DESIGNER

Julia Watson is a designer, consultant, award-winning educator, and bestselling author redefining the future of climate-resilient design through Indigenous knowledge systems. A leading expert in nature-based technologies, she coined the global Lo—TEK movement—an emerging design philosophy grounded in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), reciprocity, and intercultural co-design.

Australian-born and of Greco-Egyptian-English heritage, Julia was raised amid First Nations knowledge systems that deeply shaped her worldview. She studied architecture and landscape in Australia before completing a post-professional degree in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University, where she received the program’s highest honor, the Charles Eliot Fellowship, and several national design awards. Since then, her work has bridged ancient practices and future innovation to advance a more inclusive and sustainable planetary design ethic.

She is the author of Lo—TEK, Design by Radical Indigenism (TASCHEN, 2019) and the forthcoming Lo—TEK Water, A Field Guide for TEKnology (TASCHEN, 2025). Her books have become seminal works in the field, challenging dominant narratives around sustainability and offering Indigenous and local knowledge as essential solutions to today’s ecological crises.

Julia is the co-founder of the Lo—TEK Institute, which empowers generational wisdom through education and advocacy, and the Living Earth Curriculum, a global initiative to embed Indigenous knowledge into STEM and climate literacy. She launched and co-leads the Lo—TEK Office of Intercultural Urbanism, a design studio providing strategic consulting at the intersection of culture, ecology, and innovation. Through this practice, the Lo—TEK Office is advancing the field of TEKnological Urbanism—a transformative approach to city-making that centers ancestral wisdom and trandisciplinary collaboration.

Over the past two decades, Julia has taught architecture, landscape, and urban design at leading institutions including Harvard, Columbia, RISD, and Rensselaer. She has worked with Indigenous communities around the world—from Indonesia to Iraq—to respectfully document and amplify their technologies through storytelling, research, and design.

Her thought leadership has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Architectural Digest, Vogue, BBC, CNN, Wallpaper, DOMUS and many more. She is a TED speaker, a Long Now presenter, and has consulted for global brands such as NIKE, Cartier, and IKEA on sustainability and future visioning. Her practice focuses on helping foundations, design firms, communities, governments, and institutions realign human systems with ecosystems through ancestral wisdom.