This month's Frame: using Perspectivism to avoid near-sighted product development
A framework to design truly global products.
There is a dominant way that many tech products are developed today. They are built in one place—often in Silicon Valley—and then retrofitted for other markets. This means that product development usually takes the needs and perspectives of the dominant market as its starting point, with other regions treated as secondary considerations.
This is where localisation / internationalisation comes in. It is the primary strategy for adapting products to different regions: and usually involves deploying researchers and designers to conduct market-specific investigations, experiments and tests to try and figure out how the California-made product can be tweaked to fit different needs.
However, localisation can be costly, difficult, and still runs the risk of running into problems that arise from cultural ignorance / blind spots. It’s also arguably an inequitable way of doing things. Instead of forcing products into different cultural contexts after they’ve been built, what if we started by incorporating different perspectives from the outset? What if global tech development wasn’t about adapting a single “true” product, but about co-creating multiple valid versions?
To explore this, we turn to perspectivism, an idea from anthropology that offers a radically different model for building global technology.
The framework
Perspectivism, as developed and popularised by the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Marilyn Strathern, is a way to better understand Amerindian thought, especially their beliefs about how the world and reality are constructed. It challenges the assumption that there is one objective reality experienced in different ways. Instead, it suggests that different beings inhabit different realities, which can be thought of as “perspectives”—how they see the world.
Firstly, all perspectives are equally valid within this framework: there isn’t one correct way to experience reality. A human being and a jaguar are equally important—and so are their perspectives. This is a very different understanding of the Western-derived notion of humans as being separate from (and superior to) “nature”. According to Viveiros de Castro, Amerindians would “put a wide berth between themselves and the Great Cartesian Divide which separated humanity from animality”.
A key goal of a perspectivist anthropology is to compare and translate concepts across different perspectives in order to understand the relations between different types of social actors. For example, the Amerindian human perspective on manioc beer would be as something to drink, enjoy and be revitalised by. A jaguar would see blood and hold it in the same regard as the beer was to the human. A human sees himself as a “person”, and another human as his “fellow man”, while seeing a jaguar as an “animal”. A jaguar sees another jaguar as a “person”, and a human as an animal, etc.
We can therefore make statements such as: “Blood is beer to the jaguar.”...“Other jaguars are “the fellow man” of the jaguar” etc. At its heart, perspectivism is about raising all perspectives to the same level, uncovering what people believe about the essential categories of their social world.
Using the framework
Perspectivist ideas have utility beyond the Amazonian rainforest basin. Cultural perspectives function similarly—just like animals, human cultures often perceive and experience reality in fundamentally different ways. No single cultural viewpoint is “normal” while others are deviations.
The problem with localisation is that tech companies assume their default design is “normal” and localisation is just an adaptation. The process is often deeply hierarchical and top-down, and while a product is localised for different markets, it tends to maintain one strong perspective that occludes all others. Localisation—while often framed as inclusion—is ultimately about adapting one dominant perspective for other contexts.
What if, instead of adapting a single perspective for different markets, we built global tech products that emerged from multiple perspectives from the start? This is the shift from localisation to a perspectivist model of global design.
Practically, this could mean adopting one or more of the following approaches which differ from the traditional process:
Engage remote teams / colleagues during idea generation:
Acknowledging the perspectivist notion that there is equal validity for all perspectives, ensure a “multi-sited” starting point for innovation work, particularly during the front-end idea generation phases. Many global tech companies have people around the world, but often the tech or product teams are concentrated in one particular geographic location. Naturally, this would mean embracing remote work and reducing the expectation for in-person collaboration. How can companies leverage the perspectives of their team members across the world, across different functions?Multiple prototypes reflecting multiple perspectives: while the norm is that distributed teams often focus only on a specific part of the product, larger companies should consider experimenting with another approach. Try engaging multiple global teams from the outset, having them create high level prototypes with their own, local perspectives in mind. This could be made into an “event” that signals a wider culture shift within the company: for example, a hack week with teams from different countries solving a shared challenge and sharing back their perspectives with everyone else. Bring those different perspectives together and find the common structure—similar to the process of “translation” within perspectivist anthropology—and discuss the different prototypes in the round. What’s similar, what’s different? Is there a particular kind of relationship between social actors that is replicated across perspectives? What is the essence of the user experience?
Find global perspectives through in-field research and co-design: another approach that teams can use (especially if they don’t have colleagues in other countries) is conducting in-person research in a different country, with the goal to create a high level prototype at the end of the trip. This could involve a product team going to a different place for 1-2 weeks, conducting user research such as in-home interviews or user immersions, all in collaboration with local designers / engineers / experts to generate ideas to solve a product challenge. This can be run in a scrappy way, with multiple teams going off and exploring other field sites before coming back and incorporating their “perspectivist ideas” into further iterative designs upon their return.
This might seem like a radical inversion of software development and tech industry norms, but it’s not entirely without precedent. There are examples of technology built around a specific, non-Silicon Valley perspective, that found traction elsewhere. For example, mobile payments took off in Kenya (M-Pesa) before becoming a global norm.
Instead of treating such technological innovations as one-off anomalies, we should draw a more optimistic lesson from them. Innovation—and therefore the opportunities for growth—lies not in an “arms race” of talent and technology, confined to a particular location. Rather, it can be found anywhere in the world—provided you are willing to look through someone else’s eyes.
Interested in exploring similar topics further? Explore our archive of past Frames for fresh perspectives:
In this related piece about the role of “boundary objects” in innovation we explore another way to align on new and useful ideas without needing hierarchy or dominance.
Shifting organisational culture can be difficult: for more ideas and suggestions for organisations to stay innovative and avoid path-dependency, check out this piece applying learnings from the canalization framework.
We have done considerable research diving deep into specific markets and building up our understanding of local perspectives. A good example are some of our articles showcasing our work in India, painting a detailed picture of the technological and cultural landscape of users in often-overlooked Tier 2 cities.
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