When we talk about good design, the same examples come up: Apple products, Japanese stationery, Bauhaus furniture. If you ask where to look for design inspiration, we’d not likely say: a three-bedroom flat in Kolkata with three generations, one fridge, and a scooter helmet stored on top of the shoe rack.
But maybe we should.
There is a kind of design brilliance in Indian homes that’s easy to miss because no one usually calls it design. It’s not ‘aesthetic’. It’s not minimalist. And it’s certainly not trying to win awards. But the truth is that it works. And it has worked, in millions of households, for decades.
Most Western design starts with intention. Indian homes start with constraint. You don’t get to decide how much space you have. You don’t get to separate form from function. Your refrigerator is next to your washing machine. If space is a constraint like in our house in Kolkata, the refrigerator is in the guest room. Your broom is behind your gas cylinder. Your internet router is zip-tied to a curtain rod. But, somehow everything has a place. That’s what makes Indian homes worth studying: they’re not designed by designers. They’re designed by needs.
I started noticing this more clearly once I began building hardware. In the abstract, hardware design is about form, usability, durability. But when you actually put products into Indian homes, you face a bigger challenge: understanding the unique ways people use things in their real-life situations. There are objects in Indian kitchens that have lasted longer than most startups. There’s a Milton water jug with a cracked lid but a perfectly working spout. There’s a shoe rack that was originally meant for books and decorative items. And there’s the Prestige pressure cooker with five replaced gaskets but the same original base. These aren’t design objects in the conventional sense. But they survived. I think they are exceptionally well designed objects that lets you live around them without noticing.
Unlike Western products, Indian homes are built on adjustment. You put a microwave on top of a refrigerator not because you want to, but because there’s nowhere else it fits. You drain your RO filter into a sink across the room because the inlet pipe is too short. It’s not neat. But it works. And over time, the working becomes a kind of invisible order. These look like clutter but are efficiency models evolved through years of constraint, trial, and reuse.
This evolution shapes not just objects but our behaviours. Indian appliances come with manuals, but no one reads them. Instead, usage instruction is passed down orally like recipes or rituals. Everyone knows how to press the right button on the washing machine, even if they don’t know what that button’s called. Your mother knows exactly how long to wait after turning on the geyser. Your father knows which socket trips the fuse. In these homes, knowledge is the ‘interface’.
A product that ignores this gets ignored in return. One of the most common reasons products fail in India isn’t because they’re badly made but because they assume people will read instructions. Or that users have space. Or that there’s always stable voltage. They assume a version of the home that doesn’t exist here.
Which brings us to the real insight: if you want to design for India, don’t design for the ideal home. Design for the one that’s already working without you. It might not look like much. But it’s been choreographed over years of tradeoffs that people adapted to without complaining.
When we designed our first hardware product, we made dozens of prototypes. Apart from the great looking CADs and demo room showcases, the only ones that survived were the ones that could survive a real Indian home. They had to work with wet hands of our semi-trained technicians during installation. They had to make sense to someone who’s never downloaded an app to connect a smart device. In short, they had to respect the household.
That’s what Indian homes teach you. Not just where the objects things go in the house but how people live. And once you see that clearly, your job as a designer gets simpler. You’re no longer designing for personas with Pinterest only inspiration, you’re designing for families.
And maybe that’s the real lesson. The best design doesn’t always look good. Sometimes it just lasts. Sometimes it just fits.
If you want to learn how to build products that survive, look beyond the studio and the magazine catalogue. Walk through any Indian kitchen including yours. You won’t find minimalism.
You’ll find design that’s just asking for space.
