Collaboration Support in the Initial Intercultural Collaboration Phase

Collaboration of participatory design is often carried out by a wide variety of members from several work cultures especially in the initial design stage. However, little is known about how to support work culture difference. This paper presents an analysis of participatory design case applied to software development collaboration project. The analysis is from an intercultural point of view and aims at finding ways to support intercultural collaboration activities. Investigation how intercultural communication errors are recognized, repaired and bring agreements to participants were made. Surprisingly, our analysis indicates that the initial stage of a participatory design process mainly relies on a dynamic and creative process where participants create expressions together with unique semantics rather than just transferring static terms from each others own vocabulary.