Our trademarked design process allows us to cross-pollinate and collaborate across various industries and disciplines. We see art, design, and craft not as silos, but as a creative ecosystem that can be fully activated.
Our official foundation partner is TUKOD Foundation. Every project we take on makes a significant impact, as we work directly with island communities on culture-based climate solutions.
What began in 2015 as a youth-led movement called Kids for Kids, we soon learned that greater things were still ahead of us – as we grew up to understand our people from the grassroots level, we created an avenue for designing solutions for systematic transformation inspired by our land, sea, and people. We are crafting the company and communities we needed when we were younger.
Isabella and Natasha Tanjutco, at the ages of 13 and 15, along with their friends, began a movement turned youth-led organisation called Kids for Kids in 2015, empowering the youth to power the nation. They realised the capability of young people if given a platform. Disappointed in an education system that didn't fuel passion for creativity and liberty, they found another way — from outreach in typhoon-affected communities to mural painting, Filipino games, children's books, and art festivals. For ten years, the goals have been simple: creating avenues to empower our people, establishing physical creative and cultural spaces even in the most remote islands of the Philippines, and using optimistic action for a world where a child's right to a safe environment is lived out daily.
In 2016, the core team created Kamalayan, meaning awareness, an annual art festival on climate and culture that has raised funds for cultural projects by Indigenous people, farmers, fisherfolk, and youth. In 2018, seeing these issues absent from schools, they founded Habilin, meaning to give someone something for safekeeping — originally a one-day conference, now an educational movement building modules, books, workshops, and podcasts.
That same year, TAYO was born from the spirit of everyone across these projects, co-founded by this community of individuals. Since 2018, TAYO has served as mother company to Kids for Kids, Kamalayan, Habilin, and social enterprises like Retaso, a textile studio repurposing waste into design.
TAYO remains 100% youth-led, with 7 years of collaboration and an Executive Board of majority women working alongside professionals and institutions.
Archipelagic Design is a reflection of the co-creative culture we must pass down throughout generations, a post-colonial movement, rooted in indigenous wisdom that reclaims creativity, diversity, and spirit as crucial for thriving communities. It is seeing the world without fixed silos and boundaries but as interconnected living ecosystems, and sees these various art, craft, media, and design practices as islands - connected by the water - that all belong to one archipelago.
It is a design practice that acknowledges the differences, uniqueness, technicalities, and diversity across cultures, and fuses them together by grounding the approach in shared traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom. We see how similar languages are, between Asia-Pacific countries as evidence of water as a medium of exchange. Our ancestors were learned sailors, foresters, and travelers, navigating through land and sea. We learn from one another, which result in humility. Today, we bear our ancestors’ knowledge and wisdom from the places they traversed. Our languages, trades, and material exchanges are examples of our continuing evolution as a migrating people. In design, we acknowledge that culture is a collection of memories from exploring and connecting with the world.
In an era of ecological breakdown, the climate crisis, the disappearance of biodiversity, coupled with exponential growth of AI and technology, we must continue to design new systems of working with the earth, working with our home - the very reason for our existence. Various facets of design that western ideologies and theories separated [from architecture, interior design, graphic design, industrial design, spatial design, experience design, fashion design, food design, or fine art practices such as drawing, painting, sculpture, or crafts such as weaving, mending, embroidery, textiles, etc.] must be blended together to support the development of our world if we want to survive. The Filipino is the most hospitable designer we know, and our highly participatory nature is what the rest of the world can learn from. Good Filipino design is true to itself, its land, its seas, and its people.
