Give three compelling examples of how cultural issues affect your project.
In Kazakh culture, it is not imperative to arrive on time; however, being more than 30 minutes late will be portrayed as disrespectful. This concept is spread throughout many countries and causes failures in communication between teams, leading to delayed meetings and procedures. Our time in Kazakhstan will be limited and this ideology will waste our time and decrease the impact we leave on the community in Kazakhstan. In some countries, like Egypt and India, independent devices in the streets can be seen as a lucrative object and become a target for theft. Incidents like these would cause sensors planted for data monitoring and collection would be stolen and possibly sold in the black market. It would not be practical to have these items stolen all of the time. In Kazakhstan, the official language is Kazakh; however, the language most spoken by the people in Russian. While Russian was the language of teaching at schools and universities, now it is Kazakh. This will cause a problem since we will be using Kazakh to communicate, but a lot of people will be speaking Russian. All of these issues should be taken into account when implementing a solution or navigating our way to one.
Have you experienced or observed any of these social situations at home? Describe at least three such situations.
At home (Egypt), we had the theft issue. For example, a few years ago, there were an epidemic of tire theft, cheap and expensive tires were being stolen daily. This issue reflects on how insecure it would be to plant devices on the streets as their faith is predictable. The only way this problem was somewhat resolved was by having police cars roaming the streets all night and putting light sources for rural streets. In Egypt, the culture is very conservative and resistant to change. Introducing a new concept or way of life would be very difficult to implement in the day’s structure; for example, 15 years ago, the idea of converting your car from using gasoline to using natural gas was introduced as a solution to high gasoline prices, and till this day, people are very hesitant to perform this conversion. Reluctance to change is cancer to our smart cities project since the solutions that will be implemented will be new and different, aiming at impact. In our culture, engineering is seen as a profession for men only, so in a graduating class of 200 mechanical engineers, only 7 would be women. This stereotype prevents many women from aspiring to study smart technologies and leaves a significant portion of the population uneducated to the fields of smart technologies. To implement change, a diverse workforce is needed and misconceptions like these prevent us from reaching this desired state. This workforce is crucial to building smart technologies and is very important to the contribution of perspective and ideas.
Give three examples of cultural practices that can be leveraged to addressed community/market problems
The sharing and co-operative elements in some cultures can be harvested to manifest a market where ideas are being shared and contributed to by everyone. A common example would be when a mobile phone store opens, another one opens beside it. This way they bring customers to each other and they share ideas with each other. A culture like this one usually has everyone connected with each other, so basically, by knowing a few people, you will probably be able to get to anyone you need. This can be leveraged when we begin to implement our solutions. Implementing them requires a lot of country-related logistics that need locals who work in the proper area of expertise. Another way is data and feedback collection; spreading a survey link would very simple and effective for future improvements in our innovations. Marketing a product or idea can also be done easily since the word is spread effectively. It is definitely more influential to hear about something from someone, rather than watching a commercial or reading a flyer. Also, the youth in such areas tend to be very proactive about improving their conditions and implementing new and smart technologies that reduce the inefficiencies they have every day. All of these advantages can be used to spread information about a product and how to use it, so it is used widely and correctly.
Post by Bishoy Youhana
Good work! It’s interesting to reflect on how social networks are built in different places/cultures and how information might spread – it’s good you’re thinking about how a few people could give you access to a much larger audience in the case of your project.