The windmills of our minds: a workshop on culture clash in CSCW

Abstract

This paper introduces a workshop in which teams from a number of ''synthetic cultures'' have to cooperate in order to design a communication architecture for a multinational company. The communication needed is about the sales and maintenance of windmills manufactured by the company. The synthetic cultures are ideal types of the extreme scale values of five well-established, empirically found dimensions of national culture. Four of them are already being used in workshops for intercultural learning. The case study on windmills is fictive. The workshop is set up with a view to obtain confrontations between the synthetic cultures. The workshop's aim is twofold. At a methodological level, it is intended as a tool for laboratory research into multi-cultural issues in the introduction of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work technologies. As such the present proposal is only a first attempt, which will no doubt be improved with experience. For the participants, the aim is to convey an experience of culture shock which will make them more aware of the pervasive effects of differences in culture on cooperative design processes, and hence of their importance as an item on the research agenda for the International Office of the Future. The workshop has been held three times at the time of writing, and has proven to live up to its aims.