or family — assumes that individual activity is the kind most worth monitoring. That our gaming consoles are designed primarily with a single, networked player in mind assumes we prefer remote interaction to the in-person kind; compare that to what Korean and Chinese gamers do, which is cluster in cafes.

This focus on individuality and personal mobility is deeply American, and it’s being taught to the rest of the world through the medium of American technology. And the age of invisible design, with its focus onexperiences (as opposed to just products and interfaces) has made cultural influence the elephant in the room: obvious, ignored, and hugely powerful. Especially because technology platforms favor the culture that spawned them.

If the best experience we can have with technology requires an American-designed platform, we’ll get an American experience: Buy an Apple iPhone, and in a thousand quiet ways, we interact with it the way Cupertino wants us to. The experience is so seamless and fulfilling, that consumers around the world are willing to sacrifice a fraction of cultural identity to obtain it. Multiply this by millions of users, and the effect can be transformative. As cities like Bangalore, Curitiba, and Shenzhen become more affluent and connected, their residents increasingly resemble those in any other tech-savvy city.

This is a loss for all of us. Enjoying a better user experience shouldn’t require acting more American.

Shared platforms create shared cultures. Those shared cultures may enable opportunity, but they also erode the varied perspectives and values that make humans such a diverse bunch. If the future of design is in thinking of “constellations of devices” where individual devices “reduce complexity of the system” and “increase the value of everything else in the ecosystem” (according to Bill Buxton in WIRED), well, it’s important to remember that ecosystems rely not just on interacting components — but on diversity to survive and thrive.

 

veja artigo completo em https://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/12/how-american-centered-design-is-leveling-tech-culture-too-much/

 

 

Bárbara Araújo