Research · Design literacy
How does design capability reach everyday India?
India had one design school in 1961. It now has over 2,000. Yet design’s effect on everyday life is still uneven. My research looks at that gap, which seems to be one of distribution, not supply.
In their own words
Watch it before you read about it.
Conversations with people shaping the design of everyday India, in their own words. A video says more than a definition can.
Interview
Jagdishbhai
[Who he is, what he makes, and what he talks about, in one or two lines.]
The idea
What is design literacy?
Design literacy is the ability to see everyday decisions as design, to reason about them, and to make them on purpose. It is not about turning everyone into a designer. It is about recognising a capability people already have, and giving it language.
India needs this because its design capability is vast and mostly unnamed. When people can see and name what they already do, they can use it with intent, teach it, and be recognised for it. The interview above is that capability, speaking for itself.
What I study
Four threads
01
Design literacy as a lens
Not a curriculum or a framework. A way of seeing how people engage with design decisions in daily life, often without calling them design.
02
Capability that already exists
Craft, community practice, and the informal sector have long made careful decisions about form, material, and organisation. Design capability circulates in India outside the design profession.
03
Design inside public systems
Payments, language platforms, AI tools, and public buildings all carry design decisions. Many of them are invisible to the people they act on, and hard to question.
04
A vocabulary for design
India built a shared vocabulary for cricket through everyday use, not through cricket schools. Can design find one in Indian languages?
Essays & papers
Writing
Click a title to read the abstract.
Design Literacy as a Missing Layer: On the distribution of design capability in India
2026 · Conference paper · Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD15)
Kavya Agarwal
Abstract
India had one design school in 1961. It now has over 2,000, drawing more than 200,000 applicants each year (Chatterjee, 2026). The country produces more trained designers than at any point in its history. Yet design’s effect on everyday life remains uneven, and the gap appears to be one of distribution, not supply.
The expansion of design in India has largely been framed through professionalisation, measured in graduates, qualifications, and workforce demand. Yet outputs of professionalised design often do not translate into small businesses, startups, informal sectors, and community settings, where people regularly make complex decisions about form, function, communication, and systems without any awareness of design as a discipline. The expansion of design as a profession does not appear to have produced a corresponding distribution of design capability across society.
To examine this gap, the paper introduces design literacy, not as a defined framework, but as a lens for understanding how people engage with design decisions in everyday contexts. Drawing on existing literature (Dubberly, 2014; Lutnæs, 2021; Mulder et al., 2022), it positions design literacy as a mediating layer between professional design and its societal application, while exploring what this looks like from an Indian vantage point.
Two practice-based observations inform this framing. First, design-like decision-making has long been embedded in Indian social life, in craft, spatial organisation, and community practice, without being formalised. Mamidipudi and Bijker’s (2018) work on handloom weaving demonstrates ongoing technological innovation embedded in social organisation, outside the formal design profession. Such systems were neither uniform nor equitable, but they indicate the circulation of societal design capability in distributed forms. Second, smartphones, digital public infrastructure, and AI are again expanding who engages with design, often outside formal training.
Positioned as a practice-led conceptual reflection drawing on the author’s engagement across Indian design contexts over more than a decade, this paper contributes to systemic design discussions by shifting attention from the production of designers to the distribution of design capability. It does not propose a model or a roadmap. Instead, it offers design literacy as an opening: a way of attending to capability that already circulates, and to the question of what it means for design to exist outside formal expertise.
design literacy · design capability · practice-led research · design education · systemic design · Indian design
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How the research works
Practice-led, week by week
The questions come from practice: design school, a business with craft producers, years of teaching, and the weekly reading that goes into Design Futures India. Each edition is a small field note on where design decisions are being made in India, and by whom.