Traditional structures, built purely from philosophy and academia, have excluded and standardized what counts as beautiful, leaving entire heritages out of the conversation.

 

As an artisanal product designer, I have worked directly with communities whose sense of beauty is their own, shaped by their context, their materials, their meaning, not by any academic western-centered design canon. For years, the field has asked how to educate their taste, never why that education was owed to them at all, or to any other community. 

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Art and beauty is not a Western invention. Cave paintings, garments, symbols, every culture, everywhere in human history, developed its own visual language for what it found beautiful, long before Gestalt or the Bauhaus wrote it into theory.

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This is a different lens: studying design and aesthetics through physiology and neuroscience, so a designer and a person with a different taste can finally sit at the same table, understand each other, and ask what beauty actually means to them, instead of deciding it for them.