Cultural Understanding

Being a father, it is my primary objective to focus my attention on my family’s needs in order to make their lives better. I would like to express this in my field of work. When I lived in Japan almost 5 years ago, I enjoyed adapting to their culture and their way of life. 

In America, we established a strong clientele for a vacuum cleaner, which contains the necessary parts to develop our product. Our team has introduced a product that puts an emphasis on reducing the impact environmentally. This is done by not using any power cords or batteries. The product was designed to make an individual life easier and efficient when cleaning some debris within a house. We used the concepts of the pressure changing and volume work for our product.  There is 2 small vaults build on the container which enabled the air to flow through. The first vault builds on top of the container and the second vault builds at the end container.  As the handheld vacuum is sucking, the debris will collect by the dust collector and the air will flow through the vault. The volume of the container starting to increase and the pressure inside is lesser than outside. Thus, this will allow the first vault to seal the container once the volume of the container is maximized.  As we compress the handheld vacuum, the air will release through the second vault because the volume in the container decrease and the pressure force the second vault to open to let the air flow out. This product is not common in Japan, which makes it unique on a global level. However, we still stick with the Japanese‘s culture that is environment friendly.

For the time being our product had some impact on the society in Japan. With my knowledge of the Japanese’s culture that I learned when I was in Japan; our team is looking to make a huge impact in helping the household.

After many years of cleaning, I found that while I was in U.S, handheld vacuums only serve to clean up messes without care about components that made the handheld vacuum. There are huge differences in the US which they did not care about their product impact has on environment. Generally speaking, environment friendly is not part of the nation’s concern compared to Japan because recycling cost a lot of money per tons of components. Besides that, some components are difficult to recycle, such as plastic. Furthermore, the voltage in American is 120V which is different from Japan (100V) which require amount of electricity to run. But with our product, we can get the job done efficiency and eliminate the pollution that results from the components that make up the handheld vacuum. Handheld vacuums are very common household product that helps many Americans with the household chores.  We took the Le chatelier's principle making into our own handheld vacuum, which is a unique product that we are expanding in Japan. Due to the cultural differences, our team thought of this handheld vacuum specifically for Japan.

Xavier Charles

-Anthropologist of Handheld Vacuum