Effect of Cultural Differences and Referent Characteristics on the Design of Pictographic Map Symbols
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Korpi, J.; 2Ahonen-rainio, P.
1AALTO UNIVERSITY Email: jari.korpi@aalto.fi
2AALTO UNIVERSITY Email: paula.ahonen@aalto.fi
Abstract
Pictographic symbols are used on many kinds of maps, because, at best, pictographic symbols are self-explanatory, and therefore they are able to convey information efficiently even without a legend. However, the symbols need to be correctly interpreted by the users before this advantage can be claimed. The cartographic research often limits to reporting the testing of newly designed symbols. While testing is a necessary phase of the symbol design process where the quality of the symbols is ensured, effort should also be put in studying the factors that affect the comprehension and design of map symbols so that the success rate of the tested symbols could be increased. We studied how: 1) the concepts to be depicted and 2) the differences in the cultural background of the designers affect the design of the symbols by analyzing the semantic contents of map symbols designed by students attending to a master’s level cartography course. The symbols were designed by 75 students in four years (2009 and 2011-2013). Forty of the students were Finnish, and the rest came from 17 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America. The task of the students was to design pictographic symbols to represent eight given activity areas of regional planning. The areas varied slightly from year to year, and in total designs for ten areas of regional planning was received. The contents appeared in the designs were analyzed in four stages. First, the measures from participatory design approach called stereotype production method were used. The calculated measures were population stereotype, describing the most common ideas for each referent and stereotype strengths, telling the ratio of the most common design idea to the total number of designs. Second, the number of concepts needed to cover 50 % and 75 % of the total number of designs were calculated for each referent. Third, the most common representation strategies for each referent were identified. These measures were used in order to study the level of agreement among the designers in their design ideas. In the fourth stage, the first and second stages were performed separately to Finnish and international groups of students in order to study the degree to which the variation in the design ideas for the referents is due to the differences in the cultural background of the designers. The results showed that different stereotypes were produced for five of the ten referents by the two student groups, which suggests that cultural conventions define many of the design ideas the students use when designing symbols. On one hand, this indicates that there are also differences between users when interpreting the symbols. On the other hand this result indicates that designers favor design ideas that originate from their own cultural environment, which they should pay attention to when designing symbols for intercultural use. The results also showed that in case of some of the referents the cultural differences did not explain the low stereotype strengths resulting from the high variation in the design ideas. This indicates that for some referents it is difficult to design an intuitive symbol even for a user group with a homogeneous cultural background because of the lack of a consistent representation strategy for the referent that is due to the abstractness or broadness of the referent. One practical recommendation to achieve successful symbols even for culturally variable user group and for difficult referents is to involve the users in creating the ideas for the symbols. However, it is critical that the users involved are representative of the intended user population of the symbols.