Ho’ohuli ke Kahua: Turning the Foundations of Knowledge in Design Education

Herman Pi’ikea Clark

Decolonizing design education requires more than expanding the curriculum. It requires examining the foundations on which the discipline understands knowledge itself.

Many discussions about decolonizing design begin with representation—adding Indigenous perspectives to the curriculum, diversifying case studies, or expanding the range of voices included in design discourse. These efforts matter. But they do not yet reach the deeper issue. The deeper question concerns the ground on which design knowledge has been built. To decolonize design education is not only to reconsider what is taught. It is to examine how the discipline has come to define knowledge, legitimacy, and professional authority in the first place.

Colonial power once operated primarily through territorial control. Today it often persists through institutional and administrative systems—including the ways disciplines like design define legitimate knowledge and practice. Standards, procedures, professional norms, evaluation frameworks, and accreditation systems shape how knowledge is recognized and how authority is granted. These systems rarely appear as instruments of power. They appear instead as neutral mechanisms for organizing institutions and assessing quality. Yet they quietly determine what kinds of knowledge are seen as credible—and what ways of knowing remain invisible.

Understanding this shift is essential to understanding why decolonizing design education matters. Where colonial expansion reshaped land, governance, and knowledge systems, movements of decolonization inevitably followed. Across the world these movements have taken many forms: political independence, cultural renewal, language revitalization, and the reassertion of Indigenous systems of governance and knowledge. In other words, decolonization appears because colonial history exists. The conversation about decolonizing design education belongs within that larger historical process.

How Design Education Was Formed

Modern design education did not develop outside of history. It emerged within European intellectual traditions during the same centuries that colonial expansion reshaped much of the world. During this period, powerful ideas about classification, measurement, rationality, improvement, and order were taking shape. These ideas helped generate modern science, engineering, architecture, and design. They also helped organize the systems of administration, infrastructure, mapping, extraction, and governance through which colonial power extended itself across land and peoples.

Design disciplines translated these assumptions into material form. Cities were planned. Territories were surveyed and divided. Infrastructure networks were built. Communication systems standardized meaning and identity across expanding societies. Design helped make particular ways of seeing the world durable, practical, and scalable. None of this means that design itself is reducible to colonialism, nor that the knowledge developed within Western design traditions should be discarded. The point is simply that design education inherited frameworks formed within a particular historical worldview—one that often assumed its own universality.

The Philosophical Inheritance

Modern design education also rests on specific philosophical inheritances from the West. Enlightenment thought helped elevate rational method, systematic inquiry, classification, and the ideal of objective knowledge. Thinkers such as René Descartes and Francis Bacon helped shape a worldview in which knowledge could be organized through method, abstraction, and the disciplined study of nature. Later, industrial modernism and institutions such as the Bauhaus translated parts of that inheritance into design education through functionalism, efficiency, standardization, and the search for forms believed to be broadly applicable or universal.

These traditions generated powerful tools and important innovations. But they also shaped the assumptions through which design problems continue to be framed, taught, and evaluated. Recognizing these foundations does not require rejecting them. It requires asking what they foreground, what they leave out, and what other epistemologies were excluded as design came to define its own legitimacy. 

Where Colonial Power Persists Now

Colonial power once operated primarily through territorial control. Today it often persists through institutional and administrative systems that quietly determine what counts as legitimate knowledge and practice. Standards, Procedures, Classification systems, Professional norms, Evaluation frameworks.

Colonial governance historically relied on systems of classification, mapping, surveying, and administrative control. Many modern institutional systems—from planning regimes to bureaucratic evaluation structures—descend from these same administrative logics. These systems rarely appear as instruments of power. They appear instead as neutral mechanisms for organizing institutions and evaluating work. Yet they quietly shape legitimacy. Universities are saturated with them. They appear as accreditation structures, grading rubrics, hiring criteria, research evaluation metrics, ethics protocols, and expectations about professionalism and tone.

Design education is no exception. Studio briefs, critique culture, iteration norms, portfolio expectations, and evaluation rubrics do more than organize teaching. They train designers in how to define problems, how to recognize “good” solutions, and how to speak in ways that sound legitimate within institutional frameworks. Long before a designer begins a project, much of the field has already determined what will count as legitimate design.

