This is just the Beginning

This week marks the 10th edition of Design Futures India. For this small but meaningful milestone, I want to pause and remember why I began a weekly Design & Innovation Signal Scan in the first place. I started DFI because I felt mainstream media rarely captured the richness of India’s design and innovation landscape. Important signals slipped by unnoticed, while our design conversations had become too westernised— often ignoring our own culture, craft,and lived context. And design itself remained siloed: seen as an aesthetic layer, rather than a way of solving problems. But India has always designed — through frugality, community wisdom, systems and everyday ingenuity. DFI became my way of reconnecting design to the worlds it truly belongs to: business, policy, technology, education, and people. A weekly reminder that design is not a luxury, but a national capability in the making — and that India deserves to find its own design voice. -Kavya Agarwal, Editor

-Kavya Agarwal, Editor