I’m looking into how to do an MBA in China, and the reason starts with something very concrete in my work, which is the way digital products there are designed, and with a bet on where technology is heading.
A high-context culture
China, and Asian culture in general, is what’s usually called a high-context culture, where much of the communication depends on what surrounds the message. That shows up in digital products in a way that stands out to anyone coming from the West, because to our eyes the screens there look overloaded, with information, options and features competing for space, like the super apps where the same screen is used to chat, pay and order food.
For people who grew up in that culture, though, that excess means something else. Many contexts and many use cases on a single screen build trust, because they show that the system can handle everything a person might need, while for us the same amount of stuff tends to confuse and look careless.
What AI changes
I believe we’re entering a moment when the rest of the world will move in the same direction. With AI and increasingly accessible technology, building a product that does many things will get much easier, so the difficulty stops being building each feature and becomes connecting different systems and making it all work together without turning into a mess.
If that’s right, knowing a culture that already lives comfortably with dense products up close could become an advantage, both to understand how people there use those products and to study the methodologies they use to build them, and that’s exactly the kind of thing I want to learn.
The next technology
Today we live under American hegemony in technology, where much of the products we use and the way we think about product comes from there. But I feel that balance is starting to shift, because Asian technology is also becoming more Western, and my bet is that the technology of the next century will be built, in large part, by China and countries like it.
I want to be in the middle of that shift, inside China’s technology world, learning how they think about product while it’s still taking shape, and that’s why I’m looking at China.
Written by Matheus Sá. Disagree or want to add something? Write to me.