The DIE is cast: The continuing evolution of intercultural communication's favorite classroom exercise

This article reviews the origins and continual evolution of what may be the most widely used exercise in intercultural communication workshops and classes. The popular DIE exercise, developed in the 1970s, was derived from General Semantics exercises presented in the Speech discipline decades before Intercultural Communication emerged as a field in itself. The exercise, which is known by its ominous acronym “DIE,” asks people to observe an unusual object or a photograph of an unfamiliar scene, and then first “describe” what they see, then “intferpret” possible meanings, and finally to “evaluate” by giving their value judgments. While the DIE exercise has been a favorite among teachers and professional trainers in the area of intercultural communication with variations in format and applications for three decades, the ambiguity between interpretation and evaluation and the ominous acronym itself have been problematic.This article proposes a DAE version utilizing a significant Korean word [dae] as a more felicitous acronym: describe, analyze, evaluate. This avoids the negative association of the DIE acronym and the often mentioned ambiguity of the words interpretation and evaluation. In addition, attention to other cultural perspectives is signaled through the use of a non-English word as the name of the exercise.