Global Language & Culture Study With Nokia

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Do different people in different companies have the same conversations? That’s what Reach recently tried to determine in a major project conducted for Nokia. Three network partners, Apogee, Fuelfor and STBY, worked together to design a global study analysing how the cultures people live in can influence the type of language they use.

Working on such a broad topic was a challenge in itself – as indeed was conducting a simultaneous study in 3 separate timezones – and required a great deal of planning and preparation. One of the benefits of the network however is the experience each company has in working with each other; regular, close and open collaborations mean projects like this often feel like working as a single entity.

Each company maintained their own clear areas of responsibility however. Amongst these, the first step was to create a matrix of existing knowledge, developing a framework of relevant issues from a wide range of literature (in 3 different languages no less). After coming together to refine and synthesise this data, it could then be further focused on the topic at hand via a series of in-depth expert interviews. We spoke to a range of leading academics, journalists, and designers from right across the world, and the insights we gained allowed us to build an analytical framework that refined a hugely complex issue into a series of testable hypotheses.

Once developed, we then applied this framework to a series of in-depth ethnographic immersions. Going out into the field in London, Barcelona, and Shanghai, each company conducted a series of intensive interviews with a wide range of different people. This generated an incredibly rich amount of data, which our framework helped shape into a workable format for a collaborative workshop held with Nokia and all the partners in London.

This complex, multi-phase project proved how design research techniques can be applied to even the most complicated, abstract issues. It also proved how the network-company approach adopted by Reach can allow such projects to maintain a global focus, incorporating cross-cultural differences (and universal similarities) into the earliest possible stages of a design process.

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