TAYO Archipelagic Design Agency is proving that the best design doesn’t borrow from the outside—it grows from within.
11 years after then-teenagers Bella and Natasha Tanjucto co-founded the grassroots youth movement, TAYO is officially stepping into its fullest form, reintroducing itself as the TAYO Archipelagic Design Agency. Recently, the agency hosted “Salu-Salo TAYO” at the National Museum of Natural History, marking National Heritage Month with the debut of its Archipelagic Design Living Lexicon and Archive.
What TAYO calls “Archipelagic Design” refuses to treat creativity as a set of isolated disciplines, ecology as a footnote in a brief, and Filipino visual culture as something to be measured against Western standards. Its proprietary framework, The 8 Pulses of Filipino Design, combines materiality, storytelling, craft, media, and ecology into a single practice.
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A Decade of Groundwork
The story behind TAYO is, in many ways, inseparable from the story of its founders. Sisters Bella and Tasha Tanjucto began planting the seeds of this endeavor when they were teenagers. They co-founded Kids for Kids in 2015 at ages 13 and 15, then built out “Kamalayan,” an art festival centering indigenous and ecological knowledge; “Habilin,” an environmental education initiative born from a visit to Siargao; and “Retaso,” a community upcycling project that turned discarded textiles and plastic into functional objects. Each project connected the ecological crisis to colonialism, capitalism, and the displacement of cultural and natural systems already sustaining communities across the archipelago.
“It is our duty as designers and creatives to root all our systems back into the nature and culture that keeps us thriving,” they explain in a statement.
Design As A Communal Act
Salu-Salo TAYO was designed to embody those principles rather than merely describe them. The afternoon gave guests a full, in-depth look into the Archipelagic Design Living Lexicon and Archive, presented on flowing fabric to evoke water’s movement and transmissive quality. The program was followed by a communal meal co-designed with Fia’s Food using ingredients sourced from local fisherfolk. The evening drew from the island communities central to the studio’s work, including the Halian, Anajawan, Mam-on, Suyangan, and Simariki, and featured Filipino artisans working within the same sensibility.
A Vocabulary Anyone Can Use
The Lexicon is designed to be used for all kinds of purposes, including hospitality branding, corporate sustainability, large-scale exhibitions, and product design. TAYO’s principles are meant to be applied across contexts, keeping projects connected to the communities they’re made for; what the document does is make that vocabulary available to anyone willing to use it.
Explore the Salu-Salo TAYO launch and the TAYO Archipelagic Design Agency’s other projects below:
Photos courtesy of TAYO Archipelagic Design Agency
Frequently Asked Questions
TAYO Archipelagic Design Agency is a Filipino group that creates visual identities, strategies, and immersive experiences rooted in the culture and ecology of the Philippines.
Archipelagic Design is TAYO’s design practice that treats creativity as an interconnected living ecosystem rather than isolated disciplines, drawing from the biodiversity, storytelling, and materiality of archipelagos.
TAYO was co-founded in 2018 by sisters Bella and Natasha Tanjucto, though the movement behind it began as early as 2015.
TAYO offers a full suite of creative services including product design, branding, social media, large-scale exhibitions, and festivals for clients ranging from passion projects to global corporations.
