Full-time & contract roles
Senior product design, UX, HCD and design-lead roles. Tokyo, remote, or worth relocating for.
Joseph Emmanuel
I'm Joseph, a Nigerian product designer living in Tokyo. I've been designing for 14 years, since the day I opened Microsoft Paint in 2012 and refused to close it.
These days the canvas is bigger. I work on systems with real operational weight: enterprise platforms, legacy tools that people depend on, public services, regulated workflows and the AI products now arriving inside all of them. Most of them aren't failing because the technology can't do the job. They fail because the experience around it is hard to understand, hard to adopt and hard to run. That gap is my work.
I studied Applied Geophysics, which taught me to find signal in messy data. I'm doing an MBA at Lakeland University Japan, which keeps my design tied to how organisations actually make decisions. In between, I've led design for a seven-country social protection platform, a university research portal and a sports-tech startup where I was CTO and Head of Design.
I also build. Haske, a voice-ordering product for Nigerian restaurants, went from idea to live in five days. This site is hand-coded too. Some of my client work runs through Jemirae, the studio I founded, which brings together talent across Japan and Africa.
Outside of work I speak, from CIC Tokyo to the auditorium at FUTA where I studied, and I mentor younger designers. On TikTok I post short lessons on leadership, purpose, design and AI. In 2026 I wrote my first book, The Sovereign Blueprint (free to read and download), for students in Akure and across Nigeria who want a global career without waiting for permission. I'm also part of the School of Mentors community, and I keep getting lost in Tokyo on purpose.
Portrait above by Mojuba Visuals.
Senior product design, UX, HCD and design-lead roles. Tokyo, remote, or worth relocating for.
Enterprise and legacy modernisation, GovTech and digital public services, design systems, human-centred AI.
Design, AI, focus, personal authority and building across borders. Conferences, universities and teams.
English, fluent. Japanese, learning every day.