31 Dec Can Susan Sontag inspire inclusivity and UX storytelling?

The problem rarely announces itself as cultural.
It appears as a misunderstanding that no one can quite locate. The interface is clear. The copy is translated. The flow passes usability checks. And yet, users hesitate, disengage, or behave in ways the team did not anticipate.

In post-mortems, the explanation is often vague. “Different markets behave differently.” “They understood the words, but not the intent.” Something was lost, but nothing obvious was broken.

This is where Susan Sontag becomes useful. Not as inspiration, and not as authority, but as a way of naming what UX work often flattens too quickly: interpretation.

Translation is not substitution

In The Translation of Cultures, Susan Sontag argues that translation is never a mechanical transfer of meaning. It is an interpretive act, shaped by what the translator notices, values, and chooses to foreground. Words move, but context does not travel intact.

UX teams make a similar mistake when they treat cultural adaptation as substitution. Text is translated. Icons are adjusted. Colours are swapped to avoid obvious offence. The interface “works”, but the experience does not quite land.

The failure is not linguistic. It is interpretive.

In practice, this shows up when teams assume that clarity equals understanding. A label is readable, therefore it must be meaningful. A flow is consistent, therefore it must feel familiar. When behaviour diverges, the explanation is pushed toward user variability rather than design assumptions.

Research methods can reveal this gap, but only if the team accepts that something more than usability is at stake. Interviews, testing, and localisation frameworks help, but they do not replace the judgement required to interpret what a behaviour means within a specific cultural context. Translation, in Sontag’s sense, demands attention to what resists transfer.

 

Storytelling and the problem of images

Sontag’s On Photography sharpens a different tension. Photographs, she argues, do not simply document reality. They frame it. They select, aestheticise, and distance. What looks like evidence is already an interpretation.

UX storytelling often relies on imagery in a similar way. Journey maps, personas, screenshots, highlight reels. These artefacts are meant to make research visible and persuasive. They succeed at alignment, but sometimes at the cost of accuracy.

Images create confidence quickly. A smiling participant. A clean dashboard. A heatmap glowing in the right places. The team feels they have seen the user. But what is missing is harder to represent: hesitation, doubt, partial understanding, silent friction.

This is where inclusivity quietly fails. Not through exclusion, but through simplification. When visual artefacts stand in for lived complexity, certain experiences are smoothed out. The story becomes coherent, but less true.

Sontag’s warning is not against images themselves, but against mistaking representation for understanding. In UX research and strategy, imagery should expose uncertainty, not conceal it.

 

Inclusivity as an interpretive practice

Inclusivity in UX is often framed as coverage. More languages. More edge cases. More personas. These efforts matter, but they address symptoms rather than the underlying risk.

The deeper issue is whether the team is willing to hold interpretive tension. To accept that users may understand the interface and still not trust it. That behaviour may look successful while confidence is eroding underneath. That what is visible in analytics or visuals may be the least important part of the experience.

Sontag’s work insists on this discomfort. Meaning is never neutral. Images and translations always carry assumptions. The responsibility is not to eliminate interpretation, but to recognise where it is happening and what it obscures.

In UX work, this means treating storytelling not as a delivery tool, but as a site of judgement. What is shown. What is left out. What feels resolved too quickly.

 

What Sontag helps surface

Sontag does not offer a method for inclusive design. She exposes a blind spot.

Translation reminds us that meaning does not travel intact.
Photography reminds us that seeing is never neutral.

Together, they point to a recurring UX failure mode: mistaking coherence for understanding. Inclusivity breaks not when teams lack good intentions, but when they stop interrogating how meaning is constructed, framed, and consumed inside their own artefacts.

UX storytelling becomes more inclusive not by adding more voices, but by resisting premature closure. By leaving room for what does not quite fit. By allowing uncertainty to remain visible long enough to be examined.

 

Footnote: on Susan Sontag and the essays

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was an American essayist, novelist, and cultural critic. The Translation of Cultures (1970) examines translation as an interpretive and cultural act rather than a technical one. On Photography (1977) explores how images shape perception, memory, and belief, questioning the assumption that visual representation equals understanding.