10/10/2025
💭 This October 12, we want to pause and reflect… 🇦🇷 Español en comentarios ⬇️
… on our continent, and on what we can learn, as designers, from those who have inhabited it for thousands of years.
🌎 Aleut, Anishinaabe, Apache, Araucano, Asháninka, Achuar, Aztec, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chibcha, Chickasaw, Chippewa, Chiriguano, Choctaw, Chorote, Cuna, Diaguita, Guaraní, Huarpe, Huaorani, Aymara, Inca, Inuit, Karajá, Kaxinawá, Kayapó, Krenak, Mapuche, Maya, Mixtec, Mohawk, Navajo, Ojibwa, Ona, Onondaga, Piaroa, Quechua, Qom, Sioux, Tehuelche, Terena, Ticuna, Toba, Toltec, Tupinambá, Wichí, Xavante, Xinga, Yámana, Yanomami, Zapoteca — all of them have something to teach us.
Native peoples remind us that there are many possible — and equally valid — ways of living, designing, and knowing.
🫂 As Arturo Escobar writes in *Design for the Pluriverse* (2018), the future of design is not about “integrating” ancestral knowledge into modern design, but about learning with Native peoples, not about them.
They teach us that every action transforms the web of life. That’s why designing is not only about intervening or solving problems — it’s about caring, listening, and weaving connections among people, territories, and more-than-human beings.
✨ Escobar invites us to understand design as a relational practice, one rooted in communality, care, connection, and shared life— a way of thinking and creating that begins with respect for the diversity of ways of life and seeks to sustain the worlds that already exist across our territories.
