Interview: Senongo Akpem on cross-cultural design
Senongo Akpem, a design director in New York, discusses his book on cross-cultural design and why you should read it.
Note: this interview took place in March… before the lockdown, the death of George Floyd, the closure of net magazine in print, and indeed everything else that 2020 has thrown at us. Senongo’s book, however, has become more topical than ever, so we thought it would be useful to share his Q&A here.
Q: Could you briefly introduce yourself to anyone who doesn’t know you?
I’m a designer and illustrator based in New York City. I’m also the founder of Pixel Fable, a collection of interactive Afrofuturist stories. I’m the design director at Constructive, a social impact design agency. I’ve been working on the web for a good 15 years, both on the agency and in-house side.
I’m the child of a Nigerian father and a Dutch-American mother. I grew up in Nigeria, lived in Japan for almost a decade, and now call New York City home. Living in constantly shifting cultural and physical spaces has given me unique insight into the influence of culture on communication and creativity. I love science fiction, especially the galaxy-spanning, space opera stories.
Q: What led you to write Cross-Cultural Design, published by A Book Apart, and why should people buy it?
I’ve been speaking about culture and design for quite a few years, starting with a talk I gave at Future of Web Design (RIP) in 2012. The internet is connecting more people in a dazzling variety of places, languages, perspectives, and expectations about the web, and I truly feel that our design practices have to change to account for all of that.
In Cross-Cultural Design, I try to offer readers a clear and accessible methodology for designing across cultures. That means performing socially-conscious research, designing and building culturally responsive experiences, even choosing meaningful imagery, colour, and iconography. The topic is a large one, but I hope the book acts as a guide for people working on global digital experiences.
Q: What are some big mistakes that people tend to make when designing online experiences for global audiences?
We forget to centre the needs of our users, especially when they don’t look like us or share the same culture. But in order to design for global audiences, we need to think and act differently, which leads to better content, design, and strategic choices in our work.
Q: What lessons have you learned from Pixel Fable?
Pixel Fable has been so great to work on. I found out early on that trying to make a large, immersive experience for each story was not sustainable. For example, my most recent story was The Voyage of Captain DaCosta. I started the research for that about six years ago. The scale was so large, that if I took the same route for every story, I’d never get anything launched! Now I’m taking a simpler, MPV-style approach to getting new stories on the web.
I’ll now proceed to contradict myself! I’m working on another big story called Shan Geh: Messages From the Orchid Terraformers. It’s a series of around 30 illustrations of scientists who are terraforming some distant planet. Using a text generator, I mashed up text from century-old Russian and North African expedition diaries with botanical descriptions of orchids and sci-fi vocabulary. That gives me this stilted English that sounds like it’s been translated from some alien language. I used that as inspiration for the illustrations.
Q: What’s most exciting to you in the world of web design right now?
I’m excited, but also terrified, of what is coming in the world of web design. We are seeing a rapid rise in generative images, mashups, AI-driven art, and deepfake videos. I imagine that in the near future, people will be able to plug in a number of sample image, a few keywords, and their brand guidelines, and be instantly offered multiple designs for their website.
In that exciting, but terrifying world, designers will need to be the leaders and managers of the process, not the actual creators of site design. How much of our jobs can we give over to AI, while still remaining designers?
Interview by Tom May
