Ñawpaq
Design
Collective
WHO WE ARE
A disobedient design and research collective grounded in Indigenous cosmovisions, creating spaces to learn, make, and create in relational ways.
THE LAND
Our work is rooted in Andean-Amazonian worldviews and in the lands our ancestors come from. It is informed by Indigenous thinkers across Turtle Island, Abya Yala, and beyond. To be rooted is to be with the land, and to feel our ancestors as an extension of it. We carry that wherever we work.
OUR APPROACH
Design is how we bring different worldviews into material form and test how they shape the way we make things.
Refusal.
The academy has long studied communities like ours and called it knowledge. Now that we hold some legitimacy within it, we use that position to refuse its terms: extraction, the gaze that reduces us to our pain, and the idea that knowledge belongs to whoever publishes it first. What we refuse makes room for what we choose to build together.
Disobediance.
Academic conventions of what counts as knowledge, what is “valuable,” and who gets to produce it were largely built by people who studied communities like ours rather than being part of them. We use the legitimacy we have to make room for other ways of researching, teaching, and learning, and to make the status quo a little uncomfortable.
Relationality.
We understand knowledge as living in relationships with people, lands, and ancestors. We begin from our own positionalities, naming where we come from and the power we hold, and our research and design answer to those relationships through reciprocity.
OUR PROJECTS
2025
| The Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) is a nonprofit organization founded in 2010 to document and support endangered languages across the New York Metropolitan Area - one of the most linguistically diverse urban regions in the world, with over 640 languages reported. To support the Endangered Language Alliance’s ongoing work promoting the visibility and preservation of Tu’un Savi (Mixtec), this project involved co-facilitating a series of oral storytelling and illustration workshops, in which mothers told family stories in Tu’un Savi, while their children listened, translated, and illustrated them. Collaborators for this project include a group of mothers and their children, ELA founder Daniel Kaufman, Prof. Claudia Tomateo and students of the MS Design & Urban Ecologies program. Together, we produced twelve trilingual storybooks to support the visualization and resurgence of the stories from these lands. more here |
2025
| Mujeres en Movimiento (MeM) is a grassroots collective of Spanish-speaking immigrant women that use Balioterapia - dance therapy - as a practice for healing and organizing. As part of the MS Design & Urban Ecologies Studio, our initial work with MeM centered around growing their internal design capacity. This involved co-design workshops to formalize visual identity, developing their logo, color palette, and branded templates to support their organising work. Our solidarity with the collective grew from there. The next year, the following cohort of the MS Design & Urban Ecologies developed a neighbourhood bike tour, supported a Día de Muertos celebration, and are in the process of developing an audiovisual documentary. more here |
| High Amazon region of so-called Peru 2024-ongoing |
| For more than 35 years, the non-governmental organiszations, Andean Project for Peasant Technologies (PRATEC) and Waman Wasi, have worked with diverse Indigenous communities in the Amazon region of so-called Peru. This project focuses on their methodology for creating communal calendars: spatial-temporal visualizations of biocultural activities carried out by members of Quechua communities. These calendars translate oral land-based knowledges into visual forms. more here |
OUR PEOPLE
Claudia Tomateo(she/her/ella)
| Claudia Tomateo is an Indigenous descendant of the Quechua-Chanka people from the mountains of Apurímac, in so-called Peru. Her work explores Indigenous methodologies in relation to data visualization, examining how visual practices can support Indigenous knowledge systems and the design of Indigenous futures. She is an architect, designer, planner, and activist, currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Knowledges and Methodologies at Parsons School of Design at The New School. |
Shivani Dave(she/her)
| Shivani Dave is an urban planner and researcher interested in the relationships between people and the places they inhabit. Her work brings together spatial design, public policy and community life, exploring how cities can become more inclusive, equitable and responsive to needs. She examines how public and cultural spaces shape connection, belonging and life. Working across scales, from individuals and neighbourhoods to landscapes, she uses place-based research, spatial analysis, community participation, mapping, design and storytelling to bring overlooked perspectives into conversations about how cities are planned and made. |
Antonia Simon (she/her)
|
Antonia Simon is an urban designer and environmental technologist focused on circular technology, digital infrastructure, and participatory design. Her work centers on environmental justice, circular systems, and rethinking the cultural relationship between cities, technology, and the natural world. As an Aronson Fellow and Social Impact Fellow, she developed Slow Circuits, a circular technology collective that developed libraries of refurbished technology within community-based organisations in New York City and beyond. Antonia has a BA in Anthropology and Computer Science from Georgetown University and an MSc in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons School of Design, The New School. |