You can always change this.

It is a very well known fact that different colors mean/symbolize different things in different cultures. One of these is the difference how Black and White are perceived in western cultures and how they are perceived in Asia. (For a short overview of what is believed to symbolize what, check this).

How about in Kenya? During our thousands of kilometers around this country I was wondering why there are not many traffic lights. One reason is obvious, they are costly. However, a local driver told me that where there were traffic lights installed, the number of accidents increased. His explanation was that the red color symbolizes danger; therefore many drivers when seeing the red signal push the gas pedal as though there would be some danger.

So I went on finding an evince for the claim. During one of my lectures I presented to the audience three choices about what does the RED mean to them. The three choices were danger, hot, and stop. I used the same choices as in one of the previous works comparing Hong Kong Chinese and Americans. In the lecture settings the 25 participants could provide a multiple response. (I do not attempt to approach this as a formal experiment, but if you are interested for more details contact me).
Fifteen out of 25 (60%) related red with danger, nobody related red with hot, and 1 (4%) connected red with stop. Comparing to the Hong-Kong Chinese (65%, 31%, 49%) the differences are obvious. While almost half of the Chinese can associate red with stop, almost nobody from my sample did the same.

Do you think it can explain why the traffic lights as we know in West do not work?

Whether the driver’s anecdote is true or not, and how does the results of this small survey apply for whole country remains open. There are tens of tribes, sub-cultures and languages in this country, so to generalize the findings is hard. I would not like this post to be perceived as a piece of research, since the settings were very vague, as well as I do not know how many of the participants in my lecture had a driving licence, what is their background, etc..

However, this ‘research’ has started from an observation and then it attempted to find an empirical evidence. In many of the contemporary cultural works it is often done the other way round.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 11:24 am and is filed under hci, Kenya, usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.