The value of multigenerational memory in design practice

Editor’s note: This is the third installment of a series on design lessons learned from Reclaiming Value, Murmur Ring’s four-day multi-disciplinary immersion in Peru’s Sacred Valley. Along with insights from individual participants, the series explores the question: what makes a meaningful convening? Read more of the series here. 

What if design isn’t solely about innovation, but about remembering?

I came to the Reclaiming Value: Sacred Valley Design Immersion as part of my continuing work to reshape how I approach design through Indigenous frameworks. These frameworks — which view design not as a product to be bought and sold, but as a living system that honors past wisdom, present responsibility, and future legacy — work at the convergence of multiple histories and epistemologies.

In Peru, we began to articulate together why multigenerational knowledge should matter to designers as community builders and stewards of culture.

Rooting community work in multigenerational memory

As a dual citizen of Colombia and the United States and a professional working directly with diaspora communities, my work is rooted in honoring the multigenerational memory that lives within Indigenous, Black, and brown communities in places like Tulsa, Chicago, the Osage Nation, Tamaya, and beyond. In Tamaya (Santa Ana Pueblo), I sat beneath the stars as creation stories passed down through generations unfolded. In Tulsa — once home to a vibrant Black mecca known as Black Wall Street — I listened as descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the Creek Freedmen, people of African descent who had been enslaved by the Muscogee (Creek) in the 1800s, broke long-held silences, sharing stories that had never been spoken, even within their own families.

My current project at Breakout, the Global Eahou Immersion, is a partnership with the Purple Maiʻa Foundation led by Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians). Together, we are bringing together a values-aligned cohort to explore how ancestral knowledge, technology, and entrepreneurship can shape a regenerative, inclusive economy. Through moʻolelo (storytelling) and the values of aloha, mālama ʻāina (care for the land), and laulima (working together), the cohort moves in the spirit of ʻEahou’—a vision of empowered, sovereign community and fresh beginnings, carried forward by the wisdom of the past, present, and future. 

In each community, memory lives not in individuals alone, but in the collective act of remembering together what one generation may have lost and another reclaimed.

On multigenerational knowledge: a powerful blueprint for designers

Multigenerational value is the journey of remembrance. It is the intentional act of walking alongside ancestors, elders, peers, and future generations, all at once. This value system challenges linear time and invites us into a more expansive, cyclical understanding of knowledge, memory, and responsibility.

Consider Indigenous knowledge, such as the North American-based Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The confederacy, composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations, is considered one of the first and longest-lasting participatory democracies in the world. The Haudenosaunee’s Seventh Generation Value principle, which posits that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future, offers a powerful blueprint for designers. 

Across Indigenous nations, similar frameworks emerge. It’s not about immediate impact, but about enduring responsibility — what Kānaka Maoli call ‘kuleana,’ the inseparable bond between privilege and responsibility to land and community. The question becomes: What wisdom do we nurture in ourselves today that will benefit the lives of people and the world we may never meet?

When influence is borrowed but knowledge is dismissed

Yet embracing these Indigenous frameworks requires us to confront an uncomfortable truth.

We cannot discuss Indigenous frameworks without acknowledging how Western institutions have systematically suppressed and devalued traditional knowledge — even as they’ve benefited from it.

Consider the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace. Scholars have documented its significant influence on the U.S. Constitution, yet this contribution remains contested or absent from mainstream historical narratives. Meanwhile, the very method that preserved this wisdom for centuries, oral tradition, has long been discredited by academic institutions that privilege written, peer-reviewed Western formats.

This isn’t just historical injustice. The devaluation of Indigenous knowledge systems continues today, from the dismissal of Indigenous science in climate research to the appropriation of traditional ecological knowledge without credit or consent. Western institutions extract what serves them while denying legitimacy to the epistemologies that produced it.

As designers, we must ask: What patterns within our own field perpetuate this extraction? How might Indigenous frameworks not only deepen our practice, but fundamentally reshape what we understand design to be?

Indigenous frameworks center community, belonging, and purpose 

To honor the power of this borrowed knowledge, we might consider the Siksika (Blackfoot) worldview, which can offer designers a reimagination of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. 

Rather than a pyramid with self-actualization at the peak, the Siksika model positions Cultural Perpetuity as central to both self and community actualization. This shift is profound: Maslow saw self-actualization as something individuals must earn through sequential achievement; the Blackfoot understand belonging and purpose as innate, but always in service to community continuity. The focus becomes not individual accomplishment, but the perpetuation of cultural memory, values, and collective wellness. All other layers, including physiological needs, safety, belonging, purpose, exist in relationship to this center.

Through this model, I created the “Breath of Life” Immersion Framework, where we can apply these concepts to experience design and ask ourselves the following questions:

●      Are we designing experiences that foster presence?

●      Are we enabling people to move through space with ease and dignity?

●      Are we creating emotional safety and collective trust?

