Design is suffering from cultural amnesia – and it’s time we called it out. We fill our homes with materials we don’t recognise, use objects we can’t name and ignore the long journeys they have taken to get to us. This is more than a design problem. It’s a crisis of memory, presence and selfhood.
As a materials designer, researcher and someone shaped by diaspora, I live at the intersection of displacement and belonging. My ancestry stretches across continents – from Persia, Gujarat and East Africa to the UK – and answering the question ‘Where are you from?’ has always felt like a trap. The one constant I’ve returned to is material. It’s how I root myself in a world that’s constantly shifting. Through earth, fibre, stone and clay, I began to trace a lineage no-one else could name for me. A sari border passed down. The red of Kenyan soil. The texture of jute. These were my maps before I had one.
This journey led me to create the research studio Ma-tt-er and to co-develop the Material Atlas with the British Council and ten creatives from ten cities across Sub-Saharan Africa – a classification system that moves beyond traditional typologies (metal, plastic, wood) and towards relationships: native, local, migrant and cosmic. These are not just material categories; they’re social and political concepts. They acknowledge process, place and people. They ask: who made this? Where did it travel from? What story is it carrying? Identifying materials as citizens, not just resources for extraction.
And that’s what material memory is. The ability to recognise that design is not just about form, it’s about force. Every object carries histories: of extraction, of care, of migration, of invention. Yet most of us are living in homes filled with objects divorced from their context. Materials stripped of meaning. Labour expunged. Names forgotten. Land overlooked.
This detachment is not accidental. It’s the result of centuries of erasure. Colonisation didn’t just seize land – it effaced the knowledge systems that shaped that land. Whole communities, crafts and skills were rendered anonymous. The result? A design canon that still privileges authorship over ancestry. That devalues the unnamed. That treats a cooking pot made by a Ghanaian roadside welder as ‘vernacular’ but elevates a similar object made in Europe as ‘designer’.
The designer/artist Nifemi Marcus-Bello speaks of anonymous design as a space where real innovation lives – in everyday tools, objects and rituals that go unnamed, but not unnoticed. These items are still designed. They hold ingenuity. They involve materials, land and lives. And yet, when design becomes about signature styles and named creators, everything outside that frame becomes invisible.
This is the heart of the issue: human erasure and material erasure are chapters of the same story. When we can’t name the forest our wooden table came from, we also can’t name the people displaced to harvest it. When we fetishise mudcloth as a boho trend, we erase the Malian hands that dyed it. When we say ‘natural stone countertop’ without naming the quarry or its impact, we’re participating in a kind of cultural gaslighting – pretending that beauty has no consequence.
But materials are not innocent. They are political, ecological and energetic agents. And they deserve our attention.
Ask yourself: how does it feel to live among things you do not know? To walk across a rug with no idea where it came from? To eat from a plate whose glaze you couldn’t trace? This is not just aesthetic detachment – it’s emotional displacement. A low-grade dissonance that leaves us unmoored, constantly consuming in the hope of feeling something. And it’s not working.
If our homes feel hollow, it’s because we’ve built them on silence. Rooms curated by moodboard, not meaning. Vibe, not village. All taste, no tenderness. But design without memory is just styling. And styling can’t hold us.
Real shifts are happening. Ghana has recently declared that only Kente woven there, certified at origin, can legally bear the name. It’s a material sovereignty move on a par with Champagne in France. India has secured Geographical Indication status for Kolhapuri sandals. Mali has challenged the misuse of mudcloth. These are not marketing stories, they are geopolitical statements. And they remind us: materials carry identity.
But we don’t have to wait for governments or brands to validate this work. We can begin at home. With every choice, every object, every material, we build a relationship. Begin by asking: where is this from? Who made it? What is this made of? Why does this material matter? If an object is ‘handmade’, by whose hands? If a stone is ‘natural’, where was it quarried? If something is ‘global’, what did it displace to get here?
When we begin to see materials this way, we begin to see ourselves differently too. We become less extractive. Less detached. More rooted. This is how we build homes that feel like ours. The materials around you already know who you are. It’s time you knew them back.
Got an opinion on the issues raised in this article? Write a letter to the editor (no more than 200 words), and it might be published online: roomfordebate@worldofinteriors.co.uk
A version of this story appeared in the March 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
