Dear Ella,
Your topic is really interesting. I thought of two examples:

1. Any social media platform such as instagram. For instagram to make
sense, it needs people to upload photographs. When people upload
photographs, they also start interacting with each other as commenting,
liking, shopping.

2. In transportation systems, it has become common to offer a smart card
touchpoint as ticket, which you need to upload money regularly, otherwise
it is useless. In many examples, you use a kiosk to upload money. And those
kiosks could be very difficult to use, which initiates interaction among
the people in line.

Also, in this category, the system in Denmark "rejsekortet" is very
interesting. The system needs you to use the card both as you get on a
bus/train and also when you get off the bus/train. In other words, you need
to check in and check out. When it was first introduced, it became such a
disappointment cause everyone forgot to check out as they left the bus. On
facebook everyone was sharing their frustration over their daily troubles
with the card also because when you forget 3 times you get a fine and also
it could get blocked. So, it is such a demanding system that united many
strangers :)

Hope the examples were useful.
Best regards

Seda Ozcetin, Co-founder & Lead Designer @Hamide, www.hamide.dk

On Thu, 2 Jul 2020, 03:34 Mauricio Mejia, <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi Ella,
>
> I can think of a wayfinding design example with a cultural flavor based on
> personal experiences in the US and Colombia. The users would be citizens or
> tourists making sense of the space. I am from Colombia but I have lived a
> total of about 7 years in the US.
>
> In the US there is a wealth of visual information, signage, wayfinding, etc
> that allows people to navigate any space in the city. Highways, streets,
> stores, etc have in general many types of signs, visual directories, map
> apps dense data, etc that you can use as individuals to get wherever you
> want. Even with no signage, there are city patterns like highways
> separations, grocery stores every mile, libraries in about every zip code,
> and so on that makes cities somehow predictable. US natives may imagine US
> cities very different, for me, they are like template repetitions with some
> customization. NYC would be an anomaly of this template. It is similar with
> shopping malls, we could argue that an architect designed a master
> template, and many shopping malls use it (e.g. all have large department
> stores in the corners).
>
> Medium and big cities and shopping malls in Colombia are more organic (I
> may have the native bias here), information is less standard, and
> cities/malls are more vertical (more hills and many floors in all types of
> constructions). In a typical day, citizens and local tourists (for example
> someone from Manizales in Medellín) will find talking to each other to get
> or provide help in wayfinding. Users of the city or the shopping mall end
> up talking and helping each other more often. I imagine that a US tourist
> in Colombia may have a harder time because they, in general, are more used
> to independent interaction in the space. More recently, map apps have very
> good data and cities and malls are improving wayfinding info. In any case,
> I think that in Colombia, our personal space is smaller, mental maps are
> less cartesian, and we rely a bit more on each other.
>
> I hope this helps.
> Mauricio
>
>
> > I'm really interested in the idea of technology systems/designs having
> > their own "needs" for interaction, and as a result of responding to these
> > needs, the users find themselves interacting with other users to meet the
> > designs' needs.
> >
> >
> --
> G. Mauricio Mejia, MDes, PhD
> Assistant professor, The Design School
> Senior Sustainability Scientist, Global Institute of Sustainability
> Arizona State University
> See my research in the Transformation Lab
> <https://web.asu.edu/transformationlab>
>
>
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