Vernacular culture
A defining aspect of vernacular culture is its informality. It emerges outside formal institutions, shaped by communities through everyday practices that respond to their own contexts and needs, often without official support.

Responsible cultural discourse
We recognize that some of us may not come from the socio-economic backgrounds most directly involved in the visual and material trends we seek to understand. At the same time, cultural experience is not flat: it is layered and intersectional. Tk invites the community to actively and respectfully hold one another accountable when conversations risk misrepresentation, appropriation, or fetishization. Thoughtful research, coupled with empathy, is always a strong foundation.

Misrepresentation
Untrue or misleading statements of fact about a culture or sub-culture, especially one we do not directly take part in. 

Appropriation
The inappropriate use of cultural elements from a minority group by a dominant group. The imbalance of power at play often leads to loss for the former and gain for the latter. 

Fetishization
The stereotyping and objectification of a group of people or their cultural practices, often by those outside the group. It can take the form of excessive romanticization that reduces people to symbols or tropes—stripping realities of complexity and reinforcing unequal power dynamics.

Presentation vs. Representation
Each visual and material trend filed in the index has a story of shared circumstance. In the Philippines, Southeast Asia and the tropics at large, it is often a circumstance of hardship and vulnerability. Due to the persisting concentration of economic struggle in the tropics, combined with today’s frequent climatic disturbances—both with roots in the Western expansion taking a southbound turn (i.e., widescale extractivism), many of our folk strategies are responses to scarce resources and extreme weather. Checking on Google Street View reveals uncanny similarities in the streets of SEA, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the rest of our neighbors in this zone, beginning with #tkcolorcooling. Now, whenever we see a green house or building, we no longer just see a recurring style but a complex intertropical reality shaped by the legacy of global inequality.

Recognizing this, Tk prioritizes presentation over representation: foregrounding shared material conditions and subsequent adaptive practices rather than reinforcing fixed boundaries. It’s a commitment to exploring a sense of belonging through culture, rather than identity through nation.