Abstract:

Mobile Applications have been gathering popularity in the recent years due to the releases of latest generation of smartphones. Mobile applications are particularly compelling for traveling usage because of its mobility and ready availability. Students who are traveling abroad for short term study trips are becoming more common to bring with them mobile dictionaries, phrase book or travel guides in their smart phones.

The shortcomings of these applications are that they are designed for uni-directional expression of one's view, rather than bidirectional communication between the visitors and the locals. Also, they treated local culture and language as separate entities. As stressed by Olaniran (Olaniran, 2009) that there is a "need to understand culture and contextual appropriateness of language." This particularly applies to students who travel abroad for culture visit and learning.

The "Decent Japanese Travelling Communicator" is an iPhone application designed with cultural sensitive bi-directional communication for visitors to Japan as a goal. Commonly used dialogs for travelers are categorized into places like Japanese Ryokan, Sushi Restaurant and Bookstore. The likely corresponding responses within the cultural context are listed when a dialog is selected. Dialogs are narrated in real voice and each party can sketch or type on the dialog to customize it with specific nouns like a book name, dish name or even draw maps on it. Dialogs and responses that were not culturally appropriate were purposefully left out. A special cultural remarks on things to be noticed can also be viewed under each place category.

The iPhone application is distributed to a group of students and teacher for an undergraduate design education study trip to Japan. Studies are made to evaluate their experience and effects, both in terms of enhancement in communication and cultural sensitivity on using it during the trip. Results are compared with another control group that went to the trip without usage of such mobile application.

Keywords:

mobile learning tools, interaction design, cultural and language studies, study trips.