Description:
<jats:p> To make communication between individuals possible one has to follow certain rules. The interpersonal communication is based on cultural and social influences, and has developed over millennia into many regional communication forms. In the same way as in interpersonal communications, the human machine communication needs defined rules, so that the information displayed by the machine expresses the current process state. In order to clarify cultural differences in human machine communication the project Intops (funded by the German minister for Research and Technology) was carried out by the Centre for Human Machine Interaction (pak) from the University of Kaiserslautern for mechanical engineering applications in selected Asian countries. The results of the study show that cultural influences need to be considered above all in the area of information coding. Examples are the use of colours and pictorial symbols. </jats:p>