Reef to canvas workshop during Design Week. PHOTOS FROM DESIGN WEEK PHILIPPINES 2024
GOING into 2025, designers can artistically ride on the waves of our maritime waters, learn from communities, and embrace our islandness to create more soulful design.
That was the consensus in “Unearthing Islandness,” one roundtable discussion in the 2024 Design Week held last October at the Yuchengco Museum. The panelists explored embracing our pre-colonial roots and rediscovering our innate ethnic identity. Organized by the DTI-Design Center of the Philippines, Design Week has a national scope with talks, workshops, tours, and partner events throughout the country, with over 15 cities in 10 regions participating. Natasha Mañosa Tanjutco, co-founder and creative director of TAYO Design Studio, said that the concept means reconnecting society to the water, which she laments as a challenge created by our colonial experience’s separation of our identification from water. Despite being dwellers of an archipelago, Filipinos today identify as people or slaves of the land with fear of water inculcated in them by myriads of coastlines.Conquering this fear and “designing with water” can bring about fluidity and other emotions related to it, such as “having the sense of pakikipagkapwa and malasakit,” Tanjutco said.
While islandness can bring about connections, water also separates, said Cora Alvina, director of the Museo Katutubo of the Philippines. She defined islandness as about leveraging regional diversity, rejecting the homogenization of globalization, and celebrating local traditions.
The discussion inevitably led to climate change, especially massive flooding given the recent super typhoons that battered the country. To respond to the climate change crisis, the panelists said that it would be time to embrace our islandness and return to the wisdom of the indigenous.
Local weaving class in Siargao during Design Week.
Kapuluan ng Kabataan, a school of culture and creativity that supports communities to find local solutions to their unique climate change problems, showed that “we no longer have the savior mentality,” said Tanjutco who helped establish it. “We want to learn from indigenous communities. Should everyone wish to become Westernized?”
The panel recommended returning to indigenous methods of addressing regular flooding to bring long-term solutions and not just quick fixes.
Debunking myths
Another yearend resolution was debunking popular myths to develop the public’s clearer and correct understanding of design. Paolo Mercado, joint president for Ogilvy Consulting Asia, spoke of the urgency to bring design thinking across all sectors of Philippine society, especially in public works.
His defining “design moment for 2024” was the brouhaha about the steep PWD ramp on the EDSA Philam Quezon City Station that erupted in July. Experts found the ramp to be 10 degrees steeper than the standard, making it impossible to climb and perilous to get down from.
Lamps made from indigenous materials during Design Week.
One popular myth holds that design is only about aesthetics. Tanjutco, granddaughter of National Artist for Architecture Francisco Mañosa, said that design likewise aimed for the value of “ginhawa” for it to give breathability and life. For example, a well-constructed ramp arises from empathy for the plight of persons with disabilities.
Another myth is that a designer is just “somebody who draws.” However, Mercado says design thinking is a higher-order cognitive exercise which seeks to solve problems. It is also seeing “… what the world could be, not what it is.”
Alvina believed that, since Filipinos are “madiskarte,” they have an innate capacity for design. Derived from the Spanish word for “discard,” the word that originally meant the honeyed words used in courtship now means resourcefulness and street smarts.
Sometimes, good design can be found outside the usual art spaces and in unexpected places. Rambie Lim, a community livelihood development and product enhancement consultant, shared her encounters with rural folk who produced attractive yet functional design.
She gave the “limliman” as an example: “Usually, somebody makes a suitable place for chicken to take refuge in, which everyone else in the community uses.”
The discussion ended with the panelists encouraging the designers to start exploring their unique connection with our archipelagic culture and its affinity with the water.
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