From House to Garden: A Two-Part Exploration of Coloniality in Design and Research

IMPORTANT: This event is limited to 20 participants. If you are interested in attending, please ensure that you are available and register for both parts.

What if the very tools we’re taught to use are quietly sustaining the structures we claim to be transforming?

Drawing on Audre Lorde’s insistence that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” and inspired by Vanessa Andreotti’s House of Modernity, this two-part offering invites a deeper reckoning with how coloniality and modernity  continues to shape contemporary design and research, and how we might imagine otherwise.

This offering is for practitioners, researchers, and thinkers who sense that something deeper must shift: not only in what we design, but in how we relate to knowing, making, being, sensing, and dreaming.

Come prepared to question what feels familiar, to sit with discomfort, and to imagine alongside others what might take root when we dare to grow beyond the house.

Part One: Deconstructing the House

January 22, 2026 | 9:00–10:30am PT

Together, we will examine the foundations of what Pause and Effect calls the House of Modern Design. We’ll trace how familiar design frameworks, methods, and tools reproduce logics of power, domination, control, and extraction, often in the name of neutrality, efficiency, or impact.

This session asks:

What becomes possible when we truly confront the colonial foundations of the architecture we’ve inherited?

And what does it mean to acknowledge that some houses cannot — and should not — be renovated?

Part Two: Stewarding the Garden

February 5, 2026 | 9:00–10:30am PT

If not the house, then what?

Shifting from deconstruction toward emergence, we move from architectural metaphors to ecological relations. 

In this session, we'll explore: 

What grows when we tend different soil?

What kinds of nourishment sustain liberatory practice?

What conditions allow for interdependence, abundance, and life beyond enclosure? How might we nurture these futures into being?

This session is an invitation to lean into collective imagination and move toward regeneration.

To learn more about the work we do and the learning experiences we offer at Pause and Effect, visit www.pauseandeffect.ca