Kavya Agarwal
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.
Keywords: design literacy, design capability, practice-led research, design education, systemic design, Indian design