UXPA Boston Conference 2020

Cross-cultural team working can be fraught with misunderstanding, bad communications and missed opportunities. But done well, a diverse team can be a powerful resource to design robust products and services that are more evocative, desirable, and delightful. If well managed, a diverse and collaborative team can have a positive impact on the organization: boosting productivity, creativity and overall company performance.

In contemporary working environments, collaborative teams are often composed of people from different cultures, nations, religions, racial and ethnic backgrounds. Now more than ever, there is a growing need to understand and embrace differences. Yet, many teams fail in this endeavor because they lack the tools to harness the power of diversity.

In this session, you’ll learn tools and techniques to build team cohesion, and surface deep understandings using evocative objects to facilitate those difficult conversations. We’ll share our experiences helping teams to communicate more effectively by building common ground and shared understanding amongst diverse individuals.

We’ll share real-world cases that we have worked on to demonstrate how designing your organization’s difficult conversations can help revitalize the workplace environment, and improve morale and productivity. Using research and techniques you already know — like participant observation, interviews, cultural probes, participatory design and workshops — we’ll show how understanding cultures through objects is an effective method to improve understanding in a cross-cultural team.