ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores how practical pictures with human forms are saturated with cultural elements that reflect the design conventions and aesthetics of a particular historical era as well as the beliefs and social values of designers and audiences. In multiple ways, human figures visualize culture: their gestures and clothing, the artifacts they bear, the tasks they perform, and the identities they reveal based partly on their gender, ethnicity, and power. The level of cultural context, however, varies along a continuum from culturally focused images, which emphasize local context, to universal images, which embody the international approach of modernism. Contemporary cross-cultural and multicultural design aims to visualize human forms that appeal to specific or diverse cultural groups.
