The culture was part of the interface
When good design still felt slightly foreign
There was a time when I believed good design was mostly universal.
If the hierarchy was clear, the interface was usable, and the visuals felt polished, I assumed the work would travel well. Good work was good work. At least that was how I used to think about it.
Then I began working more closely with clients in Norway.
On paper, the work made sense. The layouts were clean. The flows were thoughtful. The decisions were not careless. And yet, every now and then, I could feel a small distance between what I had made and how naturally it landed for them. Nothing was obviously wrong. The work was functional. But it did not always feel fully native to the people it was meant for.
That gap stayed with me.
It made me realize that design can be correct and still feel slightly out of place.
A book I bought for someone else changed the way I saw everything
The shift began in a very ordinary moment.
I had picked up a book about Norway from a second-hand bookshop, originally without much intention beyond buying something interesting. It sat around for a while, mostly ignored. Then one day I opened it and started reading.
What began as casual curiosity slowly turned into something much more useful.
As I read more, I stopped seeing Norway as just a place my clients happened to be from. I started noticing a visual and cultural logic that ran through everything — the landscapes, the architecture, the colors, the objects, the restraint, the quiet confidence. There was a relationship between environment and expression that felt deeper than style.
And once I noticed it, I could not unsee it.
I was no longer just designing for a market.
I was designing for a culture.
I started seeing the country inside the design
After that, I began paying closer attention.
I looked at how local brands communicated. I studied the work of designers and studios from that part of the world. I paid attention to interiors, public spaces, typography, color use, even the way simplicity showed up in everyday objects. What stood out to me was not only that the work looked minimal. It was that the minimalism felt lived-in, not decorative.
There was restraint, but not emptiness.
Clarity, but not coldness.
Space, but not detachment.
I also began noticing how deeply nature seemed to sit inside the visual language. Certain colors felt less like branding choices and more like something absorbed over time — from landscapes, weather, materials, national identity, and the rhythm of life around them. Even when the work was contemporary, it still seemed connected to something older and more grounded.
That changed the way I interpreted design decisions.
What I had once seen as aesthetic preference started looking more like cultural memory.
I stopped designing from my own default taste
That realization forced me to confront something uncomfortable: I had been assuming my own design instincts were neutral.
They were not.
They were shaped by my own references, my own environment, my own visual habits. And the more I worked across cultures, the more I understood that what feels intuitive, warm, premium, trustworthy, or beautifully simple is never completely universal.
So I changed the way I approached the work.
Instead of starting with what looked right to me, I began asking what would feel natural to them. What kind of visual rhythm are they already used to? How much is too much? What feels elegant in this context, and what feels performative? What kind of clarity do they trust?
Those questions made my work better.
I became less interested in adding and more interested in removing. Less focused on surface-level expression and more focused on the tone beneath it. White space started carrying more meaning. Color became less about decoration and more about familiarity. Simplicity stopped being a trend and became a form of respect.
The work grew quieter.
But it also became stronger.
What changed in the way I design
The biggest shift was not visual. It was emotional.
Before that, I often treated users as if they arrived only with functional needs. Complete the task. Understand the flow. Use the product. But people do not arrive empty. They bring expectations shaped by their surroundings, their habits, the products they trust, the aesthetics they have grown up with, and the values their culture has quietly taught them to recognize.
Once I understood that, design became less abstract.
Understandability was no longer just about labels and layout. It was also about cultural familiarity. Discoverability was not only about making features visible. It was about making the experience feel aligned with how people already see and interpret the world around them.
That gave me a deeper kind of empathy.
Not just empathy for what users need to do, but for the world that shaped how they expect things to work.
What I believe now
Now, I no longer think of design as something that happens in a vacuum.
Every interface enters a context.
Every product meets a culture.
Every visual decision speaks to a history, whether we acknowledge it or not.
That does not mean I try to imitate a region or reduce people to a design stereotype. It means I take cultural context seriously enough to study it. To respect it. To understand what already feels familiar, meaningful, and trustworthy before I start deciding what the work should become.
Because the truth is, I could not fully design for those clients until I understood something deeper than the brief.
I had to understand the world behind it.
And that has stayed with me ever since.
The best design is not only usable or beautiful.
It feels like it belongs.