These histories do not survive only in theory. They are reproduced through the everyday artifacts of design education: the brief that frames the problem in advance; the rubric that rewards efficiency, clarity, and polish while leaving relation, accountability, and consequence harder to measure; the critique that mistakes detachment for rigor; the professionalism norm that treats institutional fluency as credibility; and the accreditation framework that standardizes legitimacy across vastly different places and peoples.

These are not neutral teaching devices. They are part of the institutional and administrative systems through which design learns what to see, what to value, and what to ignore.

Why Inclusion Alone Is Not Enough

This helps explain why many well-intentioned efforts to diversify design education struggle to produce deeper change. Institutions may add Indigenous perspectives to the curriculum. They may invite new voices into the classroom. They may acknowledge Indigenous knowledge. But if the institutional structures that produce legitimacy remain unchanged, the deeper terms of the discipline remain intact.

Indigenous knowledge is often welcomed as content—a perspective, a cultural reference, a case study. Yet the frameworks used to evaluate knowledge—the standards of rigor, professionalism, objectivity, and evidence—remain largely inherited from the same traditions that shaped the field historically. When that happens, Indigenous knowledge must still translate itself into a system that was never designed to recognize it on its own terms. Inclusion without structural change becomes accommodation.

Indigenous Knowledge as Epistemology

Indigenous knowledge systems are not simply bodies of cultural information. They are epistemologies—ways of understanding how knowledge is produced, validated, and applied. Across many Indigenous traditions, knowledge is grounded in relationships: to land, to ancestors, to community, and to future generations. Knowledge is validated not only through abstraction but through continuity, stewardship, and lived accountability.

Kanaka Maoli knowledge traditions have long recognized that ʻike (knowledge) emerges through relationship—between land, genealogy, practice, and responsibility. Scholars and cultural practitioners such as Puanani Kanakaʻole Kanahele have articulated frameworks like Papakū Makawalu, which describe knowledge as layered, relational, and embedded in the living systems of the world.

Building on these foundations, I have been developing Makawalu as a theoretical framework for design. Makawalu—literally “eight eyes”—proposes that design judgment can be strengthened when practitioners deliberately expand the field of perception through which problems are understood. Makawalu asks design to see more than it has been trained to see.  Rather than approaching design through a single dominant lens—efficiency, innovation, optimization, or aesthetic resolution—Makawalu encourages designers to attend simultaneously to multiple relationships: land, community, ancestry, power, consequence, use, memory, and future continuity. Makawalu does not reject existing design knowledge. It asks the field to see more than it has been trained to see.

What Is At Stake

The issue is not only that dominant design traditions excluded other ways of knowing. They also helped produce many of the conditions now presented to design as problems to solve. Design has been deeply entangled with industrial expansion, territorial development, extraction, mass production, and the rationalization of social and material life. It helped make the modern world more efficient, scalable, and interconnected. But these traditions also normalized particular ways of seeing: Land as resource. Communities as populations to be managed. Progress measured through growth, speed, and control. Many of the ecological and social crises we now confront—climate instability, environmental degradation, and widening inequality—did not emerge outside these frameworks. They emerged, in part, through them. This does not mean that Western design knowledge is inherently harmful, nor that its contributions should be dismissed. But it does mean that the assumptions through which design has historically operated can no longer be treated as neutral, universal, or sufficient.

The Question Ahead

If design education is serious about preparing students for the world they will inherit, it has to ask harder questions of itself. What exactly are we training students into when we teach design? What histories live inside our methods, standards, and definitions of legitimacy? And what would become possible if the discipline were willing to examine not only what it teaches, but the worldview it continues to reproduce? If design education continues to train designers within the same inherited assumptions—efficiency without accountability, innovation without relation, problem-solving without historical depth, development without reciprocity—the discipline risks reproducing the very patterns that contributed to the crises it is now asked to address. The question is no longer whether design education will change. The question is whether design education practices are willing to examine the foundations that shape what the discipline is able to see.

Toronto, 2026