Whose rules are we learning? Rethinking design education beyond the western canon

Design education often begins with “universal” rules, but what happens when those rules are culturally specific?

In my early design education, I was introduced to Bauhaus, Swiss typography and grid systems as if they were the natural starting point of all visual thinking. 

The message was consistent: Learn the rules before you break them. At the time, this felt helpful. These systems gave structure to something that initially felt overwhelming. But over time, I began to notice what was missing. The “rules” we were learning were not universal. They were specific histories, shaped by particular cultural and political contexts, yet presented as global standards. 

What stayed with me most was not just what we were taught, but what was consistently positioned as secondary. Whether I studied design in Lebanon or Canada, design education followed a similar pattern: Western modernist movements formed the foundation, while non-Western design histories appeared later, often as electives or side references rather than core frameworks. This hierarchy quietly suggested that design knowledge flows in one direction from Europe outward. 

At the same time, I started noticing how deeply this structure shaped the way we speak about design. Many of the terms we rely on, such as kerning, hierarchy, alignment and negative space, exist primarily in English. Even when translated, they often lose precision or feel slightly unnatural. I remember trying to explain a design concept in Arabic during a workshop and quickly switching back to English because the vocabulary didn’t quite carry the same technical clarity. 

It wasn’t just a language issue; it reflected how design discourse itself has been standardized through one dominant linguistic system. In some Arab design classrooms, this tension becomes even more visible. Arabic typography might be taught, but instruction often takes place in English. It creates a contradiction: learning how to design Arabic script through a language that is not Arabic. A similar tension exists in many other regions where English dominates design education. This raises a quiet but important question—how can a design language fully develop when the language used to teach it is disconnected from it? 

These experiences made me start questioning what counts as foundational knowledge in design. Why is Bauhaus positioned as essential history, while other equally rich visual traditions are treated as niche or specialized topics? In North America, Indigenous visual cultures have existed for thousands of years, yet they are rarely embedded in the core structure of design education. Instead, they are often framed as separate from mainstream design history, reinforcing the idea that modern design begins in Europe.

Yet outside institutional frameworks, alternative systems of knowledge already exist and they challenge this framing entirely.

The Arabic Design Archive (ADA), for example, was created to address the lack of accessible historical documentation of Arab visual culture. Beginning with Arabic book cover design, it has grown into a collaborative initiative spanning Cairo, Beirut and Casablanca. What makes it significant is not just what it preserves, but how it operates: not as a centralized institution, but as a distributed, community-driven archive shaped by designers and researchers across regions.

Similarly, the East Asian Graphics Archive (EAGA) documents contemporary graphic design across East Asia and its diaspora through community-based archival practices. Rather than treating the archive as a fixed institutional authority that decides what matters, it reframes archiving as something fluid and participatory. Design history becomes something shaped through collective memory, not just institutional selection. 

What stands out in both initiatives is that they are not simply filling gaps in existing design history—they are redefining what an archive can be. They suggest that design knowledge does not need to pass through Western institutional frameworks to be legitimate. Instead, it can be built through networks, communities and lived cultural experience.

This shift points toward a larger question in design education: what would it look like to move from a single narrative to a plural one? Decolonizing design education is often discussed as adding more diverse content, but the deeper issue is structural. It is not only about what we teach, but how we define knowledge in the first place. A more inclusive design education would not remove Bauhaus or Swiss typography from the curriculum. Instead, it would place them alongside other design lineages such as Arabic calligraphy, Indigenous visual systems, African textile traditions and East Asian typography. These would not appear as electives or exceptions, but as parallel histories that have all shaped visual communication in different ways.

For me, this is where design becomes most interesting; not when it is confined to a single canon, but when it is understood as multiple overlapping systems of meaning. Once you see design this way, it becomes harder to believe in a single set of universal rules. What we often call ‘best practices’ are culturally specific solutions that have been generalized over time. This realization has changed how I approach my own work. Instead of asking whether a design follows the rules correctly, I find myself asking whose rules I am following and what other visual logics might exist outside of them. It has also made me more attentive to the visual languages I grew up around: languages that were never framed as theory in school, but that live in everyday signage, packaging, calligraphy and digital communication. 

Design education does not need to abandon structure or rigour. But it does need to expand its sense of what counts as knowledge. If design is truly a global practice, then its foundations must reflect that reality. Otherwise, we risk teaching a version of design that feels complete in theory, but incomplete in the world it claims to represent. 

Ultimately, design is not a fixed set of rules to be mastered. It is a collection of histories, systems and perspectives that are constantly evolving. The more we open the discipline to different ways of seeing and making, the more honest and expansive it becomes. The goal is not to replace one canon with another, but to recognize that no single canon was ever enough to begin with.