The one rule I follow when designing outside my own culture.
Whenever I design for a culture that isn't mine — which is most of the time — I follow one rule: study the people, never just the aesthetics.
It's an easy rule to state and a hard one to keep, because the aesthetics are right there and the people are not. Colours, patterns, motifs — you can gather them in an afternoon and assemble something that photographs beautifully and means nothing. That's the trap. Visual research feels like doing the work. It's actually the part you do instead of the work.
I've designed the Singapore National Day Parade — a country celebrating itself, broadcast to the whole nation — and I'm not Singaporean. There's no shortcut through that. The palette was easy: red and white, fixed, straight off the flag. The genuinely difficult part was how a young, multicultural country holds its sense of itself — proud and still working it out at the same time — which no palette or pattern was ever going to tell me. I had to ask people, and listen past the polite answer.
There's a distinction I find useful: the designer studies form, the artist studies emotion, the innovator studies people. When the thing you're making belongs to a community, only the last one matters. Everything visual is downstream of it.
And it generalises, well beyond stage design. Any time you're making something for people who aren't you — a product, a service, a story — the temptation is to study the surface of their world and skip the harder work of understanding the people in it. The surface is quick and it's safe and it's almost always wrong. What you're actually being trusted with is the people. Study them, and the rest has something true to stand on.
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About Patrick Larsen
Patrick Larsen is an Emmy Award–winning production designer and the founder of Studio Bound, the Singapore studio he established in 2015. Over more than twenty-five years he has designed immersive experiences, themed attractions, live shows, ceremonies and broadcast environments — including the Expo 2020 Dubai ceremonies at the Al Wasl dome, Olympic broadcast environments for the Vancouver 2010 and Rio 2016 Games, Las Vegas residencies (Bob Marley Hope Road at Mandalay Bay, 2025), the opening-ceremony shows for IAAPA Expo since 2024, and a continuing partnership with Taman Safari Indonesia on Varuna, Lila and Marine Safari Bali. He gave a keynote, Spaces That Speak, at World Stage Design Sharjah 2025, and is currently writing his first book, on the craft of creativity. — patricklarsen.studio
