2. Problem
• The world is increasingly becoming culturally diverse, a sort of a
global village, and given this adapting to new cultures is a hard
process.
• Anxiety, language barriers are some of the major causes as to why
people find it hard to adapt to new cultures.
5. Finding 1: Misconceptions
The biggest barrier for people to not interact with new cultures is
stereotypes and misconceptions about the new cultures.
• “I took so long to realize that Americans are so forgiving of our
grammatical mistakes” - U3
• “In the movies, Detroit looked like a huge city with big buildings, I
landed and saw a huge farm” - U1
6. Finding 2: Common ground
People go out of their way to learn and mingle with new cultures when
they do not find any common ground/ interest within their own
cultural social group.
• “I play video games but I couldn’t find anyone in my group who
played the same games as me and hence I tried reaching out to other
people I knew who played the game” - U8
7. Finding 3: References
Language is a huge barrier while adapting to new cultures. People are
comfortable talking to other people of the same culture because they
feel understood
• “I don’t understand most of the American jargon/ pop culture
references and I zone out of the conversation if I am in a group” - U5
• “I did not know what “What are you upto?” meant! I was too shy to
ask in a group and Googled it later” - U2
8. System brainstorm
• Remove the misconceptions
• Help in learning new cultures
• Connect people based on common
interests and goals
• Make them feel comfortable
9. The concept of Social Glue
• People who have some common ground with you.
• Two kinds of social glue
• People who are from Chinese/Indian culture (culture A) but have been
residing in the United States (culture B) for a while.
• People who have common interests – Be it music, food, sports.
10. System considerations
• How do we prevent trolling?
• How do we build trust?
• How do we build sustainability?
• Where is the life in the social ecosystem?
11. Design Brainstorm
• Pseudo anonymity to make people
comfortable
• One on one conversation with your
social glue to sustain interest
• Participate to clear misconceptions
about your own culture
• Participate to learn new cultures
• Control the content by voting
• Build in trust within the system using
“Glue rating”
12. Paper prototype
• Answer
• Answer interesting questions
• Down vote bad answers
• Ask
• Check “My asks”
• Favorite answers
• Slide right/left to remove bad answers
• Chat
• With randomized social glue
13. What’s next?
• Conduct prototype evaluation using the paper prototype with the
defined user group.
• Include findings from the evaluations in the final report as next
steps the group will take.
• Issue with bootstrapping
• Run a scan for appropriate questions on sites like qoura and reddit and
gather them to create an initial database.
• Test with Beta users
The overall idea was to see how people from different cultures adapt to new cultures
But we chose to prototype it with Chinese and Indian students adapting to American culture.
East and west
6 Chinese and 4 Indians
Literature review
People who are used to growing up around different cultures within the country tend to be more open. Does this mean Indian students adapt to American culture more easily than Chinese students?
The theory says that people with lesser cultural gap will easily mingle. But Chinese and Indian cultures are quite similar compared to the western culture, even then there is a gap in interaction between Indian and Chinese students.
What we did was
Ask them about how much they have travelled inside their own countries, to see if that affected their way of adapting to new cultures.
Warm up
Deep dive
What were the things that they did back home that they don’t anymore and why?
Chinese and Indian students are shy to talk freely about their ideas as they aren’t sure of
American slang/jargon/ spoken language.
2. Food is one of the major conversation starters which seems to connect people from
different cultures.
3. The main motivation for people to explore new cultures is when they don't find
common interests in their social kind.
4. People are in need of learning about new culture to a large extent at the beginning of
being a part of the new culture and this interest goes down with the passing of time.
5. People have a lot of misconceptions about what new cultures are. There is no single
comprehensive platform today which connects them with facts about social norms
around new cultures.
6. For sustaining interest and building stronger relationships between people from
different cultures, there is a need to start deeper conversations on a one on one basis.
7. We reject the hypothesis that we started with which states that people coming from
countries with varied cultures adapt to new cultures easily.