Herman Clark

Dr. Herman Piʻikea Clark is a Kanaka Maoli artist, designer, educator, and Professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University. Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, his work advances the proposition that Hawaiʻi is not simply a place where design is practiced, but a source of knowledge capable of expanding how design is understood, taught, and applied.

Over more than three decades, Clark has developed a distinctive body of scholarship, creative practice, and design pedagogy across Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Canada. His work demonstrates how Kanaka Maoli knowledge provides rigorous epistemological foundations for design, challenging the assumption that contemporary design theory derives solely from Western intellectual traditions. Rather than positioning Indigenous knowledge as an alternative perspective to be incorporated into existing frameworks, his research shows how knowledge grounded in Hawaiʻi generates new ways of thinking about perception, inquiry, creativity, and the responsibilities of design.

Central to Clark’s scholarship is Makawalu, a Kanaka Maoli framework of perceptual plurality that he has developed as a methodology for design inquiry, research, and education. Makawalu proposes that design begins not with methods or technologies, but with the cultivation of perception itself. By learning to perceive relationships, place, genealogy, and responsibility differently, designers develop new capacities for engaging the complexity of social, cultural, and ecological systems. Through this work, Clark contributes an original theoretical framework to contemporary design education that is rooted in Hawaiʻi while addressing questions of global significance.

Clark established the first university design courses taught from a Kanaka Maoli perspective at the University of Hawaiʻi, initiating a program of work that has continued across multiple countries and educational contexts. His research, creative practice, and invited presentations have been exhibited, published, and shared internationally, contributing to conversations on design education, Indigenous methodologies, visual culture, and the future of higher education.

At OCAD University, Clark teaches across undergraduate and graduate programs while advancing research into Indigenous foundations for design education. His scholarship, writing, and creative practice seek to establish Kanaka Maoli knowledge as a living intellectual tradition that continues to generate new theory, new methodologies, and new possibilities for design in the twenty-first century.