Indigenous design for a climate-resilient future

Julia Watson is a designer and environmentalist exploring indigenous, nature-based technologies for climate-resilient design. She calls these technologies Lo–TEK: not to be confused with low-tech, which in architecture and innovation implies rudimentary or primitive technologies, the TEK in Lo–TEK stands for traditional ecological knowledge.

Watson has released a book of the same name which captures such knowledge and describes the way indigenous peoes of indigenous technologies that are “born of symbiotic relationships with our environment, humans living in symbiosis with natural systems”, such as living root bridges in India and Indonesia.

“Lo–TEK reframes our view of what technology is, what it means to build it in our environment, and how we can do it differently, to synthesise the millennia of knowledge that still exists.” It seems like a fitting topic to explore at the moment, as the world takes a pause to reassess how we will move forward.

You can read the full interview with Julia Watson here.