By Amit Kapoor and Meenakshi Ajith
The wheel wasn’t invented for decoration. Neither was the bridge, the book, or the byte. ‘Design’ or the art of giving shape to intent, has always been humanity’s greatest technology. What we call ‘progress’ is when design becomes invisible and when things simply work. However, behind every leap forward lies a mind that decided what “working” should mean. India has long excelled at making things work. It has engineered, improvised, and innovated its way through scarcity and scale, turning constraint into creativity and chaos into motion. In todays’ world, function alone is no longer enough. If India is to move from a nation that builds to one that imagines, from making do to making meaning, it must learn to design its way forward. Design is not the final brush of colour on a finished idea, rather it is the structure beneath progress itself. It is the language through which a nation expresses its intelligence, ethics, and imagination.
At its simplest, design is an act of control of choosing form, process, and experience with deliberation. Every system, whether a smartphone interface or a government policy, carries within it the hopes, fears, and blind spots of its makers. When we complain that something “doesn’t work,” we are often describing a system that works perfectly for someone else. Systems reveal their designers. The test for India, now, is whether it can design systems, be it industrial, digital, civic that work for the many rather than the few.
This is not just a question of competence but of temperament. China’s manufacturing success, for instance, did not arise from innate genius but from a culture that learns by doing. Its factories-built discipline before they built brands. Over time, the gap between knowing and doing narrowed until knowledge itself became embodied in muscle memory. Technicians became entrepreneurs; factories became design studios. The country’s mastery of production evolved into mastery of experience. Today’s drones, smartphones, and electric vehicles from China are not merely cheaper but they are thoughtfully engineered, emotionally resonant, and globally aspirational.
India’s challenge is different. Our engineers and programmers possess exceptional intelligence, but our economy is still plagued by a large knowing–doing gap. We understand complexity but often stop at understanding. We analyse before we act, theorize before we make. Design requires the opposite rhythm: it teaches us to learn by making, to think through touch, to test, fail, and refine. The ability to iterate is the beginning of real sophistication.
When we think sophistication, we often think of it as a matter of luxury, but it is simply a matter of empathy. True design anticipates the unspoken needs of its users. The better version of empathy is structure: policies, interfaces, and experiences that care for people automatically. Apple built an empire on that truth. Its rivals often offered better hardware or more open technology, Android still does in many respects, but Apple’s supremacy came from design. The clarity of its interfaces, the coherence between devices, and the emotional ease of use created something technology alone never could: belonging. People don’t just buy Apple products; they build lives around them. That is what design can do; it turns convenience into culture. India’s genius for innovation and improvisation must now evolve into that same culture of refinement, where design is not decoration but discipline.
Design is equally the architecture of services. A health-care process, a public-transport app, a delivery network all relies on invisible design decisions that determine speed, clarity, and trust. The delivery of government services in India, for instance, could be transformed by applying design thinking not as jargon but as citizenship. A well-designed policy anticipates human behaviour and reduces friction. It makes honesty easier than corruption, compliance easier than evasion.
The question, then, is cultural: can India evolve from a society that tolerates dysfunction to one that insists on coherence? We have the raw material; centuries of craft intelligence, instinctive frugality, and the ability to work with constraint. Our artisans understand balance and proportion better than any algorithm. Our coders understand complexity. What the country lacks is a bridge between the two: the discipline to integrate art and engineering, empathy and precision.
Education will play a decisive role. Design must move from the margins of art schools to the centre of every curriculum. It is not an elective skill but a civic one. A doctor designs care, a teacher designs learning, an engineer designs relationships between matter and motion. To teach design is to teach responsibility.
In the coming years, India’s growth will not be measured by how many products it exports but by how much thought those products embody. Countries that design well manufacture trust. They create ecosystems where creativity scales, where small enterprises innovate with confidence because the culture values form as much as function. Design is how a nation learns to think about itself. It is the mirror through which it sees what it values and whom it includes. If we want to move beyond survival and into significance, India must build a design culture that is intelligent, ethical, and emotionally literate. The future will not be inherited; it will be designed. And the country that designs best not the one that codes fastest or builds cheapest will set the standard for the century to come.
The article was published with Economic Times on October 11, 2025.
