Reweaving Design: ancestrality, reciprocity, and complexity in practice

Ian Francis Onyango with the designers at the workshop during Dutch Design Week. Photo by Cecilia Scolaro

This article emerges from an ongoing conversation between Cecilia and Tiago, founder of Design Reparations, about their shared experiences at Dutch Design Week (DDW). In the midst of the event’s fast-paced innovation and speculation about the future, they found themselves drawn to a different kind of inquiry—one rooted in the past, in the knowledge of ancestors, and in the land itself.

Design is often championed as a tool for shaping the future. But what happens when we pause to ask: What have we lost along the way? What might we regain if we worked on a design with different intentions?

This question is not abstract. It is deeply entangled with histories of colonialism, extraction, and displacement. At DDW, this conversation unfolded through a workshop co-led by Kenge Content Hive and Design Reparations, where designers, storytellers, and cultural practitioners explored how design might become a practice of repair rather than domination.

Is Design a Colonial Term?

The word “design” feels universal, but its roots tell a different story. As Tiago reflected:

“In university, I wasn’t encouraged to explore indigenous design practices. Imagine how different my work might have been—how much richer, more rooted, and more meaningful—if I’d been taught to look beyond Western frameworks.”

As it is widely understood today, design emerged alongside the Industrial Revolution—a moment of extraordinary ingenuity and brutal colonial expansion. As European empires extracted resources and labor from colonized lands, they also imposed their own ways of thinking, categorizing, and creating. Design became synonymous with problem-solving, efficiency, and control, detaching itself from the relational, cyclical, and deeply rooted ways of making that had long existed in indigenous cultures.

In Decolonizing Design, Elizabeth Tunstall challenges us to see how mainstream design education centers a Eurocentric narrative that erases interconnected knowledge systems and positions certain voices as the only legitimate sources of innovation.

Cecilia put it plainly: The harm isn’t theoretical. Design has played a role in erasing cultures, depleting ecosystems, and severing communities from their land. It’s time to ask: What has design done to us? To society? To the planet?”

If we accept that design has historically been a tool of domination, then how do we reclaim it? How do we shift from extraction to reciprocity?

From Domination to Reciprocity.

One of the most profound shifts we can make is rethinking design as a relational practice rather than an extractive one.

Designers have been positioned as problem-solvers, fixers, and inventors for too long. But what if, instead of asking what we can create, we began by asking what we can learn? What can we give back?

This is the essence of reciprocity, an approach woven into indigenous and ancestral knowledge systems worldwide. It asks us to recognize that design is not a neutral act; it is always part of an ecosystem of relationships.

Take the example of designing a building. In a reciprocal framework, the question is not just:

How can this structure serve humans?

Instead, we must also ask:

How does it serve the soil, the water, the birds? How does it repair what has been harmed?

Cecilia offered a powerful metaphor:

“Reciprocity feels like weaving. It’s not about imposing a pattern but about working with the threads you’re given—honoring their textures, strengths, and stories. It’s collaborative, humble, and slow.”

Weaving Ancestrality into Design.

These conversations took shape in a workshop at DDW, where designers were invited into an experience curated by Kenge Content Hive.

The room was filled with artifacts, textures, and stories from the Samia people of Kenya. Participants were encouraged not to “brainstorm solutions” but to listen—to immerse themselves in a world of oral traditions, material culture, and ecological wisdom.

A video depicted daily life in Busia County, paired with a traditional Samia song—a celebration of returning to one’s roots. Designers touched handmade objects, heard stories of craftsmanship passed through generations, and reflected on the embodied knowledge that modern design often overlooks.

One designer shared afterward:

“For the first time, I felt like I wasn’t just making something—I was being asked to listen. To understand.”

Lessons from Dutch Design Week: Designing with Ancestrality.

The workshop explored two guiding questions:

1. How do we preserve and celebrate traditional knowledge?

2. How can design address ecological and social challenges regeneratively?

Three key projects emerged, illustrating what a reciprocal, ancestral approach to design could look like:

The Regeneration Festival

This annual gathering is focused on environmental restoration and cultural reconnection. Rather than treating an event as a temporary moment, this festival reimagines it as a living system that restores landscapes strengthens community ties, and deepens intergenerational learning.

Revitalizing Traditional Crafts

This project demonstrated how design can be a bridge—preserving heritage and allowing it to evolve through collaboration between generations. It is a communal learning space where elders teach clay-making, weaving, and traditional cooking.

A Collaborative Cookbook

This project, a collection of recipes, ecological wisdom, and personal stories, underscored the role of storytelling in design. It showed that food, memory, and landscape are deeply intertwined and that reclaiming traditional knowledge is an act of resilience.

The Call for Complexity

Mainstream design has long prioritized simplification—reducing ecosystems to resources, people to users, and problems to linear solutions. But life does not work that way. Life is messy, cyclical, and interwoven.

Indigenous and ancestral knowledge systems remind us of this. They teach us to see challenges not as problems to be “fixed” but as imbalances that require attention, care, and relationship-building.

Cecilia and Tiago’s conversation at DDW was not about discarding design but reweaving it—thread by thread—into something that honors ancestrality, embraces complexity, and nurtures the relationships we’ve long ignored.

Closing the Circle.

So, where do we go from here?

The most important shift is moving from design as mastery to design as stewardship. Instead of positioning ourselves as experts, we must ask:

What can I do to repair the web of life?

This is not a question with an easy answer. It’s meant to stay with us—to grow and shift as we move through our work. It’s a reminder that design is never neutral. Its true potential lies not in what it builds, but in what it restores.