They say reading books makes you a better speaker. I agree. The more varied your book collection, the more diverse your vocabulary.
I also believe reading people makes you a better thinker. Not just the people you live with, or the ones who sit next to you at work. But people you wouldn’t normally bump into, divided by borders, time-zones, or purely because they chose pizza every time you went out for sushi.
I was fortunate enough to travel very early on in my life. My parents moved between Britain and India, with a bit of Sweden thrown in as well. Quite obviously, those are three extremely different cultures, and exposure to all three at an age when my brain was absorbing everything like a sponge meant I developed a natural affinity towards noticing, learning – and most importantly – respecting cultural nuances.
Growing up, I was a student across three countries as well – Britain, India, and Italy. And all through my teens into my mid-twenties, I learnt that student life is pretty much the exact same, no matter where you live. We were all about experiencing as much as our hungry hearts and our shoestring budgets could handle. The only thing that changed was the language, and the colloquialisms that came with it.
But as I grew older and moved into the professional world of timesheets and Teams calls, the responsibilities became heavier, and those cultural gaps grew larger.
What felt universal at twenty felt distant in my thirties, and even more complicated as I crossed into the forties.
Chapter 1: Long-Distance Assumptions
For four years, in my early thirties, I lived and worked across a large part of South-East Asia, with Singapore being the main hub of operations.
It was a fantastic time full of discovery, and willingly armed with loose shoulders and open minds, my partner and I embraced everything about that life. We jumped feet-first into the myriad of languages, cultures, idiosyncrasies, the night-life, the day-life, the uncharted culinary choices and the familiar drinks.
But cultural gaps are easy to fill in a personal space. The expectations are low, and the stakes – nonexistent. Everyone was a friend, because judgements were naturally absent from the equation.
It took my job, and the work I did for a global beauty brand to bring me face-to-face with the other side of that coin. And teach me how little I knew about a culture I thought I was familiar with.
Working out of Singapore, but designing for the Filipino market, my idea of a successful campaign was based on the patterns that I had been taught, and the ones I had practiced at work – a formula that had worked just fine in other countries. My partner and I came up with a campaign headline, which was immediately liked by everyone. All we needed now was some good design to wrap it all together.
I went down the tried and tested route of using a striking female face as the main focus of the key visual, convinced that was exactly what a beauty campaign needed. I immediately got to work on Shutterstock, using search phrases like ‘beautiful Asian female with naturally glowing skin‘, mixing in other keywords like ‘relatable’, ‘candid’, and a few more in the same ballpark.
The result was a perfectly good-looking key visual. Modern, classy and on-brand for a global beauty campaign. Everything described beautifully through an impactful headline, and a face that brought it to life.
The result couldn’t have been more wrong.
When we tested the key visual for the Filipino market, we realised the campaign headline lost all impact on translation. The wit, the brevity, the wordplay – all diluted when translated in the language it should’ve been written in in the first place.
And the face I found on Shutterstock? I was told it was Korean, not Filipino.
I didn’t just fail once. I failed thrice. Each failure based on a different kind of assumption – what classifies as regional individual characteristics, what words mean within the context of a language, and what beauty means to a culture. Three failures – each one invisible, till it wasn’t.
Perhaps the real irony in the entire process was that my failures didn’t come out of inexperience. In fact, it was quite the contrary. My experience dictated my choices, and fueled my confidence. I was just experienced in the wrong context, and that is a more dangerous kind of blind spot than ignorance.
Because experience, unlike ignorance, is seldom questioned.
What followed was a complete shift in my approach, and produced some of the best work of my career. All because I stopped conducting dry research in a room with fellow creatives, and started hanging out with local people, eating their food, listening to their jokes and bonding over the one common universal language of the world – evening drinks.
It taught me more than any book or YouTube tutorial could about cultural colloquialisms, fears, and insecurities. Most of all, it taught me that true insight lives in the patterns that are invisible, buried deep under the surface. The ones that demand we relinquish control and dive in deep with both feet.
