Akewi App
Preserving Yoruba Oríkì Through Digital Storytelling
2026
Explorations
Akewi pairs recordings of Yoruba Oriki with text, so the oral form survives.
introduction
Oriki are Yoruba praise poems. They carry lineage and identity, and they have always moved by voice through family elders, ceremonies and storytelling. Nothing about them was designed to be written down.
Role
Design Lead / Motion design / UX/UI Design / Website / Prototyping
Year
2026
Category
Explorations
project details
Oriki lives in people, not in records, and that chain is thinning.
It moves through elders and ceremony, and when that chain thins there is no version left that still sounds like itself. The digital records that exist strip out tone, pronunciation and the context around a line. Misinterpretation follows, and erasure is permanent.
Solution
Oriki are artifacts, not posts, so I refused to build a content feed.
Listening comes first and contributing is deliberately slow. Typography, spacing and interaction pacing are tuned to slow people down, and the contribution flow leads with context so people add meaningfully rather than mechanically.
result
Oriki becomes searchable and shareable across generations without losing its oral form.
Preservation is a format decision before it is a storage decision. Once audio was the record and text sat underneath it, most of the interface arguments answered themselves. Whether this can support local-language models is decided at capture, not afterwards.
The job was not to store Oriki. It was to keep it speaking.