Tribal Design Forum is a growing platform to celebrate tribal knowledge systems, epistemologies and contemporary tribal talent.
It brings together tribal and Indigenous professionals, scholars, artists, designers, and knowledge holders who are bridging ancestral wisdom with modern disciplines. At its heart, TDF is a space of connection – between the past and the present, between local and global, between memory and imagination.
It invites the current generation of tribal professionals across diverse sectors to reconnect with their heritage, culture, and ways of knowing, and to explore how these foundations can help shape a shared, ethical, and sustainable future – while retaining cultural and knowledge sovereignty.
TDF 1.0 (2021–2025) began as a pioneering community of multidisciplinary designers and creative professionals from diverse tribes of India, coming together to share, learn, and celebrate tribal aesthetics and design frameworks. It served as a foundation for connection and visibility within the design ecosystem.
TDF 2.0 (2025 onwards) expands that mission into a broader multidisciplinary community across sectors, welcoming tribal professionals in design, education, health, technology, policy, entrepreneurship, and beyond as Members of TDF. It focuses on celebrating tribal knowledge systems, fostering cultural and knowledge sovereignty, and building bridges with global networks for a collaborative, ethical and shared future.
TDF also welcomes all those who are working closely with tribal communities or are interested in learning more about tribal communities and worldviews from members of the tribal or indigenous communities, as Patrons of TDF.
Showcase and support tribal professionals, artists, thinkers, and makers who are shaping the future across sectors.
Enable tribal knowledge systems to dialogue meaningfully with global movements in design, education, sustainability, technology, and policy.
Offer a reflective space for tribal youth and professionals to rediscover cultural memory, wisdom, and practices – and carry them forward with pride and fluency.
Support self-defined futures where tribal communities guide how their knowledge is represented, shared, and engaged with – on their terms.
Foster respectful, cross-cultural learning and co-creation rooted in mutual respect, equity, and relational thinking.
Create open spaces of learning, documentation, and co- thinking – where memory is not static but alive, growing, and generously shared.
TDF 2.0’s approach is rooted, relational, and evolving. It values the local and the global, the traditional and the contemporary, the poetic and the practical.
Wisdom sessions from tribal elders, artists, researchers, and global Indigenous peers – open to all, rooted in exchange and respect.
Facilitate global-local partnerships that center tribal agency and cultural clarity – never compromising sovereignty.
Intergenerational mentoring that values both tradition and innovation – enabling youth to lead with groundedness.
A growing, evolving record of tribal design thought, frameworks, creativity, and futures- thinking – created by us, for us, with us.
Using storytelling, design, film, research, and pedagogy to make tribal knowledge systems visible, accessible, and influential in the world.
TDF advocates for tribal leadership in how tribal narratives are framed – in art, design, technology, education, and diplomacy.
TDF 2.0 is not a platform of resistance – It is a platform of return, connection and celebration.
It is where tribal imagination becomes a design language of the future. It is where memory does not stay behind – it walks forward with us.
And every gathering, archive, and campaign ends with the same invocation:
Designing Tribal Futures.
TDF Secretariat
Adivasi Academy
Mandaar, Tejgadh
Vadodara
Gujarat 391156
Email us at contact@tribaldesignforum.com
www.tribaldesignforum.com
Instagram @tribaldesignforum
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Linkedin /tribaldesignforum
