Healthy Attitudes for International Travelers
“Traveling internationally soon, or hope to again sometime in the future? This article provides four principles to help hone your mind-set and turn your international travels into more meaningful experiences for you and those around you. ”
Today’s global supply chains mean that modern products are generally made up of components and materials originating from various countries. Though the frequency will vary, members of product development teams will likely need to travel internationally and work with individuals and companies in foreign places. This can be an amazing mind-opening experience, or it can be sorely frustrating. At its worst, a frustrating experience can lead to ill-founded generalizations about a country and its people.
This article is written for people who travel, or hope to travel internationally. The goal is to share principles I practice regularly. To me, these principles make my international travel great and enriching. Although it may seem totally unrelated to design practice, this article is also for designers who want to become better anthropologists. At the end of the article, I give some thoughts regarding how good designers are also good international travelers, and vice versa.
Your attitude about the destination
The single greatest thing that will affect your international experience is your attitude about the place you are visiting. Develop and maintain a healthy attitude by adopting these principles while traveling abroad:
Principle 1: You are the foreigner.
Take a look at your visit from a bird’s eye perspective. Observe yourself in the foreign country. Although it’s easy to think that everything around you is new, the only thing that is actually new in this environment is you. You are the foreigner. You are the one doing things differently. You are the one imposing your existing world view on a new world. To avoid letting this sink you, be flexible, adapt to your surroundings, blend in so that you don’t distract from or diminish the environment around you. Above all, be a gracious guest in the country, just as you would if you were visiting a new friend at their home. Be interested, complimentary, and non-judgmental.
For example, during your visit, see more than the hotel and office space. Go to the town square, or a monument, or look at the architecture. Take initiative to look for amazing things, then let your local friends/colleagues know that you enjoyed seeing those parts of their town and culture. Avoid one-up-ing by saying too much at the wrong time about your own town or country; “I love that statue of your country’s founder; in the United States we carved our founders faces into a huge granite mountain, it’s awesome.”
Principle 2: There is more than one right way to do things. It doesn’t have to be your way.
In principle many of us believe this, but in practice it can be very difficult to remember in a foreign country. Many people get frustrated in foreign countries when they’re told to not flush the toilet paper, or don’t see price tags on things, or when it takes a very long time to order, get, and pay for food in a restaurant. What’s more is that it is easy to get mad and even feel violated, when hotels don’t provide a towel or clean the room every day, or when someone jumps the line by moving into the contextually large gap you’ve left between yourself and the next person in line, or when disembarking a plane is not done row by row. I’ve experienced all these things, by the way. Although they are uncomfortable, is it valuable to ask if they are wrong? No, they are not wrong; not in their culture. It’s just different than what we have experienced. Be a good guest, and remember that the thing that is different here is you.
Principle 3: Unmet expectations cause frustration.
Frustration is what happens when expectations are unmet. The key to managing frustration abroad is to get your expectations in tune with reality. Simply stated, if you want your experience in another country to be like your experiences in your home country, you will be frustrated. When you buy a yogurt in another country and it doesn’t match your expectations for viscosity and flavor, avoid thinking about how you want it to be and instead experience what it is. When you need to buy some glue in a foreign country, and you can’t find your favorite brand, try asking the shop owner what their favorite brand is and why. When you want to stay late at the office in the foreign country, and they don’t have a culture of staying late, adjust your plans and finish your work somewhere else. When you get a haircut in another country, and they don’t know how to deal with your hair’s texture, earn experience points for trying something new. When you order something for dinner in a foreign language and they deliver the wrong thing, accept it as a communication breakdown, not incompetence in the kitchen. I’ve experienced all these too, and at first they are frustrating until I realize I’m wanting things to be as I would expect them to be in my own country.
To avoid having experiences like these cloud you from seeing the good things, you’ll need to manage your expectations. When you loosen up on your expectations, you’ll find it easier to manage frustration. In my mind, there are at least three ways to do this, but they all start with accepting that international travel is an opportunity to experience something different than what you normally do, and to avoid the temptation to complain against or try to change the new culture you’re experiencing. My three recommendations to manage expectations are these:
Before your trip, study up on the place you’re going to – not to get a firm understanding of specifics, but to get a general sense for the kinds of cultural things to expect. Such as how different cultures deal with punctuality, gift giving, tipping, meals, and more.
Before your trip, experience many diverse things in your own life, so that your appreciation for the various ways to do things will grow. For example, if you normally drive a car to do errands, try walking or taking the train or the bus to see how others do these same tasks. If you normally go to the movies without buying popcorn and a drink, try it next time just to see how others experience the theater. If you normally run outside for exercise, try a treadmill for a week. You don’t have to like these other ways, but as you try them, you’ll begin to see and appreciate other slices of the population that do things differently than you.
During your trip, if you have not studied up on the place you’re going, and/or if you have not had a chance to diversify your personal experiences sufficiently, it is a good idea to simply abandon your expectations and use your international travel experience to absorb all you can – largely without judgement – from what you see, smell, taste, hear, and feel abroad. That’s right, try not to have expectations. Just experience. I have seen too many people spend their time abroad comparing what they see to what they expected to see. This is dangerous, generally unhealthy, and pretty much why roughly half the people I talk to say they didn’t like Paris that much. Abandoning your expectations is not easy. For example, when you arrive in a foreign place and you see graffiti, how do you react? Try abandoning your pre-conceived thoughts about how graffiti is viewed in your home country, and simply experience the country for what it is, thinking less about what you wish it was. I know for example that the graffiti I have seen in Northern Ireland has a very different meaning than the graffiti I have seen in China, and even that is different than what I have seen in Brazil. Make tons of observations, but be careful about inferring the meaning of things without following up with someone knowledgeable about what you’re seeing. If you can’t access someone knowledgeable, largely leave these observations as simply that. Observations.
Principle 4: It is not about if you like or dislike a country. It’s about if you did or did not enjoy your experience in that country (there is a huge difference).
With an unhealthy attitude, it is easy to make sweeping generalizations about a country and its people based on inconsequential things like the viscosity of yogurt, the hardness of a bed, or a frustrated driver in a traffic jam. To put this into perspective, imagine a foreigner visiting your hometown for Thanksgiving weekend, and the false generalizations that could be made about the USA regarding over consumption, family interactions, and shopping behavior. Not only are these things observed during an anomaly weekend, and they don’t necessarily shed light on the day-to-day values, dreams, and approaches of the American people.
Just two days ago, I was in Manaus, Brazil. I had been there before, but never on a Sunday afternoon. The docks on the Amazon River, the lively fish market, and all of the countless shops were unfortunately closed, though they normally paint a vibrant picture of the 350 year old city. Unlike what I had experienced before in Manaus, the downtown parks and other areas were completely empty – except for the homeless population, who clearly had nowhere else to be. One of my travel companions who had never been to Manaus commented “I don’t really like Manaus.” What he actually meant, however, was that he didn’t like his experience in Manaus. Without the exciting Brazilian energy that normally fills its streets, I can see how my friend arrived at his conclusion about Manaus. Nevertheless, he would be wrong to assume that the only version of Manaus is the Manaus we saw on that Sunday afternoon.
What does this have to do with design?
This has more to do with design than you may think. Any time we engage with, and seek to understand an end user (such as during interviews, participatory design, or ethnographies) we step metaphorically into a foreign country. We enter a space where the surroundings and culture are different from that of our own lives, and expectations. When we’re in that space we can attempt to change it so that it matches our experience, thus making us feel good. Or we can momentarily embrace it and be enlightened, thus putting us in a noticeably better position to create products and services that enhance the lives of end users.
