Who designed Egusi Soup? — A Design Case Study
Yea, who made the first Egusi soup.
What was the goal?
What problem were they trying to solve?
Did they follow a design process?
Were there assumptions?
Did they carry out research?
What was the outcome?
I have been thinking about these questions since I left ‘Design Central with Dapo Akintunde’, an event by Semicolon Africa in Lagos. Dapo is an Industrial Designer and a Chartered Architect with a lot of interest in African ingenuity and craft. I figured, like me, that he wants Africa, particularly Nigeria on the World Design Map, if there’s a thing like that.
At the event, Dapo asked the same rhetorical question
Who designed Egusi soup?
I am asking you too
But don’t answer yet. I might have the answers. Just might. Not so sure
I’ve put together a case study about my ‘findings’
The Project Brief
Egusi is a West African indigenous soup eaten by almost every Nigerian, except my sister.
Personally, I like it with fufu.
Are you interested in how it is prepared? Search ‘Egusi soup’ on Google.com. I have no intention of doing that for you 🥱
Design is what makes a product appeal, to cause something to function.
Egusi is appealing, and it functions, in the belly.
Design has remained a largely white profession, with African designers still vastly underrepresented. This may be due to how it’s been taught, with purported origins in Ancient Greece and the rest of the world. African design has seemed to be altogether absent — like it never existed, like design never happened here.
If you look up the history of Design right now, you’ll find information on how the Ancient Greeks applied ergonomic principles in designing their tools or the Chinese and their chi concept of space and whatnots…
And there are only 15 tags on African design here on medium.com, this might make it the 16th.
Of course, these ancient, talented and skilled ancestor-artists followed some kind of process while creating their stuff. Why is it different to find something similar about Africa?
I mean, was there no process that African creators followed?
Was nothing built?
Where did we lose it?
How can we get it back?
…Meanwhile, cooking Egusi soup is a skilled craft done through apt precision and timing, art, science backed by thorough design decisions, as we’ll see below.
The Design Process
Problem Statement
There was hunger in the land…
First, they Empathised
How did they know and understand who the users were?
Why did they want to eat and when?
How easy was eating the egusi like, given the circumstances, they could be out weeding in the farms, or by the river fishing?
And then, I figured, early African designers understood empathy. They knew who they were designing for. They understood use cases and personas. This is why most African designs have their roots in spiritualism. Customs and traditions tied their design pieces. The community enjoys them.
The consumption process of several international cuisines gets confusing sometimes and can be frustrating. They don’t really empathise with who eats their food. Sushi, slippery pasta, obstinate oyster, awhole artichokes, all nearly impossible to eat. Some have a specific way to eat, and you get frustrated learning that — bad UX.
You indulge in a messy, ugly battle laced with frustrations, because you want to eat. It can be so difficult that we push pasta to the edge of the plate and shovel it into our mouth.
African foods are more intuitive and user friendly.
Take the Egusi and fufu. Only seeing it, you begin to salivate. You can eat it instantly, anyhow it’s presented to you. You can use a fork, spoon, and even your hands. Every designer should take a cue from this, it’s good UX.
African designs simply made common sense.
Now,
Define Stage
Research is done, the users are hungry people, basically.
But then,
Taking a complex concept like spiritualism and condensing it into a product without losing the intent, is something that should wow us.
Like the highly reverenced Ikenga of the Igbos of Nigeria, a beautifully carved piece of wood, believed to bring wealth, fortune and protection to its owners. It is one of the most powerful symbols of the Igbo people and the most common cultural artifact. How this little piece of artifact is emotionally and spiritually connected to the owners is a feat modern designers are aiming to achieve.
UX just might have started in Africa.
And like Chimamanda Adichie said some time ago,
Much of African history lives in art and our art lives in history. Our art tells the African story. Some are literal in their storytelling. Others tell it rather beautifully, like the Benin ornamental pieces and its Great Wall.
That’s all good design.
Our process was concerned with raw form, spiritual beings, our ancestors, with references to the variety of colours from wildlife, and earthly hues.
They were able to translate reality into more abstract and expressive forms and create amazing patterns, as seen in our fabrics, sculptures and paintings.
Also, ancient and traditional Igbo made moves to inclusion with their age-grade system of governance. Some steps to accessibility was achieved with the Nsibidi writing system of the Ibibio people. Touché, Inclusion and Accessibility is a rave among modern designers.
Their Ideation Process
Then, they combine the ingredients in a lot of different ways, trying new ways each time, figuring better ways and improving the overall experience in the end. The Egusi soup, don’t forget. This process simulates an iterative process or better still, a design charet that involves generating as many ideas as possible.
Even the layouts of the huts they lived in emphasized an understanding of Information Architecture and proper layouts.
