Publish and Flourish is an annual event that recognizes the accomplishments of our faculty and staff who have published within the past year. In connection with the Office of Research and the University Bookstore, The UW Tacoma Library  celebrates the achievements of our campus community. In lieu of our campus closure, we will be highlighting these publications online through our blog. The UW Tacoma library purchases all faculty and staff publications to make them available to the UW community. This week we are highlighting:

Global Social Media Design: Bridging Differences Across Cultures

Author: Huatong Sun, Ph.D.
Department: Culture, Arts and Communication, division of School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences

“Social media users fracture into tribes, but social media ecosystems are globally interconnected technically, socially, culturally, and economically. At the crossroads, Huatong Sun, author of Cross-Cultural Technology Design, presents theory, method, and case studies to uncover the global interconnectedness of social media design and reorient universal design standards. Centering on the dynamics between structure and agency, Sun draws on practice theories and transnational fieldwork and articulates a critical design approach. The “CLUE2 (CLUE squared)” framework extends from situated activity to social practice, and connects macro institutions with micro interactions to redress asymmetrical relations in everyday life.

Why were Japanese users not crazed about Facebook? Would Twitter have had been more successful than its copycat Weibo in China if not banned? How did mobilities and value propositions play out in the competition of WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, and KakaoTalk for global growth? Illustrating the cultural entanglement with a relational view of design, Sun provides three provocative accounts of cross-cultural social media design and use. Concepts such as affordance, genre, and uptake are demonstrated as design tools to bind the material with the discursive and leap from the critical to the generative for culturally sustaining design.

Sun calls to reshape the crossroads into a design square where differences are nourished as design resources, where diverse discourses interact for innovation, and where alternative design epistemes thrive from the local. This timely book will appeal to researchers, students, and practitioners who design across disciplines, paradigms, and boundaries to bridge differences in this increasingly globalized world.” – Oxford University Press

Reviews (from Oxford University Press):

“The problem of designing social computing and social media applications across cultural boundaries is one of the most important challenges in human-computer interaction. It is tremendously difficult yet absolutely critical to successful applications. Huatong Sun’s work is essential to those trying to work in this space.” — Mark S. Ackerman, GH Mead Collegiate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

“The way Dr. Sun has integrated her knowledge of multiple disciplines with her longstanding and deep understanding of global aspects of design gives her insights into social media particular weight. This perspective–and this book–are both unique and extremely important.” — Susan M Dray, Fellow of ACM and of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Founder of SIGCHI Across Borders Initiative

“Too many social media designs have been found wanting in addressing discursive and cultural differences or in offering approaches that are critically tethered to social practice. Sun has now offered us a compelling framework to address these challenges. Immensely global in its design methodology and deeply border-traversing in its situated case studies, Global Social Media Design represents a timely and significant contribution to understanding differences and ‘deficiencies’ in cross-cultural design practices. It is a must read for scholars and students in rhetoric and writing studies, and cultural and media studies in search of new paradigms for productive engagement with difference in this increasingly interdependent and interconnected world.” — LuMing Mao, Professor and Chair of Writing and Rhetoric Studies, University of Utah

“In Global Social Media Design, Huatong Sun relates practice theory, social justice theory, decolonialist methodology, and other strands to understand the implicit asymmetries in current design approaches, leading us to a design framework that aims to design for differences. Through careful comparative case studies of social media platforms, Sun illustrates her framework, sensitizing us to the ideological and discursive affordances in these platforms. The design insights are eye-opening and deeply needed as we design information and interactions for a global world.” — Clay Spinuzzi, Professor, Department of Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at Austin

“This ground-breaking book by Huatong Sun introduces a postcolonial / decolonial critique to design practices. Too often, design for other cultural locales, or ‘epistemic locations,’ embeds and thus exports Euro-American assumptions as privileged methods. In a globalized world, these assumptions miss key criteria that would make technologies useful, or better, emancipatory. Novel, localized practices can in turn revolutionize personal technologies worldwide by shifting the parameters for meaningful design.” –Eleanor Wynn, Editor Emerita, Information Technology & People; Principal Engineer (retired), Intel Corporation

Locate the Ebook in the UW Libraries catalog here
Learn more about the author here

The UW Tacoma Library is very proud of your accomplishments, Huatong Sun. Congratulations!