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‘Indian design is at an inflection point’ – in conversation with Arvind Lodaya >
by Madanmohan Rao [October 31, 2025]
In this series of interviews, innovation platform MXR.world (‘mixers across the world’) showcases design leaders speaking at the upcoming DesignUp 2025 conference in Bengaluru (https://25.designup.io). The high-energy high-impact event is a must-attend annual gathering of the design community.
Positioned at the intersection of design, technology, and business innovation, it celebrates the strategic and human impact of design in shaping products, services, and organisations. The ninth edition of DesignUp explores how design culture and ecosystems drive innovation, inclusion, and transformation across industries.
The speaker and workshop leader lineup includes Arvind Lodaya, a design strategist, educator, and systems thinker. He is Principal and Lead at ALo Consulting, and has over 30years of experience in shaping brands, building innovation cultures, and mentoring changemakers. An alum of NID, he has led roles at Ogilvy, co-founded the Deccan Centre for Innovation & Design, and advised startups and social enterprises across India.
In this exclusive interview, Arvind shares examples of notable design in India, emerging trends in design space, GenAI impacts, opportunities and tips for aspiring designers, and his favourite books on design.
Arvind works at the intersection of design, education, and impact, and is developing a Systems Thinking curriculum for SELCO Foundation. At DesignUp 2025, he will be leadinga hands-on workshop that reimagines the future: one speculative scenario at a time.
Sign up and attend DesignUp to broaden your creative and strategic horizons, learn from global leaders, discover emerging trends, and network with peers who are reimagining the future of design and technology!
Madan: What are the top three emerging trends you see in design today?
Arvind: AI is definitely the flavour of the season, as it finds its way into every design process.
What I may call design for optics (not visual design) is another trend where the focus is on creating something that looks terrific on social media and can go viral. There is also a steady infusion of design application towards sustainability and community empowerment, which is heartening.
Madan: What exciting new opportunities are opening up in design for youth today?
Arvind: One of the best opportunities is the permeation of design into every field – eventhose regarded as ‘non-designerly’ like finance, pharma, law, and agriculture. I hope the government and public sector also starts deploying design extensively.
While AI is putting enormous creative power into people's hands, it is also feeding a massive fake and manipulated content boom – for the sake of eyeballs or worse. As sustainability percolates deeper into youth, areas like eco-design and transition design are attracting more and more interest.
Madan: What are some outstanding examples you have seen of effective design in India?
Arvind:
1. The traditional 'moodha' stool or chair made of cane and rope ('open source')
2. The repurposed washing machines used for making lassi ('jugaad')
3. The Tata Nano - even though it was a commercial failure ('optimal')
Madan: What can be done to improve ‘design appreciation’ in India among ‘non-designers’?
Arvind: Launch a podcast, video-podcast or reels series featuring local design pain-points faced by ordinary folks and innovations. It should also celebrate vernacular design intelligence – from kolam making to ‘Building As Learning Aid’ to water harvesting systems.
Create apps or events where non-designers are able to contribute ideas/solutions for local issues, like redesigning a nearby park or open gym. Mandate design thinking into public programs (and let people give feedback and their own ideas): take up challenges like monsoon flooding, potholed roads, traffic jams, and the like.
Madan: Solving the urban traffic nightmare in India requires cross-disciplinary action. How can design help here?
Arvind: Design can help set up a cross-disciplinary, participatory and iterative/ experimental action-learning framework to improve and optimise traffic within existing constraints. But the issue requires a combination of high-investment infrastructure creation combined with audacious zoning and planning ideas.
Madan: What are your favourite books on design? Any titles specially for the Indian context?
Arvind: Victor Papanek's "Design for the Real World" remains an all-time favourite, along with Christopher Alexander's "The Timeless Way of Building". S Balaram's "Thinking Design" is also a classic.
Madan: How do you view GenAI – as a serious challenge for designers, or an indispensable tool? How does one upskill oneself in this context?
Arvind: Like other game-changing technologies, AI offers immense potential to reduce effort and drudgery of certain kinds – but at the same time displacing jobs, benefiting those already privileged, and homogenising diversity.
To upskill, one needs to dive in and take the plunge and work with it, experiment and test its limits, and of course read up on all the critical literature that is emerging around it daily, to stay grounded.
Madan: What are your three tips or words of advice for aspiring 'design entrepreneurs' today?
Arvind:
1. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. We are witnessing the limitations and unintended consequences of solutionist-thinking. Most design problems need a lot of time and care to really figure out before even starting to solve them.
2. Learn to collaborate. The next level of design is where it steps out of its conventional comfort zones and builds bridges with other fields and disciplines. Being able to integrate design with or into these areas will be your superpower.
3. Lose the fear and shame of failing. Designing is necessarily a risky activity, and comes pre-loaded with a very high chance of failure, so do not take failure personally. However, learning to go forth and fail is of little use if one doesn't derive deep insights and learnings from it. So make sure you are learning and getting better all the time.
Madan: Any other comments or remarks you would like to make?
Arvind: Indian design is at an inflection point, and the next few years will tell us which direction it has chosen to pursue: follow and compete the West in achieving "development," or formulate our own definitions of it. In that sense, we don't need more designers.
We need designers who are comfortable with complexity, and the messy reality where design needs to empathetically step in – in government offices, in farmer cooperatives, in crowded city lanes – engaging with and empowering people who are already designing their own solutions.
Our task is to listen more, prescribe less, and build capacity where it is needed most, not just where it is appreciated most.
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