I used to think design was just about making things look good.
Then I stumbled into a workshop in São Paulo where a Brazilian designer named Pedro de Souza was talking about decolonial design, and honestly, it felt like someone had pulled a rug out from under my entire understanding of aesthetics. He wasn’t talking about fonts or color palettes—he was talking about power, about whose stories get told through objects and interfaces, about how Western design principles have dominated global visual culture for, what, maybe 500 years give or take. The room was packed with designers from across Latin America, and when Pedro asked how many of them had been taught that Bauhaus and Swiss modernism were the pinnacle of good design, every single hand went up. Mine too, actually. We’d all absorbed this idea that there was one correct way to arrange information, one proper hierarchy, one universal aesthetic truth.
But here’s the thing: design has never been neutral. Every grid system, every sans-serif typeface, every minimalist interface carries the fingerprints of its cultural origin. Decolonial design asks us to notice those fingerprints and question why they’ve become invisible.
How Western Design Principles Became the Default Language of Visual Communication
The globalization of design standards didn’t happen by accident—it happened through colonialism, through corporate expansion, through the exporting of European and American educational models to every corner of the planet. I’ve seen design students in Lagos critiquing their own work using vocabulary that comes straight from the Bauhaus, judging indigenous Nigerian patterns as too busy or unsophisticated. Wait—maybe that’s the point? When you teach people that their own visual languages are somehow less legitimate, you don’t just change how they design. You change how they see themselves.
Decolonial design practitioners like Tlostanova, Mignolo, and Escobar argue that we need to unlearn these hierarchies. Not by rejecting all Western design—that would be simplistic—but by recognizing it as one option among many, not the inevitable endpoint of design evolution.
Anyway, this gets messy fast.
What It Actually Means to Decolonize Your Design Practice in Concrete Terms
I guess the most practical question is: what does this look like in actual work? Designer Dori Tunstall, who became the first Black dean of a design faculty in North America, talks about something she calls respectful design—starting projects by asking whose knowledge is centered, whose labor is valued, whose aesthetic judgment is considered expert. It’s not about adding diversity as a visual style (like, throwing in some African patterns to make your app look multicultural). It’s about fundamentally restructuring who has authority in the design process. Indigenous design collectives in places like Aotearoa New Zealand and Mexico have been doing this for years, creating visual systems that emerge from their own cosmologies rather than adapting Western frameworks. The Māori concept of kaitiakitanga (guardianship) shapes how designers approach projects—not as individual creators claiming ownership, but as temporary stewards of communal knowledge. This contradicts pretty much everything I learned in design school about authorship and intellectual property.
Why This Philosophy Challenges the Entire Foundation of Modern Design Education
Here’s what keeps me up at night: if decolonial design is right—if our whole system is built on excluding certain ways of seeing and making—then design education needs to be rebuilt from scratch, not just tweaked. We can’t just add a lecture on diverse perspectives to the syllabus. We’d need to reconsider which design history we teach (why does the timeline always start with Gutenberg and skip millennia of non-European visual communication?), which design principles we treat as universal (whose universality?), and honestly, whether the entire structure of design as a professionalized discipline is itself a colonial invention. Some design schools are trying—I’ve seen curricula that include Indigenous design methodologies, African philosophy, Latin American theory—but it feels slow, you know? Like trying to steer an enormous ship with a tiny rudder.
The exhaustion in this work is real, but so is the possibility that we might actually build something better.
