The Future Has Roots

Reclaiming design through continuity, care, and ancestral presence.

Design, within contemporary society, has long been driven by a particular tempo — a rhythm that urges us to look ahead with urgency, to celebrate rupture as brilliance, and to reward speed as a marker of progress. What is perceived as unprecedented is prized, while what is known is cast aside - making this logic part of how we imagine the future. As Tony Fry reminds us, the future is not an empty canvas but a space already colonised by the trajectories of the past and present. Without acknowledging these inheritances, we risk perpetuating the very futures shaped by extraction, dispossession, and disconnection — the ones we most urgently need to unmake.

As I reflect on my trajectory as an architect and designer — shaped by the cultural, material, and cosmological landscapes of the Global South, deeply informed by Indigenous and ancestral epistemologies, yet also immersed in the complexities of life within some of the world’s major urban centers — I write as an attempt to navigate the tensions between these fragmented worlds. If, as Susan Yelavich proposes, design is inherently future-making, then we must confront the constraints of this forward-looking impulse. In response, we might imagine futures anchored in the enduring wisdom of those who came before us — and who have long been living in reciprocal balance with the environments they inhabit. 

Within this dominant paradigm, design has played a central role in shaping infrastructures that extract not only natural resources, but also labor, attention, and time — often without questioning who benefits and who is erased. As Matthew Wizinsky observes, design has shifted from crafting objects to engineering behaviors and maintaining the infrastructure of neoliberalism. Innovation becomes less about collective advancement and more a tactic of enclosure, a means for corporations to engineer new markets, assert monopoly, and secure control over emerging systems. It actively conditions how we live, relate, and survive — a process often mistaken for progress, yet contributing to environmental collapse, mental health struggles, and the erosion of collective life. This same logic shapes how knowledge is defined and whose voices are heard. Western design epistemologies have long privileged abstraction, rationality, and individual authorship, tools of capital accumulation that reinforce hierarchies and marginalize other ways of knowledge, especially those rooted in land, memory, and embodied practice. As Costanza-Chock notes, the dominant design canon continues to exclude Black, Brown, Indigenous, and disabled communities, inviting their participation only when convenient, extractable, or “inclusive enough,” while the kinds of labor that sustain life — care work, ancestral technologies, and manual making — remain undervalued or aestheticized from a distance.

On the other hand, while modern societies sought to conquer nature in the name of progress, Indigenous cultures were working with it. As Julia Watson outlines, dominant technological narratives — shaped by humanism, colonialism, and racism — dismissed ancestral innovation as primitive. These narratives fueled an industrial model rooted in extraction and control, distancing itself from natural systems rather than cooperating with them, “favoring fuel by fire.”

In contrast, ancestral and cultural knowledge carries essential insights for our time. Among them, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is particularly significant: a cumulative body of practices, beliefs, and wisdom developed in direct relationship with nature. TEK is not only designed to sustain rather than exploit resources, but also offers a framework for addressing many of today’s most urgent challenges. Watson documents Indigenous technologies that reflect a level of ecological sophistication often absent from industrial systems, including floating islands, water-regulating forest layers, and reciprocal farming networks. These are not relics of the past, but living, adaptive infrastructures that continue to exist and prove effective — technologies made powerful not despite their rootedness, but because of it.

The reason these and other systems were long kept in the margins is not because they lacked function, but because they did not align with the colonial mythology of progress — a framework that equates technological advancement with the domination and consumption of nature. As E.F. Schumacher observed decades ago, one of the deepest conceptual failures of modern economic thinking is the refusal to acknowledge that most of the capital we depend on is not generated by human effort, but gifted by nature. And yet we continue to treat these ecological systems not as finite, interdependent foundations of life, but as infinite sources to be extracted, optimized, and commodified. That illusion is unraveling, as climate collapse, resource exhaustion, and systemic fragility make increasingly visible the cost of ignoring natural limits. Julia Watson’s work underscores this moment of reckoning: “We are not suffering from a lack of information — we are suffering from a lack of wisdom.”

Ancestral knowledge often circulates through non-institutional forms, carried in gestures, in hands, in traditional songs and origin stories, embedded in the textures of everyday life. As Ailton Krenak reminds us in Futuro Ancestral, some forms of understanding cannot be accessed through mastery or ownership; they are not meant to be standardized or domesticated, but approached with respect and care. Similarly, Antonio Bispo dos Santos, a Brazilian quilombola thinker, writes, "We are peoples of trajectory, not of theory.". This perspective challenges the abstraction that dominates academic and professional design, and brings visibility to ways of knowing that lie outside formal education, that demands looking outside our own worlds, to find practices and histories where balance is not an added feature, but a foundational condition of life. 

