Design as living dialogue

Insights from the January session with the Bafut Community

On January 10th, 2025, Design Reparations partnered with Princess Abumbi Prudence from the Bafut Community in Cameroon.

The presentation revealed an idea of design that is not just solving practical needs or being a vehicle of creativity, but as an ongoing conversation that transcends time. 

In the Bafut tradition design practices like weaving plant fibers into garments, thatching roofs with local grasses carry deep cultural significance and they become vessels of messages from ancestors while preparing lessons for future generations. 

What emerged most powerfully was the depth of relational thinking embedded in Bafut design choices. Materials are never treated as inert resources but as active participants. As Princess Abumbi explained, "We are here to connect it to ourselves," describing how the community sees their work as part of an unbroken chain of knowledge. The plant fibers used for clothing, the grasses selected for roofing, even the warrior traditions with their stories of humans learning from animals, all reveal a way of thinking rooted in careful observation and respect for more than human teachers.

Designing as a way of passing our meaningful information

This perspective challenges modern design's transactional relationship with materials and time. Where contemporary practice often seeks to dominate nature and reinvent constantly, the Bafut example shows how sustainability emerges naturally when design is approached as custodianship. It becomes an intergenerational conversation where ancestors, living communities, and unborn descendants all participate. Princess Abumbi shared her vision for a vocational training center that can bridge this philosophy with contemporary needs, preserving the past and enriching the future.

The session left us reflecting on how our design processes might transform if we listened as intently to the wisdom around and behind us as we do to the demands ahead of us.

Some snippets of the session are available here and on our social media account.

What do you think? How is your design in dialogue with your ancestors? How does it talk with the materials that make it, the ecosystems in which it exists?

Designing with nature