I used to think geometric patterns were just geometric patterns.
Then I spent three weeks in a design studio in Vancouver watching a Haida artist named Robert Davidson sketch what would become the wayfinding system for a new transit hub, and something clicked that hadn’t clicked before. He wasn’t starting with grids or golden ratios or any of the Bauhaus principles I’d memorized in school. He was starting with formline—that flowing, continuous black line that defines shapes in Northwest Coast art, a visual language maybe 3,000 years old, give or take. The transit icons he created weren’t “inspired by” Indigenous design. They were Indigenous design, operating within its own logic, its own spatial relationships, its own rules about positive and negative space that have nothing to do with Swiss modernism. And here’s the thing: they worked better than the sterile pictograms the city had originally commissioned.
Turns out this isn’t an isolated case. Designers across multiple continents are increasingly recognizing that Indigenous visual systems aren’t decorative footnotes to design history—they’re parallel design histories with their own sophisticated problem-solving approaches. I’ve seen Maori koru spirals informing UI animation curves in Auckland. Navajo weaving mathematics influencing data visualization in Santa Fe. Australian Aboriginal mapping techniques reshaping how cartographers think about depicting country.
When Pattern Systems Carry Entire Knowledge Structures
Wait—maybe I should back up. Indigenous visual traditions aren’t just aesthetic choices. They’re mnemonic devices, legal documents, genealogical records, and environmental encyclopedias compressed into pattern. A Yup’ik parka design encodes information about weather, kinship, and territorial relationships. Andean textile patterns document astronomical observations and agricultural calendars. What contemporary designers are realizing, sometimes slowly, sometimes with the force of revelation, is that these aren’t primitive precursors to “real” design—they’re incredibly efficient information architectures that happen to also be beautiful.
Paula Scher once told me she envied the way Kuna mola patterns could recieve and hold multiple layers of meaning simultaneously. That stuck with me.
The Difference Between Appropriation and Actual Collaboration
Honestly, this is where things get messy. For every Robert Davidson leading his own project, there are fifty design agencies slapping “tribal” patterns onto packaging without understanding what those patterns mean or where they come from. The difference isn’t subtle. Collaboration means Indigenous designers are in the room making decisions, retaining intellectual property rights, and determining how their visual languages are used. Appropriation means someone Googled “native patterns” and dropped them into a mood board. I’ve watched both happen, and the products look different, feel different, function different.
The fashion industry has been particularly bad at this. Repeatedly.
How Spatial Logic Differs Across Visual Traditions
Here’s where it gets interesting from a purely technical standpoint. Western design education teaches you to think in rectangles, hierarchies, and linear reading paths. Many Indigenous visual systems work radially, recursively, or through what designers are starting to call “relational spacing”—where the meaning of an element changes based on its proximity to other elements, not its position in a predetermined grid. Sami duodji craft traditions, for instance, use a spatial logic where symmetry isn’t about mirroring but about balanced relationships that account for the natural irregularities in materials. When product designers actually study these principles rather than just imitating the aesthetics, they end up with objects that feel more intuitive to hold, more adaptable to different contexts.
What Happens When Indigenous Designers Reclaim Digital Spaces
The internet was supposed to be this neutral space, right? Turns out it embodies very specific cultural assumptions about how information should be organized, accessed, and displayed. Indigenous designers and developers are increasingly building platforms that work differently. Akwesasne-based designer Tara Audibert created a social media interface that prioritizes circular conversation flows over vertical timelines. Maori technologists have built search algorithms that respect cultural protocols about who should access certain knowledge. These aren’t minor interface tweaks—they’re fundamental reconceptions of how digital space could work if it wasn’t defaulting to Silicon Valley’s particular cultural logic.
Why Design Schools Are Finally Catching Up (Sort Of)
I spent last fall visiting design programs across North America, and roughly half now have some kind of Indigenous design course or module. The quality varies wildly. The good ones are taught by Indigenous designers, situate visual traditions within their cultural and historical contexts, and address intellectual property ethics from day one. The mediocre ones treat Indigenous design as a “trend” or a single lecture tucked into design history. But even the mediocre attempts represent a shift. Twenty years ago, design curricula treated non-Western visual traditions as interesting ethnographic sidebars—if they acknowledged them at all. Now there’s at least a growing recognition that designers need to understand multiple visual epistemologies, not just the narrow European lineage from Arts and Crafts through Bauhaus through postmodernism. I guess it’s progress, even if it’s slower and more uneven than it should be.
