Year

2015

Intro

During my undergrad at Keio University, I joined a seminar which researched about “Pattern Languages” - which was discovered by Christopher Alexander in 1977. Pattern Language is an “organized and coherent set of patterns” to depict problems and solutions within specific fields. Using the basic principles of Pattern Language, my project group decided to research the patterns of culture and how to depict “culture”. Pattern language allows us to create new words that were not thought about by people. By creating that new word, we can talk about a new relation with something and a change in communicating with others will be seen. We thought we are able to use Pattern Language, when illustrating culture. However, when writing about culture, we don’t use “context”, “problem”, “action” as we normally use for pattern language, so we decided to create a new method called Culture Language. 

By depicting the culture from a specific organization, it creates stronger bonds with each other by understanding what patterns of culture exist. 

For our project, we attempted to create the Culture Language for our university.

My Role

Interviews, surveys, KJ Method (affinity diagram), project management, illustrations, and translations

Process

Since Culture Language is a method that my team and I came up with, we had no idea where to start from. Pattern Language depicts the past by using successful examples from common patterns. Future Language (another method that was introduced from our seminar) depicts the future by collecting “future vision” aspects. We thought the Culture Language is neither the past or the future - but the present. We had two broad questions.

• How could we depict culture/present?

• What kind of culture/present do we want to depict?

Without knowing what kind of pattern cards we were going to output, we started with interviews from our university’s faculty and students. We interviewed 18 faculties and 15 students. 

Process cont’d

Using the KJ method, we wrote down all episodes that we heard from the interviews. After everything was listed, we clustered them into groups by what’s important from the episodes we heard. At the end, we had 26 groups that directly became Culture Language Patterns.

Culture Language Format

Pattern Language is depicted in “context”, “problem”, and “action”. However, we realized that Culture Language will not fit in that format. We created our own format that kept the importance of each culture: “What”, “Why”, and “How”.

Website Link (Japanese)

Please click here for the homepage.

Project Deliverable

Please click here for the deliverable in English.

Please click here for the deliverable in Japanese.