Cross-Cultural Understanding of Interface Design: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Icon Recognition

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale study that investigated cultural aspects of understanding the website of a virtual campus. Results indicate differences in expectations and understanding due to the users’ knowledge of everyday life and real world experience, and suggest that the campus metaphor that was used is not universally transferable

Testing of a novel web browser interface for the Chinese market

This paper compares the perspicacity, appropriateness and preference of web browser icons from leading software providers with those of a culture-specific design. This online study was conducted in Taiwan and involved 103 participants, who were given three sets of web browser icons to review, namely Microsoft Internet Explorer, Macintosh Safari, and culturally specific icons created using the Culture-Centred Design methodology. The findings of the study show that all three sets have generally high recognition rates, but that some icon functions (e.g. Go/Visit and Favourite) in all three sets have poor recognition rates and are considered inappropriate

Chinese users’ preference for web browser icons

This paper compares the perspicacity, appropriateness and preference of web browser icons from leading software providers with those of a culture-specific design. The history and future direction of web browsers is outlined, together with the implications for the future growth of Chinese internet users. China, with its rapidly expanding young netizens has now overtaken the USA in terms of the number of internet users (253 million) and we predict it will reach saturation (?70% internet penetration rate) by 2012. If correct, this will have a dramatic effect on the use of English as the ‘Lingua Franca’ of the Internet. This online study was conducted in Taiwan and involved 103 participants (mean age 21 years), who were given three sets of web browser icons to review, namely Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0, Macintosh Safari 3.0, and culturally specific icons created using the Culture-Centred Design methodology. The findings of the study show that all three sets have generally high recognition rates, but that some icon functions (e.g. Go/Visit and Favourite) in all three sets have poor recognition rates and are considered inappropriate. Furthermore, some significant differences were found when we analysed the level of user experience amongst several icon

The (dis)establishment of gender: Care and gender roles in the family as a constitutional matter

This article reasons that for women, as constitutional subjects, the emancipatory promise of constitutionalism was—from its inception—fundamentally limited by the entrenchment of the separate spheres tradition. Focusing on evolving constitutional jurisprudence in the US, Germany and Italy, the article describes a gradual and still imperfect process of (dis) establishment of the originally enshrined gender order, as it has unfolded since the 1970s in US and European constitutionalism. It is argued that these processes have allowed the constitutional doctrine of sex equality to challenge the most forthright expressions of the separate spheres ideology, denying the possibility of according men and women a different legal status of rights and duties and keeping women away from the marketplace. In spite of this, to this day, the sex constitutional equality doctrine has been an inadequate tool to fully subvert the pre-established gender order in both its transatlantic iterations. In the US, we find assimilationist workerism with its anti-stereotyping conception of gender equality, providing no support for working women, and in Europe accommodationist workerism, wherein special measures are fostered at the risk of entrenching rather than subverting existing gender roles. The article then describes recent evolutions in constitutionalism pointing to a promising third way, with Nordic inspiration, which, challenging traditionally accepted notions of family privacy and foregrounding fatherhood as opposed to just motherhood, would allow us to retain the central importance attached to care and reproduction, but at the same time assist in the process of overcoming traditional gender assumptions and stereotypes built around them

The iconographic brain: a critical philosophical inquiry into (the resistance of) the image

The brain image plays a central role in contemporary image culture and, in turn, (co)constructs contemporary forms of subjectivity. The central aim of this paper is to probe the unmistakably potent interpellative power of brain images by delving into the power of imaging and the power of the image itself. This is not without relevance for the neurosciences, inasmuch as these do not take place in a vacuum; hence the importance of inquiring into the status of the image within scientific culture and science itself. I will mount a critical philosophical investigation of the brain qua image, focusing on the issue of mapping the mental onto the brain and how, in turn, the brain image plays a pivotal role in processes of subjectivation. Hereto, I draw upon Science & Technology Studies, juxtaposed with culture and ideology critique and theories of image culture. The first section sets out from Althusser's concept of interpellation, linking ideology to subjectivity. Doing so allows to spell out the central question of the paper: what could serve as the basis for a critical approach, or, where can a locus of resistance be found? In the second section, drawing predominantly on Baudrillard, I delve into the dimension of virtuality as this is opened up by brain image culture. This leads to the question of whether the digital brain must be opposed to old analog psychology: is it the psyche which resists? This issue is taken up in the third section which, ultimately, concludes that the psychological is not the requisite locus of resistance. The fourth section proceeds to delineate how the brain image is constructed from what I call the data-gaze (the claim that brain data are always already visual). In the final section, I discuss how an engagement with theories of iconology affords a critical understanding of the interpellative force of the brain image, which culminates in the somewhat unexpected claim that the sought after resistance lies in the very status of the image itself

Power, culture and the production of heritage

No abstract available

Cultural-based visual expression: Emotional analysis of human face via Peking Opera Painted Faces (POPF)

© 2015 The Author(s) Peking Opera as a branch of Chinese traditional cultures and arts has a very distinct colourful facial make-up for all actors in the stage performance. Such make-up is stylised in nonverbal symbolic semantics which all combined together to form the painted faces to describe and symbolise the background, the characteristic and the emotional status of specific roles. A study of Peking Opera Painted Faces (POPF) was taken as an example to see how information and meanings can be effectively expressed through the change of facial expressions based on the facial motion within natural and emotional aspects. The study found that POPF provides exaggerated features of facial motion through images, and the symbolic semantics of POPF provides a high-level expression of human facial information. The study has presented and proved a creative structure of information analysis and expression based on POPF to improve the understanding of human facial motion and emotion