●      Are we honoring the cultural and historical context of place and people?

●      Are we enabling participants to show up fully — not just for their own growth, but for the continuation of something larger than themselves?

This framework was not theoretical during the Sacred Valley immersion — it was lived. It shaped everything from how we structured gatherings to how we interacted with local knowledge keepers. While still in development, I have already begun to see its potential for impact throughout all of my place-based work. By inviting groups to come together and shape their collective vision together, the “Breath of Life” Immersion Framework will allow the extension of ancestral and traditional knowledge into contemporary design practice for the good of both designer and user.

Lessons from Reclaiming Value the Sacred Valley

The Sacred Valley immersion became a living laboratory for these principles. What does it actually look like to design for Cultural Perpetuity? How do concepts like kuleana and seventh-generation thinking translate into tangible practice? 

Several key themes emerged.

1.Narrative change through local ways of knowing

Traditional knowledge and traditional technologies are not relics of the past. They are valid, living systems that hold critical insights for land stewardship, economic resilience, and cultural continuity.

Through local storytelling, the cohort was immersed in ancestral wisdom that transformed my Sacred Valley experience. At MIL Centro, a restaurant and research space dedicated to Andean biodiversity, we arrived during El Día del Campesino, one of the most significant days in the Andean calendar. This celebration honors Incan traditions, farmers, and the land, and coincides with Inti Raymi (Festival of the Sun). Our local guide wove ancestral stories of the region’s biodiversity and traditional food systems into the agricultural methods still practiced today.

In the Sacred Valley, storytelling wasn’t ornamental—it was an act of resistance. It was a method of reclaiming Indigenous identity from the extractive narratives that dominate tourism and development. Through song, ritual, and oral history, community members articulated a different kind of value, rooted in relationship rather than commodification.

2. Ancestral practices embrace modern tools

Far from being anti-modern, Indigenous communities in Peru are adept at integrating contemporary tools into their ancestral practices. At Awamaki, a nonprofit social enterprise connecting Andean artisan weavers with global markets, we witnessed this firsthand. The women artisans used the internet to find imagery for new contemporary patterns, weaving modern stories into traditional techniques. 

Technology is not rejected; it is selectively embraced. This discernment in knowing what to adopt and what to protect ensures that communities remain resilient in the face of climate, economic, and social disruptions.

3. Economic inclusivity and Indigenous self-determination

Awamaki’s work demonstrates what economic self-determination looks like in practice. The artisan cooperatives don’t just participate in global markets—they control them on their own terms. The women set their own quality standards and production pace through a supply chain that honors their way of life and respects their natural resources. This means rejecting the extractive rhythms of fast fashion in favor of timelines that align with agricultural cycles and community needs.

Their model represents a circular economy grounded in ancestral knowledge, collective decision-making, and intergenerational reinvestment. Unlike conventional fair trade models that still position Indigenous communities as suppliers within someone else’s system, Awamaki centers community agency at every level—from design to distribution to profit sharing.

This is what true self-determination looks like: not just surviving in the margins, but shaping economic systems from the inside out.

Designing for continuity in a fragmented world

Perhaps the most critical question we must ask ourselves as design professionals is this: How do we design for continuity when the systems around us are structured for fragmentation?

Multigenerational knowledge offers an answer. It teaches us to slow down. To listen deeply. To design with — not for — communities. It asks us to honor complexity rather than flatten it for scale, and to understand that what we build today echoes into the future. 

We must also reckon with how power has shaped modern thought and widely defined what is sacred, scientific, or sustainable. Designers have been complicit in this — through our processes, our aesthetics, our silences. We have legitimized certain ways of knowing while marginalizing others. Now, we have a chance to design differently.

Designing with multigenerational knowledge is not about romanticizing the past. It is about designing for radical presence, with full awareness of what came before and fully accountable to what lies ahead. It means centering cultural perpetuity in our processes; honoring Indigenous frameworks as valid, essential, and transformative; understanding that land embodies kinship, collective memory, and health.

Most importantly, it means recognizing that remembrance is not passive nostalgia. Remembrance is active resistance. It is how we reclaim what has been lost, protect what remains, and imagine what is still possible.

As designers seeking to build a better society, this is our kuleana:To design like the seventh generation is already watching.

More from this series:

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Ashley Lukasik is designing a more meaningful way to convene

Introducing a 10-part series on design lessons learned from a multi-disciplinary immersion in Peru’s Sacred Valley

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Ashley Lukasik|Peru’s Sacred Valley

Foraging design futures in Peru

A four-day cultural immersion in Peru’s Sacred Valley fosters four principles for the future of design, informed by the region’s centuries-old Indigenous philosophies

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Masha Safina|Peru’s Sacred Valley

The layers of value creation

Our modern perception of value is shaped by scarcity. Alternative systems that center abundance and relational exchange offer a more hopeful future.