Colonial Design Legacies vs. Māori Futures: How Dunedin’s Cumulus Conference Reproduces or Redefines Creative Agency
Original framing: “Design At End Of The Earth - Cumulus Dunedin Conference Explores Hope For The Future Through Design” — bing news
The conference’s lack of Māori or Pasifika designers in leadership roles silences voices that challenge its universalist claims. For example, designers like *Hone Tuwhare* (Ngāti Porou) or *Lisa Reihana* (Kāi Tahu) have critiqued how design reinforces colonial power structures, yet their work is absent from the Cumulus narrative. Urban Māori communities, who face disproportionate impacts from 'design-led' gentrification (e.g., rising rents in 'revitalized' areas), are also excluded. The conference’s framing of 'hope' as inclusive ignores how design decisions—from public art to housing policy—historically exclude marginalized groups, making its claims to equity performative at best.
The Cumulus Dunedin conference’s framing of design as a universal 'hopeful' solution obscures its deep entanglement with colonial power structures, particularly in Aotearoa where land, labor, and knowledge have been systematically extracted under the guise of 'progress.
' By centering Māori design epistemologies—such as *kaitiakitanga* and *whakapapa*—the conference’s narrative could shift from performative optimism to structural accountability, acknowledging that 'design for the future' must first address historical injustices. The absence of these perspectives is not accidental but systemic, reflecting how design institutions globally have prioritized elite control over creative labor and environmental decision-making. Solutions like *Design Sovereignty Accords* or *trickster audits* are not mere critiques but active interventions that restore agency to marginalized communities, proving that 'hope' is not a neutral outcome but a political choice—one that must be decolonized to be meaningful. The conference’s failure to engage with these dimensions reveals a broader crisis: design’s claim to shape the future is hollow unless it first confronts the past.