Juliet Kavishe does not approach design as a finished object but as a living system, shaped by memory, culture, labour, and place. With nearly two decades of cross-continental experience spanning practice, education, and research, her work moves fluidly between high-end residential, commercial, and museum spaces, always grounded in questions of indigeneity, authorship, and African-centred ways of thinking about space.
An Executive Board Member of the Pan-Afrikan Design Institute (PADI), Kavishe plays a key role in shaping how African design is taught, debated, and positioned globally. Her work challenges inherited spatial templates and imported design logics, advocating instead for methodologies rooted in indigenous knowledge systems, climate intelligence, local craft economies, and lived experience. In 2024, she was named among South Africa’s Top 100 Design Voices, followed by the AMPS Critical Futures Award in 2025 for her research on decolonising design perspectives.
As a jury member of the Africa International Design Awards (AIDA Awards), Juliet brings a sharp, deeply human lens to evaluating contemporary design across the continent. She looks beyond trend and surface, leaning into projects that show cultural courage, material honesty, and emotional generosity. In this interview, she reflects on how her thinking around space has evolved, why African design education is entering an era of authorship, and what it truly means to design for dignity, agency, and belonging.
You have spent 17 years working across continents, cultures, and typologies. When you look back at your early work, what has changed most in how you think about space today?
In the beginning, I approached space as a resolved object, something to articulate, beautify, and complete. Today, I understand space as a living cultural ecosystem. It holds memory, migration, labour, language, and emotion. I now design less to “finish” a space and more to allow it to continue becoming layered, adaptive, and responsive to those who will eventually inhabit and use it.
“Decolonising design” is widely discussed today, but how does it translate into the way a space is actually designed, built, and experienced?
For me, it translates into choice, authorship, and proportion. It means questioning why a spatial template exists, who authored it, and who benefits from it. Decolonising design is not aesthetic decoration, it is material sourcing that prioritises local craft economies, proportioning systems rooted in African textile logic, climate-appropriate construction over imported style expectations, and narratives that centre the people who built the land, not those who documented it.
Through your role at the Pan Afrikan Design Institute (PADI), you are shaping how design is taught and understood. What is the biggest shift you still want to see in African design education?
I would like to see African design education stop defending its validity and start defining global futures. We have moved past inclusion; we are at a moment of authorship. The next shift must be an educational ecosystem that recognises indigenous knowledge as methodology, not anecdote, as theory, not folklore.
Your work draws deeply from indigenous knowledge systems. How do you carry tradition into contemporary interiors without turning it into a museum piece?
By allowing tradition to breathe, not perform. I reference indigenous systems as active technologies, ventilation, spatial hierarchy, sonic privacy, thresholds of welcome, not as ornamental motifs. When tradition is treated as wisdom rather than display, it becomes contemporary effortlessly.
Being named among South Africa’s Top 100 Design Voices and receiving the AMPS Critical Futures Award puts your thinking in the spotlight. Did that kind of recognition change anything for you?
It affirmed that the work of cultural excavation and African epistemic dignity resonates globally. It didn’t change my approach, but it expanded the platform, the room, and the microphone — and that matters, not for me, but for the students and young designers who need to see that African thinking is not an appendix, but a canon.
You often work from concept to completion. At what stage do you personally feel a project truly becomes “real” for you?
The project is always real for me. Whether it’s writing about design or fulfilling a client’s brief for their residential home, the person who will read my writing and the clients who walk on site as their building evolves make it real for me. For me, the process and research of design is as real as the product.
As an AIDA Awards jury member, what makes you stop, look again, and lean closer to a project?
Courage. Not aesthetics, not trend, but the audacity to propose something culturally intelligent, materially honest, and emotionally generous. When I see a design that resists predictability and instead responds to human need, I lean in.
You often speak about design as a tool for human freedom. Where do you feel design still has the most power to shift lives?
In the enabling and support of agency. When design is used to return decision-making to communities, how they live, store, gather, cook, grieve, archive, and celebrate, it becomes a tool of freedom. Spatial dignity is political, and design can either reinforce exclusion or reimagine belonging.
From homes to commercial spaces and museums, which type of space challenges you the most, and why?
Museums. They hold collective narratives, but often through colonial framing devices. Redesigning such spaces requires ethical precision: to honour memory without mythologising it, to present truth without spectacle, and to make room for pain, joy, and reclamation simultaneously.
For young African designers entering the AIDA Awards for the first time, what would you tell them before they submit?
Submit work that sounds like you, not what you think “design language” expects. Do not dilute your references. Lead with your grandmother’s pattern logic, your city’s sonic rhythm, your coastline’s humidity, your vernacular spatial intelligence. The world is not asking you to imitate, it is waiting for you to author.
