Junlu. Xie

Cultural Faux PasS

A platform that helps people in the US to learn and practice different cultures by providing multiple games with authentic examples and explanations


Junlu Xie Expo.mp4

Cultural Faux PasS is a platform that offers people to experience what would happen for real in a foreign country. They will be presented with real-life situations with cultural differences, and test out and see what are the results they could expect from the choices they made while practicing the local language.

I designed and coded this platform - Cultural Faux Pass. (click to view the web)

The key value points of it include:

  • All of the scenarios in the game are from real-life cases and authentic resources. We did more than 10 interviews with people who have related cross-culture backgrounds.

  • All of the characters in the game are designed with shapes, rather than with realistic human figures, to avoid defining people in the games with different races, genders, and other assets.

  • All of the video content is presented in both English and the relative foreign language, to better support language learning as well.

My target audience is people in the US who are interested in moving to or learning about different cultural environments. Ideally, the platform will offer all the cultural experiences from different countries that are opposite from The US. (Learn more about High Context vs low Context Cultures.

In this case, I chose Japan as the main case and interviewed people both from the US that currently living in Japan, and Japanese who currently live in The US.

Besides coding the website, I also made my own videos that provided the content in each of the quizzes. I drew storyboards and all the graphics in the video.

Major Learning Theories & design principles I have used in my project.

Please check out the web-Cultural Faux Pass, and let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

Questions, comments?

Leave me comments below or email me at jx2053@nyu.edu