To shape futures worth living in, responding to the ecological, social, and psychological crises of our time, designers must take seriously the task of learning from living, evolving systems of knowledge. Perhaps this is the shift we need: to understand design not as the production of solutions, but as the cultivation of an ongoing relationship. Ailton Krenak offers a compelling alternative to this notion that the future must be engineered, a belief deeply rooted in the Western imagination since the industrial revolution. Instead, he proposes a different temporality, where the future arrives not through control or acceleration, but through continuity. At the heart of his thinking is the concept of alianças afetivas — affective alliances between unequal worlds —  challenging the logic of globalization that seeks to impose a unique perspective, homogenize for the sake of consumption and its tendency to flatten difference. Through the lenses of differences coexisting, the designer becomes less an author or inventor, and more a connector,  a listener, at times even a witness. Not a central peace but part of a brotherly powerful system, as Bispo dos Santos approaches confluence, not as dilution, but amplification — like rivers converging, weaving together different currents into something more generative, more collective, and more capable of holding complexity. We begin to ask not only what is being made, but with whom, and at what cost, through what histories. These alliances are not based on sameness, but on the recognition of radical otherness and the possibility of mutual transformation as a form of innovation, the kind we need most. 

I do not seek to idealize ancestral knowledge as the path to the future, nor to reject contemporary tools or technological advances. Contemporary society has indeed produced remarkable inventions to address urgent challenges, but these are rarely deployed with that purpose at heart. Profit continues to drive the system, and the notion that we simply need more or better has proven not only insufficient, but destructive. Instead, we must expand our definitions of urgency and innovation and find a place in between. Ancestor knowledge does not offer a blueprint for return, but a vocabulary for imagining otherwise a design logic that is not capitalist in nature, yet deeply modern in its vision of coexistence and connection. We need to make room for practices grounded in reciprocity and repair, learn from practices that have endured for millennia without contributing to destruction — alive knowledge, adaptive, and fully capable of coexisting with contemporary tools, as long as the frameworks remain relational rather than extractive.

Fortunately, this approach is already present in a growing number of contemporary practices — among designers and collectives who have chosen to follow alternative trajectories grounded in relation, rather than extraction. In the work of Francis Kéré, for example, architecture unfolds through community participation: earthen materials are shaped collectively, and the process itself becomes an act of shared authorship, not top-down imposition. In Brazil, initiatives such as A Gente Transforma engage Indigenous and low-income communities in the co-creation of design rooted in local traditions, material knowledge, and environmental reciprocity,  responding not to markets, but to territory and time.

What these practices offer is not innovation in the dominant sense; fast, scalable, optimized, but something slower, more iterative, and grounded. Their value is not measured by growth, but by care: for the land, for the people who inhabit it, and for the histories carried through materials and making. Crucially, they do not operate outside the world as it is, they emerge from within a capitalist society, yet refuse to be entirely shaped by its values. Living under capitalism is a reality, but not a justification for resignation. These approaches and practices demonstrate that while we may not always find a way out, we can still find ways through — cultivating design frameworks that are non-capitalist in their priorities and ethics, even if they must exist within capitalist structures. They do not require retreat or purity, but conscious repositioning: across scales, contexts, and communities. 

To move forward is not to abandon the past, nor to replicate it — but to recognize it as a living force, still pulsing beneath and within everything we create. As Paulo Freire reminds us, "knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.". The challenge is not to choose between past and future, but to reject the linearity that pits them against one another. What if tomorrow is not a distant horizon, but a continuity that unfolds through what we choose to carry, what we choose to value, and what we allow ourselves to transform? In design — as in life — the question is not only what we can build or disrupt, but what we are willing to remember. The rituals, the rhythms, the shared intelligences long disregarded by dominant systems are not relics, they are propositions. They offer methods for resisting disposability, reimagining value, and returning to ways of making that sustain both land and life. If there is hope in this moment, it lies in our capacity to design otherwise — not by inventing from scratch, but by weaving with what endures. The future may not be elsewhere. It may already be taking shape  in the hands that keep making, in the stories that insist on being told, in the refusal to forget.

Bibliography

Bispo dos Santos, Antonio. A terra dá, a terra quer. São Paulo: Editora UFBA, 2015.

Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Design Justice: Community-led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1970.

Fry, Tony. A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999.

Krenak, Ailton. Futuro ancestral. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020.

Laposse, Fernando. https://www.fernandolaposse.com/.

Schumacher, E.F. O grande negócio é ser pequeno. São Paulo: WMF Martins Fontes, 1973.

Watson, Julia. Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism. Köln: Taschen, 2019.

Wizinsky, Matthew. Design After Capitalism: Transforming Design Today for an Equitable Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022.

Yelavich, Susan, and Barbara Adams, eds. Design as Future-Making. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

“A Gente Transforma.” https://agentetransforma.org.br/.

“Francis Kéré Architecture.” https://www.kerearchitecture.com/.