Culture Is an Interface

Before I knew what an interface was, I knew how to read a room.

A living room in Mumbai. Early morning humidity. The television on, no one really watching. Adults speaking in fragments, meaning suspended between sentences. You learned quickly that silence wasn’t empty. A pause could be a warning. A sigh could end a conversation. Laughter had a precise volume - too loud and it became inappropriate, too quiet and it signalled discomfort.

This was my first interface.

We usually talk about culture as expression - food, festivals, language, aesthetics. But culture also governs interaction. It decides what feels natural to say, what must be carefully softened, what should never be said at all. It teaches you where the invisible buttons are, and which ones you should never press.

Designers call this an interface: a system that translates intention into action. Long before we touch screens, culture trains us in interaction design. It teaches us how to ask for help, how to show disagreement, how to take up space or how to disappear gracefully.

When I moved countries, the interface changed.

In Italy, conversation lived on the surface, shaped by motion and tone, with fewer layers of silence beneath it. Emotions surfaced faster. Disagreement could be expressive without being final. Compared to the layered subtext of home, this felt like a flatter system - fewer hidden rules, more visible cues. It was liberating, and unsettling.

My body adapted before my language did. I interrupted more. I stood differently. I learned that silence could mean thinking rather than disapproval. These weren’t conscious decisions; they were quiet updates, applied over time.

Culture always optimises for something. Some cultures optimise for harmony. Others for speed or expression. Some are shaped by survival, others by abundance. None are neutral.

This is why “good design” is never universal. Ease is relative. What feels intuitive to one person can feel hostile to another. The same is true of culture. Warmth can feel invasive. Respect can feel like erasure. Safety can feel like suffocation.

Growing up, politeness felt like compression. You made yourself smaller to keep the system stable. Desire, anger, ambition - these were advanced settings, unlocked only after trust had been earned, often late, sometimes never. This wasn’t cruelty. It was a design shaped by history, by precarity, by collective memory.

Colonialism and migration don’t just change where people live; they rewire how people interact. They teach communities to prioritise safety over expression, caution over experimentation. They embed delay into communication. You wait. You soften. You read the room again.

Even in a world of supposedly universal digital platforms, these interfaces persist. We bring them into emails, meetings, and comment sections. We over-explain. We apologise preemptively. Or we do the opposite, assume resilience, mistake silence for agreement.

When people struggle in workplaces or institutions, it’s often framed as personal failure. Too passive. Too aggressive. Too sensitive. But what if it’s an interface mismatch? What if someone is fluent in one cultural operating system and being judged by another?

This is why change feels so hard. You can’t simply tell someone to behave differently any more than you can hand them unfamiliar software and expect fluency. Habits linger. Old interfaces leave ghost gestures behind.

And yet, there is something quietly powerful about becoming bilingual in interfaces. Living between cultures reveals that what once felt inevitable was designed. Defaults become visible. Choice enters the picture.

I don’t believe there is a perfect interface - cultural or otherwise. Every system excludes someone. Every design makes trade-offs. But awareness allows us to design with more care: institutions that explain themselves, workplaces that acknowledge different interaction styles, technologies that don’t assume a single way of being human.

Lately, I’ve been less interested in seamlessness and more interested in legibility. Not removing friction, but placing it honestly so people know how to move, where they are, and what’s expected of them.

Culture taught me how to navigate the world before design ever did. Design gave me a way to name what culture had already shaped.

And like any interface, culture can be examined. It can be questioned. And, with care, it can be redesigned - slowly, imperfectly, and together.