Experiential Design
Homecoming is the cultural exchange festival founded by Grace Ladoja MBE, running in Lagos since 2017 and held annually over the Easter weekend. The 2022 edition ran from 15 to 18 April across music, fashion, art, and sport, with partners including Kuda, TikTok, Jameson, and MTV Base.
A festival built on cultural credibility cannot be branded like a corporate event. The audience is the most design-literate crowd in Lagos and reads a generic build instantly. There were also multiple partner brands across four days, all needing presence in an environment where obvious sponsor signage would have undercut the thing the festival sells.
Partner presence was built into the environment rather than applied to it, taking the form of structures people used, queued at and photographed themselves in front of, so the brands earned their visibility by being useful rather than by being large. Materials looked raw and constructed instead of printed and slick, matching a crowd that treats polish with suspicion. Every built element was designed with the camera in mind first, on the working assumption that the festival's real footprint is not the site but the posts leaving it.
Four days of cultural programming staged in an environment that held its own with the audience it was built for.
