Design often feels like something distant, something that happens in studios or boardrooms. But what if design has always been closer than we think. What if it lives in the ordinary gestures that sustain life. In my recent talk, “Land, Story and Design: Cultural Geographies of Care and Decolonisation,” I explored how design is already present in the ways communities live, trade, and care for each other. From the women in coastal Ghana balancing bowls of rice as they sing through the market, to the fishermen reading the sea before dawn, to elders praying under ancient trees, these moments are not separate from design. They are design. They show how people shape the world with care, memory, and shared responsibility.
To decolonise design is to understand that it does not begin with invention but with attention. It begins with recognising the wisdom that exists in everyday life, in community rhythms, in practices of repair and maintenance. These are the quiet acts that keep the world turning. The lecture, presented as part of the Heo/Geo Lecture Series by the University of the Philippines Diliman and the Philippine Geographical Society, was an invitation to rethink what design really means. It asked how we might build a language of design that honours the intelligence already present in the markets, rivers, and rituals that hold communities together.
Design, at its best, is a form of care. It is a way of remembering and of making life possible again and again.
Read “Land, Story and Design: Cultural Geographies of Care and Decolonisation” here:
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