Design and Culture

In class we viewed Babette's Feast, which is an excellent demonstration of different cultures coming together.  Babette creates a French feast for her Scandinavian hosts, which causes initial skepticism by the two women, but in the end there is an appreciation for their differences.  The interrelationship between culture and design is incredibly important and essentially inevitable.  The cultural differences are what makes design different all over the word, and it's important to appreciate all design for what it is.  Design is an incredibly powerful thing, in that it has the ability to bring people together from different cultures and different walks of life.  Design in many ways is universal, but the variety comes from the differences in the way people use rooms and spaces, and how a dining space in Japan would be completely different than that of a dining room in the US.  Understanding how various cultures live influences design and a particular design for one culture may not work for another, even if you're essentially designing the same type of space such as a dining room.  An appreciation for the different types of design is what brings us together and is what will make design stronger in the future.