Designing Intercultural Agents for Multicultural Interactions
Vienna Workshop "Agent Culture", 24-25 August 2001
Elaine M. Raybourn
Advanced Concepts Group
Sandia National Laboratories
Albuquerque, NM USA
Culture [is] those deep, common, unstatedexperiences which members of a given culture share, which theycommunicate without knowing, and which form the backdrop againstwhich all other events are judged (E.T. Hall, 1966, BeyondCulture).
I define intercultural communication as the exchange, andco-creation, of information and meanings by entities, individuals, orgroups when at least one party perceives itself to be different fromothers. In Beyond Culture, anthropologist Edward T. Hall indicated,"culture is the total communication framework." To this end, let'sthink broadly about the confluence of intercultural communication,culture, and design--by exploring the impact of underlying dynamicsof intercultural encounters such as identity, negotiation, conflict,power, equity, and trust on virtual characters, virtual spaces,users, and collaborative communities.
The topic of my position paper addresses the question, "Whichcultural analyses and considerations enter into interaction,personality, visual design and context of embodied agents?"Additionally, what cultural considerations enter into the design ofmulticultural spaces or places?
Although we may strive to create equitable spaces, differingcultures of the creators, owners, developers, and users of suchspaces make for complex, largely misunderstood interculturaldynamics. For example, in an intelligent knowledge-sharingenvironment (powered by agents) how do we bring together the cultureof the organization's management with the culture of non-hierarchicalsocial networking? In designing environments for children, how couldwe encourage them to safely explore their own identity or learn aboutthe identities of others? Should we design for certain interactionoutcomes? If we design from the communication interactions out, thatis--using intercultural communication principles as a guide, can weachieve equity and negotiation across culturally diverse communitymembers? When designing virtual characters and places, what are we todo when one person's utopia is another's dystopia?
One such experimental simulation was the DomeCityMOO (Raybourn,1998), which I designed to foster certain communication events andillustrate to users how negotiation, awareness of interculturaldynamics (power and identity), and collaborative behaviors can resultfrom non-threatening interactions occurring in a 'dystopian' virtualenvironment. On some levels, it is counter-intuitive to consider aless than utopian environment as facilitating collaboration andnegotiation. Nevertheless, this emergent culture was achieved throughinteractions that introduced role interdependencies and byencouraging participants to co-create stories in their virtual spacetogether. When designing virtual environments or characters,sometimes the mere suggestion of a cultural cue may be moreappropriate than actually providing the cue itself. That is,designers might want to take a 'parenting approach to design'--andfacilitate means with which users or agents contribute to theirinteraction environment. Enabling users to equitably co-create theirown stories (with or without the assistance of social agents) in CVEsmakes for rich intercultural communication.
An adaptive knowledge-sharing environment that I continue to workon with British Telcom (BT) is called the Contact Space. Jasper II(agents) and Contact Space constitute a WWW-based knowledge sharingenvironment comprised of a system of intelligent software agents thatsupport explicit and tacit knowledge sharing. Jasper II agentsadaptively learn their user's interests by observing the user'sbehavior, while Contact Space agents dynamically move avatars todesignated locations in a virtual space in order to support real timecommunication. I will present design scenarios for incorporatingtacit culture cues (signposts) into the knowledge-sharing environmentin order to offer enhanced support for intercultural communicationamong remote, or mobile workers.
By designing online interactions, we cannot help but design onlineculture as well. If we have an opportunity to foster 'a goodcommunication culture' online it begs the question 'what is goodcommunication culture?' We can imagine an adaptable, intelligentenvironment that encourages managers to communicate more effectivelywith individuals or even help us to understand why someone works theway s/he does. As such, we can envisage textual narratives withinvisual environments to help users come to an understanding of eachother, and each other's culture, via the online environment.
In summary, I will use examples from my previous work with MUDsand MOOs and adaptive knowledge sharing environments to focus on 1)potential cultural analyses for consideration, and 2) offerintercultural communication principles for observing culturaldifferences and similarities in avatar behavior, as well as 3)high-level suggestions toward creating culturally fluent avatars, andlast, 4) fostering a multi-cultural interaction among users andagents. It is my hope that we can spend some time after mypresentation discussing what behaviors/skills we, as designers ofthese agents, will need to acquire/nurture in order to responsiblycreate environments and virtual characters which are truly equitableand multicultural.