Let me illustrate that by unpacking one such pattern. Spray tan is to UK what fairness cream is to India, and what brightening serums are to Singapore. That’s three different relationships with the exact same aspiration. That’s cultural nuance that can’t be observed from a meeting room. It needs you on the streets, amongst the noise, observing your audience, their insecurities and their desires.
I like to think of this as being on the chaos ladder, and it showed me how India operates at a ten, Britain somewhere around the five-mark, and Singapore, quietly comfortable at a one.
And nowhere was that ladder more visible than in the boardroom.
Client meetings are chatty, brash, and strangely informal in India. The client feels they know the solution before you’ve even heard the entire problem. The cacophony of a hundred opinions somehow ending in some truly brilliant pieces of work.
It’s business-like in Britain. We cross all the Ts and dot the Is. We remember our niceties, and always talk about the weather, or the weekend. And then you take the client out for dinner and find them on top of a table, dancing and screaming to ‘Sweet Caroline’. The shift is like night and day, and somehow it all still works like business as usual the next morning.
Singapore, at the complete other end of the spectrum, is quiet and respectful. The boardrooms are so well-behaved that even a single voice sounds like a tolling bell. And the opinions come in so quietly they feel like suggestions.
I have to acknowledge that these are personal observations from a specific time, and not me painting cultures using broad strokes. A lot would’ve changed, and I certainly am not laying down cultural laws. But these were my experiences, and they changed how I think, and how I design.
Most importantly, they made me realise that my biggest failures came from making assumptions about cultural nuances, whilst my biggest successes came from living them. They taught me that the same problem can have different solutions, based purely on imaginary lines drawn on a map. And that sometimes, the problem doesn’t even need a solution at all, because you’re seeing it all from the wrong perspective.
Chapter 2: Research Through Senses
Some things can’t be researched into existence. You can read every brief, study every market report, and still miss the thing that matters most – because it can’t be described in words. It needs to be experienced.
The mad cacophony of cars and cows against the thumping beats of a Bollywood song coming out of a ramshackle roadside shack cannot be assumed. Realising you came to the pub for a quick one with the work lot but you’re now buying the fifth round cannot be assumed. Eating fragrant chicken rice after work with your colleagues and then sharing a taxi back home whilst smelling the salty Singapore air cannot be assumed. It needs to be experienced.
The best cultural research isn’t a report – it’s a conversation with someone who does it on the daily. And if you can’t physically live a culture, borrow it from someone who does. Humans have always learnt the most from talking to other humans.
And whilst not everyone has the luxury to fly to a different country every time their audience changes, we shouldn’t forget that the world is smaller today than it ever was. ICQ and AOL allowed us to make friends all over the world twenty years ago. The same access exists today if the willingness does. All it needs is loose shoulders and an open mind, and being comfortable with getting things wrong.
My Filipino campaign wasn’t a catastrophe. It was an education. The designer who never makes a cultural mistake is the designer who never leaves their own frame of reference. That’s a designer who never grows out of their own shadow.
Cultural understanding isn’t a deliverable. It’s a responsibility. Because assumptions made on a culture don’t just dilute the brief. They disrespect an entire people.
The wrap-up
The assumptions I made about culture happened despite my best intentions. But they never happened again.
Can we rely on a similar realisation when AI models are given the same task, across hundreds of cultures and millions of briefs? The models generating design outputs, personas, and research today are trained predominantly on Western data. They carry assumptions about what users look like, how they behave, what they want – built around a specific cultural origin with no mechanism for knowing what they’re missing.
AI can be taught to speak like a culture. It cannot think like one. The sights, the sounds, the smell of a culture – the salty Singapore air, the Bollywood bangers, the dusty lamps at the local pub – none of that can be documented into a model. Designing for people separated by borders is a human responsibility, not just a professional one.
And every time we assume rather than understand, we fail. Not just the brief, but the person the brief was meant to serve.