Intercultural Frolicking and Design with Kiran Varri

Experience by Design

Designing for an international audience can provide challenges to the experience designer. If we are going to design with the cultural norms and expectations in mind, how do we handle when the number of cultures we are catering to seems to always increase? This also is a major challenge when living in a multicultural society where we have people from many different backgrounds. At least in that situation, we might have a national culture we can orient to. But what then about living in an international city, where people from all over are constantly arriving, each with their own sense of what is a “moment that matters” or what constitutes a “wow” and transformative experience?

And of course, national culture is only part of that equation. We also can think of wealth cultures, religious cultures, age cultures, gender cultures, recreation and hobby cultures, and the list goes on and on. In the face of such complexity, the impulse can either be to turn and run, or to oversimplify to the point so that all these groups are reduced to a least common denominator which serves no one in particular.

Today on Experience by Design, we are happy to welcome Kiran Varri, current CX consultant and formerly of ITC, the international luxury hotel chain. Kiran has had his own international journey. Growing up in India, he then went to university in Dallas, TX. And if that wasn’t enough culture shock, he then found himself working in Dubai. In the midst of all these travels, he has gotten to know a bit about working across cultures, and how to leverage those challenges to create vital opportunities.

In our conversation, we discuss how multicultural workgroups are the key to designing international experiences. We explore how ‘intercultural frolicking’ is vital to unlocking experience designs that resonate with audiences. We also talk about how building a common and shared culture from is like the US motto E Pluribus, Unum, or Out of Many, One. By allowing people to showcase their talents, they can find new ideas through their shared creativity. Out of this we raise the larger question, How do we foster cultures of more openness and acceptance, and not to lose our focus on the importance of being human.

This episode brought to you by EXPRESSO, the Experience Research Society.