Where Culture Becomes Form: Situated Cultural Translation in Intercultural Design

Intercultural design requires designers to work with culturally situated meanings that may change as they are interpreted and materialized through visual form. Yet cultural meaning is often examined through completed artifacts, leaving the intermediate transformations through which cultural references become design material less visible. This study investigates these transformations through a qualitative analysis of eight group-based mascot design projects developed by 27 final-year Graphic Design students in Saudi Arabia for Expo 2030 Riyadh. Cultural mapping, sketches, visual iterations, intermediate proposals, and final outcomes were examined to trace relationships between cultural reference, formal development, and anticipated interpretation. The findings show that cultural references were not simply transferred into visual form but transformed through iterative design decisions, becoming redistributed across structure, surface, gesture, behavior, and relationships between characters. The study proposes situated cultural translation to describe the recursive process through which culturally embedded references are interpreted, negotiated, and materially transformed through designing. The framework provides design researchers and practitioners with an analytical vocabulary for examining how cultural meaning changes through making, supporting more critically informed approaches to intercultural design without assuming universal or controllable interpretation.