Josh Egesi on his designs and evolving culture: 'Design is a form of cultural documentation'

'Design for me as a practice started recently, but the need to solve problems started a long time ago,' shares Josh Egesi, who founded his interdisciplinary design studio Ike in Lagos in 2021, at the height of pandemic. Since then, Egesi’s studio has enjoyed the kind of speedy ascent that many design practitioners can only dream of.

His Ikenna tripod fan became something of a cult collectable and tropical home essential for the aesthetically minded in Nigeria, and global acclaim has come via a seminal debut at Milan Design Week 2024, where his Ayo bench was part of Wallpaper’s Class of ’24 exhibition at Triennale. However, plaudits aside, it is delivering solutions from a project, product and community level that underpin Egesi’s design credo.

Josh Egesi's influential designs

Origin stories often provide clues to a designer’s future trajectory and for Egesi (who holds a Diploma in Industrial Design from Federal Polytechnic in Auchi Edo State, and a BA in Fine and Applied Art from the University of Benin), an insatiable passion for a plethora of subjects coupled by an innate inquisitiveness have been the roots. 

'I was a curious child, one of the things I created was a fan because I felt like this would be a cool idea and it made a lot of sense that we can walk around with handheld fan.' It was a prescient idea, as handheld fans are now ubiquitous across Africa, and Egesi himself burst onto the scene with a fan, but it is his commitment to having a holistic understanding of design that marks him out as an important new voice. 'I am interested in how humans function and I am constantly asking questions and trying to understand how I can use my knowledge to enhance something else. I have worked as a graphic artist, and I even interned with an electrical engineer at one point.'

Egesi is known for creating pieces that articulate contemporary Africa’s mores, noting; 'I think design, just like music, is a form of cultural documentation.' The Ikeoku floor lamp and the Ayo Bench are compelling expositions of this. Whilst the lamp is a love letter to the kerosene lanterns that are used in urban centres and rural locations in Africa, the bench delves into the importance of play (Ayo is a traditional game that has variants across Nigeria), how colours have strong spiritual associations, and what leisure might look like in the here and now. 

'The Ayo game is one side and the magazine holder on the other side because I am transcultural to an extent, and I made the bench red to prompt deep conversations. A lot of people associate red with juju in Nigeria, but red is also the dominant colour of Benin,' where Egesi studied. It is these ambiguities that Egesi chooses to continue to explore in his work.

Egesi’s practice is also reflective of the material realities for designers living and working in Nigeria. Of the fewer material choices in comparison to peers residing in the Global North he explains, 'I really wouldn’t call it a limitation, we just have a different material culture, and we need to find a way to innovate.' He often returns to wood explaining, 'I am trying to educate people about our material culture and how we need to evolve it. Wood is easy to work with, easily accessible, malleable and thus easy to forge, and can take on any form. It can be used to replace plastic essentially, so it works for me.' The Yabasi table lamp, another commercial success for the studio, is testimony to this.

Egesi’s elegy to collective memory comes to the fore in many of his pieces; 'I design pieces that I think resonate with people that have shared similar experiences to me,' he says. However, Ike is not a nostalgia project. Whilst the past might gently be alluded to, Egesi notes: 'One of my core values is supporting cultural evolution. I think a lot of the time in Africa we tend to have some sort of reverence for our culture. Forgetting that this culture was a way of life for our ancestors and if they were alive now, it would have changed.'

Embracing this call, Egesi launched Sapele, a surfing brand that is centred on the surf culture found in Tarkwa Bay and acts as a social enterprise and design incubator. 'We basically created a surfboard from ocean waste. We used wood locally sourced and then we used Styrofoam collected from the seaside and made our first prototype.' 

Whilst Egesi observes that 'industrial design is capital intensive as a practice', a challenge that has affected the ecosystem in Africa, he is ultimately optimistic about his future contributions both regionally and globally. 'I want to be that connecting bridge for our designs, and collaborations would be amazing.' Given his first three years of operations, there is certainly more to come from this dynamic and distinct voice.

@josh_egesi