The idea came from watching a Korean drama. There is a scene where two characters bow to each other, and it raised the question of whether bowing reads the same way to an outsider as it does to someone who grew up inside the culture.
That thread pulled on others. Bowing in Japan signals respect, hierarchy, and sometimes apology depending on angle and duration, and similarly in Korea. In most Western contexts, the same movement reads as theatrical, even though the physical action is identical.
That was the seed for the project. Like The Journey of Rice, the format reference was pudding.cool. The result is eight gesture types mapped across countries, including head nods, beckoning, pointing, eye contact, thumbs up, greetings, self-reference, and stop. For each one, the regional meaning is specific and sometimes directly contradictory. Bulgaria inverts the head nod entirely. A palm-up beckon is offensive in the Philippines. Japan prefers palm-down. In Nigeria, pointing one finger at an adult is rude.
The project is built in React and splits into two distinct modes. An essay section builds the argument with concrete examples. After that, GestureExplorer hands control to the reader, letting them select a gesture and explore regional meanings across a WorldMap. Splitting the modes was a deliberate choice. A single scrolling experience would have undermined the argument the essay needed to make.
The WorldMap is pure SVG, no mapping library. Continent paths are hand-drawn polygons. Country positions are calculated from latitude and longitude using a Mercator-like projection written in about five lines of math. The shapes look like blobs because they are, which is the honest result of hand-drawing continent outlines rather than using Natural Earth data or GeoJSON. We considered Leaflet. We considered dropping the landmass entirely and showing only dots. The map needed to show geography, so the blobs stayed. Switching to proper geographic data is still on the list.
The research was the most enjoyable part of the build. There is a whole academic field, kinesics, dedicated to exactly this. Ekman, Friesen, Kendon, Morris. The references are in the footnotes of the project if you want to go further. Or watch a kdrama. Honestly faster.