How will India design its new identity?

At the India Design Forum in New Delhi, the big questions were how India can draw on its traditions to forge a distinct design identity and how it can use design as a force for change
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However you look at it, India is likely to have a significant impact on design in the 21st century. For one thing, this vast market of one billion people is busy being courted by western businesses whose own economies are contracting. But India is not just out to consume western products and lifestyles – it is looking to design as a force for change. There is much debate in India about how to live up to its growing status in the world. Design is being touted both as a tool of economic development and as a means of lifting millions of people out of poverty. So it was with great curiosity that I went to Delhi last week to take part in the India Design Forum, one of the first major conferences there on the subject.

The ambition was clear from the outset. "India has already unleashed its entrepreneurial ability, now it needs to unleash its creative ability. We need design," said Kamal Nath, the minister for urban development in a country with more cities of over a million people than the whole of Europe. This is the same message coming from China, as the two nations look beyond being manufacturing powerhouses and aspire to the creative capital of the west.

The problem here is that "design", that most expansive of disciplines, means everything from infrastructure and housing to products and branding. And in India, the frames of reference can veer wildly between the design of luxury hotels and solutions to slum housing. At the IDF, there was rather less of the latter. Instead, the main question preoccupying the local speakers was this: how can India draw on its venerable traditions to forge a distinct design identity?

Design, it should be said, has not had long to thrive in India. It was only in 1991 that the country liberalised its economy and opened up to global imports. For decades prior to that, you could only buy two types of car: the Ambassador (an old Morris Oxford) and the Premier Padmini (an old Fiat). During this period, known as "the licence permit quota raj", manufacturing was in the hands of a select few who operated as monopolies. After liberalisation, India started to market its goods globally, but everything looked derivative.

"Products were designed as if they were from everywhere and nowhere, they were acultural," says Bangalore-based graphic designer Sujata Keshavan. "They couldn't look Indian because Indian products were associated with poor quality." In 1989, she co-founded Ray and Keshavan, the first company in India calling itself a design agency. Best known for designing the corporate identities of technology services giant Infosys and no less than four Indian airports, the company was so successful that it was bought by WPP, the world's largest advertising group.

Yet, as Indian design agencies grow, there remains a hang-up over the issue of identity. On the one hand, this might have something to do with the fact that so much of India's cultural identity comes from its craft traditions, which do not translate naturally into a western, predominantly modernist concept of design. But numerous speakers also argued that in fact India's innate design culture is one of anonymity. The names of the architects and master craftsmen behind such masterpieces as the Red Fort in Old Delhi are rarely known. "Design is perceived as a single act of genius, and that's alien to our culture," says Ambrish Arora of architecture and interiors firm Lotus. His response is to relinquish the intellectual property rights on his designs, making them all available on an open source basis. It's a marked contrast from most designers, who fight to protect their ideas from being copied, and it's exactly the kind of structural influence (rather than merely aesthetic) that India has the potential to start exercising on global design culture.

Dharmalingam Udaya Kumar faced the question of identity head on when he entered a competition in 2010 to design the symbol of the rupee (only the fifth currency to get its own symbol). How do you represent a nation with 16 different languages in a way that's universally recognisable? His winning design uses a Hindi script that hangs from the line instead of sitting on it as most alphabets do, so he turned the top crossbar into the country's flag. The result not only works locally but sits comfortably next to the dollar and euro symbols.

But there are also native talents that are less visible. Keshavan suggests that one of India's great strengths is in system design. This is evident not just in the efficiencies of scale achieved by manufacturers such as Tata Motors, the producer of the world's cheapest car, the Tata Nano. Take the Aravind Eye Care system, which runs surgeries 24 hours a day. The process is so streamlined that the Aravind hospitals treated 2.5 million patients in 2009 alone. Similarly, the dabbawala system in Bombay ensures that millions of home-cooked lunches are delivered in tiffins (lunch boxes) to workers across the city. There's no product, just a delivery system so effective that meals are almost never late or lost.

Fashion is another sector that is strong in India, partly because the government invested in fashion education to support the huge textile industry. Indeed, the government is looking at building four new design academies, but it's not clear if or when these will materialise. Some feel the government should do more, others feel that private enterprise should step up. "India needs to start thinking of manufacturing as a cultural act," says Satyendra Pakhale, an Indian product designer based in Amsterdam. It's a point well made, as that is exactly the attitude that turned Italy, another country with a fine craft heritage, into one of the world's great design cultures.

"There's still so little understanding of design in India," says Keshavan. "Right now it's become fashionable, partly because of the market success of Apple – so 'design' is the new buzzword." She feels that it will take time and, inevitably, education. But for me the real question that needs resolving in India is about what design is for. There was a tension at the IDF between design as a force for systemic change and "design" as the provider of luxury lifestyles for India's new elite. The hottest ticket in New Delhi last week was the launch of the local Architecture Digest, the magazine that specialises in the flamboyantly decorated interiors of the rich. It's not that design needs to be treated with a hair-shirted seriousness, but the sooner the conversation moves beyond the thrill of this new found glamour, the more powerful it will be.