A Critical Examination of the Colonial Legacy in Nigerian Industrial Design Education and Its Contemporary Implications

Nigerian industrial design education was established within a colonial institutional framework that privileged European aesthetic standards, production paradigms, and design epistemologies while systematically marginalising indigenous craft knowledge, material traditions, and design values. This doctoral research conducts a critical historical and contemporary analysis of how colonial legacies persist in the structure, content, and evaluative frameworks of industrial design education in Nigerian universities, and theorises pathways toward decolonised design education practice. Drawing on postcolonial theory, African epistemology, and critical design pedagogy, the study employs a multi-site qualitative methodology combining archival analysis of institutional founding documents, curriculum histories, and examination records from four universities with colonial-era origins, ethnographic observation of studio pedagogy in current programmes, and in-depth interviews with sixty-two students, faculty, and alumni across six geopolitical zones. Discourse analysis reveals persistent Eurocentric aesthetic hierarchies embedded in assessment rubrics, the continued privileging of Western design canon in historical surveys, and the systematic undervaluation of traditional craft mastery as legitimate design knowledge. The study develops a Decolonisation Framework for Nigerian Industrial Design Education comprising five interconnected reform dimensions: epistemological plurality, heritage integration, indigenous material valorisation, community-based studio practice, and African design canon development. The framework is piloted across three university departments through a structured curriculum reform initiative. This work makes original theoretical contributions to both postcolonial design studies and African higher education reform discourse. Keywords: decolonisation, design education, postcolonial theory, Nigerian universities, indigenous knowledge.