"We must confront design's colonial inheritance"

For design to become truly sustainable in the face of rapid climate change we must first acknowledge its ties to colonialism, writes Céline Semaan.

We are no longer designing to prevent disaster. We have already crossed the critical threshold with global warming surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius, so the era of prevention is behind us.

What lies ahead is adaptation: designing for profound, ongoing and irreversible change. As climate disasters become more frequent and undeniable, fires engulf coastlines, floods swallow cities and infrastructure buckles under climate extremes, the world scrambles to respond to emergencies it was never built to withstand.

To have any hope of meeting the enormous challenge before us, we must ask: who was the world built for?

Design under empire was not just about making objects, it was about asserting control

For the last 500 years, the field of design has served colonial and capitalist systems that prized aesthetics over justice, optimisation over care and extraction over reciprocity. It assumed infinite access to land, labour and raw materials – access made possible through conquest, slavery and resource theft.

Industrial design was not an innocent byproduct, nor a driver of progress. It was a handmaiden of empire, used to organise life, enforce hierarchies and manufacture consent.

One of the most iconic examples is the cane chair – celebrated for its light, elegant design, yet built on rattan extracted through colonial exploitation in Southeast Asia and shaped by the labour of colonised workers whose histories remain largely erased from design narratives.

Or the clean, "rational" grids of Bauhaus and Swiss modernism, which rejected the ornamentation associated with colonised cultures in favour of a universal aesthetic coded as white, European, and "civilised", and perceived as elevated and universal.

Design under empire was not just about making objects, it was about asserting control and access over resources. Typography, infrastructure, textiles architecture – all were weaponised to dominate space, erase or discredit Indigenous knowledge systems, and enforce new economic orders.

Colonialism gave rise to the standardisation and modularity we now celebrate as neutral design values. Minimalist design trends draw from colonial aesthetics that erased cultural specificity, texture, and tradition in favour of uniformity and control.

Design remains reluctant to name its complicity in colonialism

As I have shown in my research tracing supply chains, trade routes for the materials design continues to be dependent on – wood, leather, metals and silks – map identically to colonial routes. This reinforces the obvious: colonialism is not a thing of the past, it is an ongoing economic reality.

Capitalism thrives on the pursuit of endless growth. But colonialism enabled it by structuring global systems of extraction and domination – systems that design helped visualise, materialise, and normalise. Where capitalism explains consumer culture, colonialism explains who was historically considered disposable in service of it.

Understanding this distinction is essential. Without it, design's attempts to be "ethical" remain shallow – focused on market solutions rather than systemic transformation.

Even now, as the field pivots towards "sustainable" and "climate-conscious" approaches, design remains reluctant to name its complicity in colonialism, pollution and waste. We can't afford that silence, because without naming the roots of this harm, we risk reproducing it in sleeker, greener packaging.

Much of today's sustainable design discourse still centres the Global North: biodegradable packaging assumes a culture of disposability (as opposed to a culture of reuse), carbon offsetting is built on the economic myth that purchasing carbon credits will somehow reduce environmental destruction.

These gestures ignore how climate collapse disproportionately affects people of the Global South – regions long subjected to colonisation and now again exploited as sites of extraction and dumping.

The communities most impacted by extractive design have been excluded from shaping its direction

"Green" design often avoids uncomfortable questions. Who extracts the materials? Who bears the pollution? Who owns the technology? Without reckoning with these geopolitical realities, sustainability remains a marketing aesthetic, not a political commitment.

The future of design is not about creating more, it's about creating differently. That means shifting from designing for efficiency to designing for accountability.

We need approaches like design for disassembly, which ensures every product can be repaired, reused or returned to the earth. We need waste-led practices that begin with discarded materials – not as an afterthought, but as a foundational principle. And we need to stop privileging novelty over necessity.

Equally important is who gets to design. Historically, the communities most impacted by extractive design have been excluded from shaping its direction.

This is changing. Across the world, designers from the global majority – like Ari Melenciano, Félix Beltrán, Rashida Ng and Indigenous scholars such as Lyla June Johnston – are transforming design as a tool of cultural memory, interdependence and survival.

If design is to become a tool for liberation, it must begin with political education. That includes teaching colonial history in design schools – not just Bauhaus, but Bandung. At Slow Factory, we've developed open-access curricula and workshops that introduce students and practitioners to the colonial roots of design systems, connecting historical violence to present-day design ethics.

To design for adaptation is to reclaim design and address its colonial ties

It means interrogating supply chains, redefining design briefs to enable community co-authorship, prioritising repair and reuse over constant innovation, and centring Indigenous and diasporic knowledge as legitimate design methodologies.

It also means rethinking the role of the designer, from a creator of objects to a designer for justice. Because to design for adaptation is to reclaim design and address the colonial ties that have led to climate decay.

This isn't about blame. The invitation is for everyone to reach towards creativity for the sake of our collective liberation.

Design is not just what we make, it's how we relate to the world. It shapes what we value, whose lives matter and how we imagine the future. If we are serious about building a more just and regenerative world, we must confront design's colonial inheritance and begin the long work of repair.

Céline Semaan is a Lebanese-Canadian designer, artist, writer, educator and speaker based in New York City, whose work focuses on climate issues and social justice. She is the founder of Slow Factory, a non-profit education and research platform that teaches about regenerative design. Her writing has appeared in The Cut, Vogue, Elle, Refinery29 and New York Magazine, among others, and her first book, A Woman Is a School, was published in 2024.

The photo is via Roboflow.

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