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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.
Services
Consulting
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, design for ESG implementation, and ESG reporting services. All these innovative techniques assist in moving an organization towards a circular economy, helpsing 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 rewilding of urbanisms, a decolonizing of disciplines, and an intercultural exchange for 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 place. Watson’s manifesto, Lo—TEK calls for hybridizing these local technologies with high-tech to foster new material technologies, architectures, and urbanisms, while protecting Indigenous intellectual property.
Research
Embracing an unconventional approach to the field informed by pilgrimages to sacred sites and professorial posts at Harvard and Columbia universities, 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, Watson explores how Indigenous cultures have developed sustainable solutions rooted in traditional knowledge. Her upcoming sequel titled Lo—TEK Water, 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 down thousands of generations that inform local nature based innovation.
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