Decolonising Design

The way design is taught, how we respond to a brief or challenge, who we reference creatively, and what we consider “good” or “bad” design has been shaped by centuries of Eurocentric, colonial ways of thinking, organising and practice.

Join us at the next Climate Designers Singapore event where we're inviting designers, students, academics and practitioners for a conversation around Decolonising Design to question the influences, systems and assumptions that shape how we design, teach and work.

Hear from Dr. Yaw Ofosu-Asare, PhD, Ghanaian design scholar, educator and writer, based in Australia, and Alison Schooling, Singaporean designer, artist and educator, as they share what decolonising design has meant in their own work, what they've had to unlearn, and what they carry into the classroom.

Moderated by Angelina Lourdes, a storytelling practitioner, curator and educator.

And how is this related to Climate Designers, you ask? Colonialism, capitalism, the climate crisis: it's all connected. By understanding how deep colonialism runs in the systems we live in and in how we think, we can start to unravel the threads and weave new patterns of connection.

Special thanks to our venue sponsor: LASALLE College of the Arts, McNally School of Fine Arts

---

Event Details

📅 Saturday 19th September 2026

🕠 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

📍 Lasalle College of the Arts, Room F214A

--

Agenda

9:45 - Doors open

10:00 - Discussion Starts

11:00 - Q&A

11:30 - Closing & Netweaving

--

Tickets

Students - Free

General admission - $8

We want our events to stay affordable and open to as many people as possible.

Students attend free. If you register and find you can't make it, please cancel your ticket so someone else can take the seat.

General admission ticket sales go towards refreshments on the day and towards planning and hosting future Climate Designers Singapore events.

Drinks provided by

--

About the speakers:

Dr. Yaw Ofosu-Asare, PhD is a Ghanaian design researcher, educator and writer based in Australia. He is a Lecturer in Communication Design at RMIT University and author of Decolonising Design in Africa: Towards New Theories, Methods, and Practices. His work brings African philosophy, decolonial thought and design education into conversation, with particular interest in how design knowledge is produced, taught, authorised and translated across different cultural and institutional settings. His research and teaching move between Africa and Australia and examine how design might be practised beyond dominant Eurocentric frameworks while remaining attentive to history, place, power and lived experience.

Alison Schooling is a book designer in Singapore who floats with local and international book publishers and institutions. She believes that visual storytelling is a collaborative type of magic and that books are living, tactile arrangements of our shared human experience. She helps to transport messages through different portals and she uses it as a tool to explore natural spaces and meaning. Her recent work is a peek into how attention and anxiety in the ocean exists in all of us in various ways, through local coastal landscapes as sites of curiosity and quiet confrontation.

Angelina Lourdes owns and runs Studio29, a storytelling-led creative practice that develops curated experiences, exhibitions and cultural programmes. Working with a diverse network of local and international creatives, she transforms research and lived experiences into meaningful projects that bridge people, places and communities.

--

This event is produced by Climate Designers Singapore, part of the Climate Designers community.