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Designer, activist, academic,
and author of Lo—TEK,
Design by Radical Indigenism.
A leading expert of Lo—TEK nature-based technologies for climate-resilience.
Her eponymously named studio brings creative and conceptual, interdisciplinary thinking to urban projects and corporate clients interested in systemic and sustainable change. Julia regularly teaches urban design at Harvard and Columbia University.
JULIA WATSON
foregrounds intercultural knowledge in the design of systems, spaces, and innovations.
Offering
Strategy
Embracing an unconventional approach to the design field, informed by pilgrimages to sacred sites and professorial posts at Harvard and Columbia universities, Julia Watson evolved the theory of Lo—TEK, which she launched in her seminal first book titled Lo—TEK, Design by Radical Indigenism. Through Lo—TEK, she explores how local cultures develop sustainable solutions rooted in traditional knowledge.
Her upcoming sequel titled Lo—TEK Water, which has been co-authored with Indigenous experts, documents aquatic intergenerational infrastructures. Modeled on the explorations of Lo—TEK, Julia works with museums, publications, institutions, and communities, to creatively document the millions of conversations, passed between thousands of generations that inform local nature based innovation.
Innovation
Lending leading expertise on traditional and Indigenous nature based technologies for climate resilience, the studio collaborates with governments, organizations, and corporations, to explore avenues for innovative exchange. Traditional knowledge systems are already informing how non-Indigenous people shape the environment.
As a consultant applying systemic and sustainable thinking, Julia Watson offers expertise in eco-innovation, industrial symbiosis, hyperlocal living, bio-based value chains, and establishing guidelines to meet ESG goals. All these innovative techniques assist in moving an organization towards a circular economy, helping to mitigate climate change while improving long-term competitiveness.
Design
Celebrating the insights and intelligence of local communities and intergenerational technologies. Julia Watson works to infuse Indigenous knowledge, ecologies, communities, and designers, into a regeneration of urbanisms, a decolonizing of disciplines, and an intercultural exchange for generational climate resilience.
By advocating for traditional knowledge and local innovations that offer food security, manage water resources, support sustainable shelters, and protect thriving habitats, Julia Watson creatively considers how to construct the resilience capacity of local peoples and places. Watson’s manifesto, Lo—TEK Design by Radical Indigenism, calls for hybridizing local technologies with high tech, to foster new material technologies, architectures, and urbanisms, while protecting Indigenous intellectual property.
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