More than ever before, today one of the challenges for interaction design is the development of systems aiming to attend to the needs and expectations of people with different cultural and social backgrounds. The most widely used perspective in cross-cultural design is internationalization-localization. Internationalization is the process of separating the core functionality code from system s interface specifics (e.g. text language, measures, etc.). With localization, the interface is customized for a particular audience (through language translation, cultural markers and even technical features, for instance). The result of internationalization and localization is to conceal or neutralize cultural differences among different user communities and contexts of use. We are, however, interested in another situation: one where the design intent is virtually the opposite: to expose and explore cultural diversity. This is the case, for instance, when the purpose of the designed system is to stimulate users to make contact with a foreign culture. This thesis provides new knowledge to help HCI designers communicate their intent when they want to promote the users contact with cultural diversity. We present five cultural viewpoint metaphors (CVM) to support reasoning and decision-making about intercultural experience dimensions. The metaphors derive from empirical studies applying Semiotic Engineering to analyze and re-design cross-cultural systems interfaces. In order to investigate if and how CVM actually support HCI professionals/practitioners at design and evaluation time, we carried out an extensive case study to assess how CVM can be used in design and evaluation activities. We found that CVM played an important role in early design stages, helping designers to reason effectively about intercultural experiences while determining which cultural perspective they want to adopt. Furthermore, CVM features provided a rich epistemic grid where the consistency of design choices stands out more clearly.