Why This Project Matters to Me:
Over the past few years, my research and design work has been driven by a question: What kinds of cultural knowledge are recognized as legitimate sites of computing, and whose cultural stories are allowed to shape how we imagine computer science? This question sits at the heart of my practicum work, my broader research agenda in culturally responsive computing, and now, this proposed mapping project on Chinese multicultural motifs.
This project is not simply a technical exercise in web mapping, nor is it only an archive of visual patterns. It is a continuation of a longer intellectual and personal journey that connects computing education, cultural heritage, and the lived realities of Chinese and Chinese American communities, particularly in the context of rising anti-Asian/Chinese racism.
From Practicum to Public-Facing Storytelling
My practicum focuses on integrating Han Chinese cultural motifs, such as Ruyi clouds and architectural window patterns, into culturally responsive computing curricula using tools like CSnap and the Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDT). In this work, I examine how traditional designs can be translated into computational concepts such as iteration, decomposition, symmetry, and recursion. This approach aligns with ethnocomputing scholarship, which challenges the false divide between technical knowledge and cultural knowledge and Western-centered CS education by demonstrating how computation is already embedded in cultural practices. However, as my practicum progressed, I became increasingly aware of a tension. While focusing on Han cultural motifs was a necessary and manageable scope for classroom-based curriculum design, it risked unintentionally reproducing a familiar problem: the tendency to treat “Chinese culture” as singular, homogeneous, and static. In reality, China is home to 56 officially recognized ethnic groups, each with its own visual languages, craft traditions, and historical trajectories. This realization prompted me to think beyond the classroom and beyond a single cultural lineage.
Anti-Asian Racism and the Politics of Visibility
The motivation for this project is also deeply shaped by the broader sociopolitical climate, particularly the ways anti-Asian racism manifests within computing and technology education. In recent years, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian racism has become more visible and more explicit. Yet within computer science, these dynamics often operate in quieter, structural ways. Asian and Asian American students are frequently positioned as naturally technical but not creative, disciplined but not innovative, competent implementers rather than visionary designers. This framing contributes to what is often described as the “bamboo ceiling”: a set of racialized assumptions that allow Asians to be included in technical labor while limiting recognition, leadership, and authorship.
Within CS education, this produces a paradoxical form of marginalization. Asian students may appear overrepresented numerically, yet their cultural identities are rarely treated as sources of epistemic or creative value. Their presence is often interpreted as evidence that computing is already “diverse enough,” obscuring the racialized narratives that constrain how Asian identities are understood. As a result, Asian cultural knowledge is seldom invited into conversations about creativity, design, or innovation in computing classrooms. Instead, Asian identities are flattened into stereotypes as homogeneous, interchangeable, and abstracted from history, despite the profound diversity that exists across Asian communities.
These dynamics are reinforced by longer-standing logics of techno-orientalism, in which Asia is imagined simultaneously as technologically advanced and culturally alien: a source of labor, efficiency, and futurity, but not of humanistic insight, creativity, or theory. In educational and technological spaces, this often translates into a narrow view of Asian cultures as either decorative aesthetics or futuristic backdrops, rather than as living traditions that produce knowledge, meaning, and computational insight. Cultural motifs may be admired visually, but stripped of context, history, and intellectual depth.
Against this backdrop, cultural representation is not a neutral act. Decisions about which histories are told, which artifacts are preserved, and which cultural practices are framed as intellectually meaningful carry real political consequences. This project responds to these conditions by insisting that Chinese and multiethnic Asian motifs are not merely ornamental or pre-computational, but are deeply structured systems that embody logic, abstraction, and design principles central to computing.
This project is a small but intentional intervention into that landscape. By situating Chinese multicultural motifs within geographic locations like temples, museums, architectural sites, and diasporic spaces, the map emphasizes that culture is lived, spatial, and historically grounded. It resists the idea that culture exists only as abstract symbols or decorative patterns. Importantly, this is not a project about “celebrating culture” in a shallow or tokenistic way. Rather, it is about reframing cultural artifacts as sites of intellectual and computational significance, thereby challenging the implicit hierarchies that position Western mathematical or computational traditions as universal, while relegating non-Western designs to the realm of craft or folklore.
Why Mapping?
Choosing mapping as the primary medium is itself a deliberate design decision. Maps have long been used as tools of power – defining borders, naming places, and asserting control over space. In this project, the interactive map functions as both an entry point and a narrative structure.
The interaction is also supposed to be simple: clicking a custom marker on the map will navigate the user to a separate page that introduces the motif. From the landing page, users enter the map view, which loads centered on the region relevant to the project. Five custom markers are placed at carefully selected locations, each corresponding to a culturally significant motif. When a user clicks on a marker, they are taken to a dedicated page that presents the motif’s name, a brief cultural and historical description, a few openly licensed images, and links to authoritative external sources for further reading. Together, the map and the linked motif pages create a clear narrative flow: from geographic context, to cultural story, to deeper engagement with the motif’s meaning and significance.
While this project stands on its own as a digital humanities and storytelling effort, it is also closely tied to my ongoing work in computing education. This map complements my practicum by offering educators and students a broader cultural context within which classroom-based computational activities can be situated. In other words, the map is not meant to replace curriculum tools like CSnap, but to enrich them. It provides a way to contextualize computational concepts within lived cultural traditions and to prompt critical questions about whose knowledge counts as “computational” in the first place.
Looking Forward
Ultimately, Mapping Chinese Multicultural Motifs is a project about connecting culture and computation through place-based storytelling. As both a continuation of my practicum and a response to persistent forms of anti-Asian racism in computing education, the project uses mapping to surface cultural traditions that are often treated as marginal or purely decorative. Rather than presenting a finished argument, it serves as a starting point for exploring how digital mapping and design can reframe cultural heritage as a legitimate source of computational knowledge and creative practice.
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