At Design Shanghai 2024, one of Asia's leading design fairs and an important annual platform for dialogue between Eastern and Western design cultures, we joined the East meets East panel discussion as part of The New Universal Language of Design programme. The conversation explored how craft serves as a bridge between design traditions that are often discussed as if they exist in opposition to each other. We spoke about our own experience working at the intersection of Arab, Japanese, and European design influences, and what it means to build a design language that is rooted in one culture but speaks beyond it.