The walls of Benin City as been described as the world’s largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era. The Old Benin city was one of the first cities to have a semblance of street lighting with huge metal lamps, many feet high, built and placed around the city.
With its mathematical layout, and earthworks, longer than the Great Wall of China, old Benin City was one of the best planned cities in the world. C’mon, they must have had a robust design team, made of Information Architects, UX Designers, Content Strategists, etc. with deadlines to meet, probably.
The golden ratio, which has been a key tenet of modernist design, may have origins in Africa.
Heard of it?
the Golden spiral?
Fibonacci series?
Ring no bells?
Well, go find out.
Certain you’ll see tons of articles about this. And nothing relating it to Africa, from where it might have originated from.
But yet, our designs were aesthetically pleasing, that most of the art pieces were taken and currently scattered abroad all over the world. The children of the designers that created those pieces were deprived of what they could have known about the African Design Process. How those pieces were created, and what problem they were solving.
You learnt the golden rectangle originated from the ancient Greeks, yea?
Now,
Learn
Our African design process tends to focus on bottom-up growth and organic, fractal forms. They started with something large and then divided it into smaller versions of itself, so that the subdivisions are embedded in the original shape. What emerges is a ‘self-similar’ pattern, because the whole can be found in the parts.
Look at this 👇🏾
I could give you tons of examples how this was done, just like in our Benin Kingdom or the palace of the chief in Logone-Birni, Cameron.
But, I want to be biased here. I’m focusing on Nigeria.
Nigeria’s past military dictators understood this principle when they were creating new states in Nigeria. Notice the pattern, from the very large golden rectangle of Niger to the smallest one in Lagos. Consequently, there are talks to continue the Golden Spiral of Nigerian states by creating more smaller ones. Amazing, right
We were told, that Africa had no form of writing or system of knowledge and African design was absent. But then, everyone is wowed by the pyramids in Egypt, or the Great Benin Kingdom and the savoury dishes by the Ibibio people 🤭
Fibonacci, the Italian mathematician and Golden rectangle ‘crooner’ studied mathematics in Africa. He specifically travelled to North Africa to learn mathematics.
Have no one thought about this, who did he learn from?
Who taught him. Who were they?
Scholars I envisaged. African scholars. African designers.
It is not unreasonable to say that Fibonacci took the sequence from North Africa. Perhaps, he was taught by an African, maybe a Nigerian, possibly an Ibibio man, maybe an ancestor of my father.
Brainstorming and Collaboration-an important part of the African Design Process
Beyond cooking as a soup, the egusi seeds were also eaten as a snack. One Ghanian recalled ‘Whenever a group of men were standing around talking, their hands were usually busy dehulling egusi seeds.”
Another Cameroonian said ‘On many an evening or hot afternoon in farming villages, women sitting with their families will be deftly and rapidly shelling the seeds ready for sale or home cooking’
There you have it.
Collaboration, an essential part of the modern Design Process, was present among early African designers. They didn’t work in isolation, they designed together, brainstormed together, bounced ideas off each other, built together, and beat deadlines together.
Prototyping
Actually, I found nothing on Prototyping Egusi soup.
But I’m certain they made the soup without any low fidelity.
They went straight to the HiFi design, garnishing the soup with all kinds of assorted bushmeat, making it colourful with fresh dark green vegetables and rich red palm oil.
Some ingredients were processed in parts and separately, before combining to form the larger High Fidelity Egusi soup, just like we create style guides, patterns and components in Figma.
Moreover…
The use of the Fibonacci sequence is found in several African layouts, like the way African villages grow: starting with a sacred altar, before expanding into larger spaces that spiral outward. What do you say about Atomic Design again?
Take a look at the Nigerian map.
User Testing
Well, they ate the food.
What better way to test a product 😋
That’s it.
I imagine you must have concluded I like Egusi soup. I don’t, not so much. Its purpose was this article, misión cumplida.
I really do not know why I wrote this.
But I’m certain that ‘We know better where we go when we know where we are coming from’
It’ll be amazing to see African designers bring their culture into something new. And create a new, different, and unique way of thinking design. Maybe inspired by how it was done by their ancestors, not just by how Norman Nielsen told us to.
Maybe some have started infusing the African taste into modern design. Like David Egorp, who is currently working as a Product Designer at Nkọwa okwu, a platform that’s leveraging technology to redefine how the Igbo language is learned and preserved by connecting the language to anyone around the world.
What do you think?
I know you took your time to read
I took my time too. After much research and analysis, climbed the hills and mountains, looked under rocks, swarm the ocean, went to Heaven and back.
Still,
I didn’t find the person ‘Who designed the egusi soup.
But you get the gist. Don’t you?
If you don’t get it, forget about it
Now, I leave the question to you.
Who invented the Egusi soup?
