AIIS 6010 Speaker Series: Design by Radical Indigenism

AIIS 6010 Speaker Series presents Julia Watson, landscape designer and educator, urban design lecturer Columbia and Harvard University.

11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. – Lecture open to the public
12:35 to 1:30 p.m. – Reserved for students

Three hundred years ago, intellectuals of the European Enlightenment constructed a mythology of technology. Influenced by a confluence of humanism, colonialism, and racism, this mythology ignored local wisdom and Indigenous innovation, deeming it primitive. Today, we have slowly come to realize that the legacy of this mythology is haunting us.

Designers understand the urgency of reducing humanity’s negative environmental impact, yet perpetuate the same mythology of technology that relies on exploiting nature. Responding to climate change by building hard infrastructures and favoring high-tech homogenous design, we are ignoring millennia old knowledge of how to live in symbiosis with nature. Without implementing soft systems that use biodiversity as a building block, designs remains inherently unsustainable.

Lo—TEK, derived from Traditional Ecological Knowledge, is a cumulative body of multigenerational knowledge, practices, and beliefs, countering the idea that Indigenous innovation is primitive and exists isolated from technology. It is sophisticated and designed to sustainably work with complex ecosystems.

Weekly virtual seminar organized by Prof. Jolene Rickard, History of Art and Visual Studies and AIISP.