Nien Siao, Dean, JS Institute of Design, New Delhi

In recent years, design has shifted from focusing solely on function and aesthetics to embracing something more ambitious: cultural responsibility. The world’s leading designers now shape how societies remember, adapt, and evolve. This shift holds particular promise for India, where the next great design movement lies in turning inward—developing a sustainable, inclusive, and deeply rooted design language that reflects the lived realities of its own people.

The Global Mirage

For decades, India’s design industry was preoccupied with aligning itself to global benchmarks. International schools, Eurocentric minimalism, Silicon Valley UX heuristics—these were treated as the holy grail. For a young design ecosystem, this approach was understandable; benchmarking against the world’s best offered valuable guidance.

Yet something vital was lost in translation: context.

A UX flow optimised for digital behaviour in Western countries can falter in Indian contexts, where shared devices, vernacular scripts, and patchy internet connectivity are everyday realities. Western design principles often assume each user has a personal smartphone and email address. In rural India, however, a single device might serve an entire family. Designing for such contexts demands shared logins, voice-based navigation in local languages, offline functionality, and much more.

Design, at its heart, is problem-solving. And when the problems are culturally specific, so too must be the solutions.

A Groundswell of Local Intelligence

Across the country, design graduates are forgoing international careers to return to their hometowns and establish grassroots studios. A growing number of Indian brands are empowering rural artisans—particularly women—by bringing their handmade products to global markets. Today, artisans collaborate with interface designers, engineers work alongside craftspeople, handlooms are being digitised, and street signage is being redesigned for culturally intuitive accessibility.

This movement is driven primarily by necessity, with nostalgia providing an added benefit. Many of the most pressing design challenges of our time—climate resilience, equitable access, rural infrastructure, and linguistic diversity—cannot be addressed using imported templates.

According to a 2023 report by the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) and the Ministry of Textiles, over 70% of India’s design and craft economy exists within the informal sector, spanning craft clusters, micro-industries, and family-run businesses. Ignoring them in favour of glossy, global aesthetics risks not only cultural erosion but also significant market oversight.

The Role of Design Education

If design is to become a language of local transformation, design education must serve as its training ground. The next generation of designers must focus on for whom and with whom they design.

This requires a shift away from a pedagogy centred on deliverables, towards one rooted in ethnography, field immersion, and transdisciplinary problem-solving. Students should learn to listen before they draft, and to prototype in direct collaboration with the communities they serve.

Design schools that go beyond teaching software skills and aesthetic principles have the potential to bridge urban and rural divides, merge digital tools with traditional craft, and balance heritage with innovation.

Local Does Not Mean Lesser

There is a persistent misconception that “local” design is somehow less sophisticated than “global” design. This could not be further from the truth. Indigenous knowledge systems offer ingenious models for sustainable architecture, circular economies, and emotional durability.

The idea of emotional durability is evident in heirloom textiles—Banarasi sarees, Kanjeevaram silks—treasured for generations as carriers of memory. In a contemporary context, this might translate into modular furniture designed to be repaired rather than discarded, or products that evolve alongside their users’ life journeys.

India’s extraordinary linguistic diversity—over 19,500 languages and dialects—encodes unique worldviews and systems of logic. Truly inclusive design must account for this richness.

Decentralised Innovation is the Future

India does not need a single, standardised national design style. Instead, it needs a networked ecosystem of local innovation. Government programmes such as the “One District One Product” (ODOP) scheme point in the right direction, but the true transformation will come from design thinkers embedded in their local contexts, co-creating with their communities.

For example, designers in Varanasi are working directly with Banarasi weavers to improve loom ergonomics and develop contemporary patterns that appeal to new markets while preserving tradition.

It is time to stop treating “local” as merely a stepping stone to “global” and start seeing it as the destination. The next great design revolution will emerge from these decentralised, culturally rooted innovations—and it will be unmistakably Indian.

Also Read: Anant National University: Pioneering Design Education in India