Between Shores and Systems: Where the Coquí Sings
Kongo Square Studio brings rhythm, research, and reciprocity to the centre of a quietly radical design practice.

In an era dominated by rapid scaling and sleek brand decks, one design studio is asking a different set of questions: What does it mean to belong to a project? What happens when research begins with rhythm? And what might design look like if it moved to the pace of a pilgrimage?
Founded in 2021 by human-computer interaction researcher Kayla Love, Kongo Square Studio is not easily slotted into industry norms. Operating as a decentralized, nomadic practice, the studio blends design research, ethical strategy, and ancestral technologies to support visionaries working at the intersection of culture, community, and liberation.
With collaborators across time zones and a process built on deep listening, the studio’s output ranges from UX frameworks and brand systems to cultural toolkits and open-source libraries. Yet its approach is anything but conventional. “We don’t mass produce,” says Love. “We migrate.”
Origin Story: Borikén and Beyond
Kongo Square’s genesis traces back not to a design sprint in a glass-walled agency, but to the forests, coastlines, and backstreets of Puerto Rico. During a formative period of residence on the island, Love lived and worked across Borikén—from Aguadilla and Mayagüez to Loíza, San Germán, and Barrio Obrero in the San Juan metro area.
It was here, listening to the nocturnal calls of the coquí frog (now quietly embedded in the studio’s logo), that Love began to realize this wasn’t simply travel. It was something else—a calling toward rooted design, informed by both Afrofuturism and the urgent realities of climate justice, colonial legacies, and cultural displacement.
More than inspiration, Puerto Rico provided a crash course in contradiction: how crypto-driven real estate development was displacing local families, how ancestral healing knowledge was fading, how skate parks and community spaces were being razed to make room for condos and investors from the mainland. “I saw how sacred connections were being severed,” says Love. “Not only for Boricuas—but also for outsiders unaware they were participating in erasure.”
The Jones Act, neocolonial tax loopholes, and extractive tourism models were no longer just abstract concerns. They were daily realities. “It’s difficult to access real Borikén now,” Love notes. “The culture is alive, but increasingly buried under Miami-style high-rises and Airbnb rental economies.” The destruction wasn’t just material—it was epistemic. The wisdom of jibaro farmers, yerberas, and mountain folk was being overwritten by convenience and capital.
For Love, this lived experience would shape Kongo Square’s approach to design: design as medicine, not merchandise. Design as cultural preservation, not disruption.
The Work: Ancestral Strategy, Asynchronous Rituals
Today, Kongo Square offers bespoke design services through contract-only engagements. Projects are seasonal, shaped by the slow logic of fieldwork, dreams, and community need rather than client deadlines or content calendars.
Among its signature offerings is Kodex Noire, a Notion-based resource library designed to serve nomads of colour, creatives in exile, and practitioners in the diaspora. The tools are tactile, grounded, and built with accessibility in mind. They read less like templates and more like ritual frameworks—designed to provoke thought, not just productivity.
In keeping with its philosophy of non-extraction, Kongo Square also facilitates salons—dialogue-driven gatherings that began in Borikén and continue across virtual spaces. Originally held in Discord and Twitter Spaces, these salons create a space for co-dreaming, taboo conversation, and mutual accountability. Topics range from design ethics and land back futures to erotic technology and cultural memory. Attendance is open, but intention is required.
The studio works asynchronously, trusting the rhythms of the land and body more than the pace of the digital market. “We believe business can be meditative,” Love says.
“Our clients don’t come to us for speed—they come to re-member.”
On Pilgrimage, Not Retreat
Kongo Square’s philosophy is, at its core, about presence. It challenges the global design economy’s reliance on abstraction and speed, instead rooting strategy in the lived complexities of place. For Love, that includes a sharp critique of tourism as it currently exists.
“The way we travel needs to change,” she says. “Vacation culture too often extracts without reciprocity. If we’re going to honour the ancient tradition of migration and cultural exchange, we have to return to ancestral values—kinship, land stewardship, hospitality as sacred practice.”
This critique is not academic. It is born from witnessing communities in Borikén struggle to rebuild post-storm, only to find foreign investment flooding in—not to assist, but to capitalize. It is born from watching food systems remain dependent on imports, while local agricultural knowledge is pushed aside.
Kongo Square seeks to reverse this trajectory—not just through discourse, but through infrastructure. The studio’s long-term vision includes community-led cultural archives, regenerative economic models, and funding frameworks that support land-based projects.
In that sense, Kongo Square isn’t just a design studio. It’s part speculative lab, part sanctuary, part compass.
Looking Forward
Whether the design world is ready to follow Kongo Square’s lead remains uncertain. The studio resists easy classification. It doesn’t scale in the traditional sense, and its methods may challenge the expectations of corporate clients used to sprint cycles and KPIs.
But that may be the point.
In a creative economy increasingly dominated by sameness and speed, Kongo Square insists on difference. On slowness. On honouring the coquí’s song. And in doing so, it opens up space for a different kind of design altogether—one that listens before it builds, one that roots before it renders.
As Love puts it, “Design isn’t just about what we create. It’s about what we choose to preserve.”