A multicultural society is a richness. And design can help.
What do you imagine as a multicultural society? You might think of places like New York, London or Paris. In cities like those, immigrants have integrated their cultures with their new homes and built diverse cultural communities. People from different backgrounds have exchanged their knowledge and experience to invent new values or solutions. It has bred numerous creative restaurants, music and art scenes in decades.
One great example is an Israeli-English chef, Yotam Ottolenghi and his restaurants in London. He was born and raised in Jerusalem, and as of Italian-Jewish descent, often spent his childhood summers in Italy. He moved to London to study French cooking and served as a pastry chef at three restaurants in London. This vibrant cultural mix was vital for the success of his first deli in Notting Hill. It quickly gained a cult for its inventive dishes full of vegetables and unconventional flavour combinations, for instance introducing Middle Eastern ingredients such as za’atar, and pomegranate molasses. The presentation of its food in the window also played an essential part in their achievement. Its delightful and colourful food display was unusual for British restaurants. (Ottolenghi remembers that it was mistaken for a florist at the beginning). But, from his experience in the city’s food scene, he knew that it would attract the hip locals in West London.
Julie Mehretu is another example of people who take creative energy from cross-cultural environments. Mehretu is an Ethiopian-born American artist based in New York, best known for her large-scale paintings. Her work depicts complex imaginary ‘landscapes’ whose layering of images, marks and mediums mediate time, space, place, and history. The socio-political iterations of her multicultural life have influenced her visual exploration. “The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies — mapping, charting, and architecture — to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment,” she explains about her work. What makes her work engaging is the use of multi-cultural reference. She actively utilises scattered elements, such as lettering of different languages, corporate logos, flags of the world and architectural traces of buildings. The gestural paintings with multiple perspectives seem to represent the accumulation of urban changes, unwinding the personal experience between cultures.
Why Multicultural Society is Challenging
However, it is challenging to create an environment for diverse communities to get inspired by each other. It is human nature to fear and resist against something unknown and different from you. It could cause misunderstanding or misconception of other cultures and make integration much harder.
Sushi encountered such resistance when it first arrived in the US in the early 1900s, following Japanese immigration. As American didn’t welcome the idea of eating raw fish, it took a while for sushi to became popular by the late 1960s. To help Americans get used to the concept of sushi, many restaurants began experimenting with new taste combinations for sushi rolls. And the now-common California Roll was created, which is an inside-out “maki” roll with cucumber, crab meat, avocado and mayonnaise with white rice.
This flavour combination instantly attracted US customers. Since the crab meat was already cooked, they didn’t have to worry about eating raw fish. The inside-out feature was invented for the American customers who tended to peel off the nori seaweed when it wrapped the roll on the outside. And after they got used to the idea, American people were able to try out more traditional sashimi and nigiri dishes.
Why and How Design Can Help
What do Ottolenghi, Mehretu and Sushi in America have in common? Key to their success was to find a sweet spot between their original culture and the local one. Through mediating and compromising between different cultures, they have created new values. This is where design can help.
Everybody’s judgement on what is good and what is right relies on the familiar experience. To design means to suggest how people feel about a thing in a certain way. You can use design to interpret an unknown idea of one culture in a more common form for the targeted culture with suitable colours, styles or languages in context. So that they would understand and accept it more easily.
Then, how can design be used to help present ideas across cultures? Let me talk about some of my projects as an example.
For Tonkotsu, a ramen restaurant brand in London, the challenge was to create an identity that represented a unique, modern ramen experience that is built on the coming together of Japan and London. To visualise the cultural hybrid concept, I created the brand assets with a blend of geometric shapes as the Western aesthetic, and handmade textures reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy. The idea was also represented by a fresh colour palette that combines modern fluorescent colours with traditional indigo blue common in ramen store-fronts in Japan. The geometric style with the vivid colours fit in the Londoner’s contemporary food scene. At the same time, the organic texture and authentic colours suggest the customers Tonkotsu’s dedication to the Japanese culture.
An art installation/accommodation, Lemon Hotel started as part of Setouchi Triennale. It is an international art festival held on several islands in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan, inviting artists from both Japan and overseas. The concept of Lemon Hotel is to celebrate the pure and sour taste of distant memories. As Japanese people associate the taste of lemon with bittersweet memories, the connection between the theme of lemon and the idea of evoking sentimental thoughts makes sense in Japan. The installation, however, needed a symbol that struck a chord with both national and international visitors. Inspired by English lettering of vintage lemonade labels, I designed bilingual typography whose Japanese scripts are made to look like the Western cursive form. The typography hints to the idea of ‘nostalgia’ to both audiences, while the lettering of the two languages visually harmonises as one symbol.
Encouraging interactions between different cultures, a diverse and multicultural society can bring creative solutions or new values to life. However, it is challenging to inspire other cultures with an idea unknown to them. Design is a powerful tool for communicating an idea from one culture to another. It helps to build a new shared language that makes the idea appealing to a destination culture, without losing the initial spirit.
