Papanek Symposium

Sonam Gyaltsen, Echostream, IND

Creative Mountain Economy

Creative Mountain Economy (CME) is a field-based design framework that emerges from direct engagement with mountain communities, landscapes, and knowledge systems of the Eastern Himalayas. This paper examines how design can move beyond urban-centric models to become a tool for community-led development and policy innovation. Through case studies involving indigenous wool, nettle fibre, bamboo, cultural heritage, and local entrepreneurship in Sikkim, the presentation demonstrates how design interventions rooted in lived realities can generate sustainable livelihoods while strengthening cultural and ecological resilience. Effective design and social policies must be shaped from the ground up, drawing upon local aspirations, traditional knowledge, and place-based economies. In doing so, the Creative Mountain Economy offers a model for reimagining development where the past becomes a resource for creating inclusive, regenerative, and culturally grounded futures.

Sonam Tashi Gyaltsen is an industrial designer trained at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad. He founded La in 2016 as the product and social enterprise arm of Echostream Design Studio, dedicated to building creative industry capacities across the Indian Himalayan Region. La began by strengthening the bamboo and cane sector through product development initiatives involving artisans from 23 villages in Sikkim. Sonam also founded T, a zero-waste tea brand, and Work From the Himalayas, a co-working and hospitality venture created to revive local economies impacted by COVID-19. La is actively reviving indigenous nettle fibre traditions in Dzongu and introduced biodegradable khadaks to replace polyester ceremonial scarves. Internationally recognised, La has been showcased at the London Design Festival, Maison & Objet Paris, and Ambiente Frankfurt. In 2021, Sonam received the Naturenomics Award from the Balipara Foundation for his contributions to sustainable innovation and mountain economies.

Arshiya Bose, Black Baza Coffee Co., IND

From Transactions to Solidarity

Photo, Arshiya Bose

Conservation and development often rely on market-based solutions, yet markets alone rarely create the relationships needed for lasting change. Drawing on a decade of building Black Baza Coffee with smallholder producers in India's Western Ghats, this talk reflects on what it means to move beyond transactional models towards solidarity—where trust, shared decision-making and long-term commitment become the foundation for both livelihoods and biodiversity conservation. It also explores the messiness of this work: the uneven progress, setbacks and non-linear paths that are often hidden from view, and why sharing these complex journeys matters if we are to build more honest and effective approaches to social and environmental change.

Arshiya Bose is a human geographer whose work explores the relationship between people, markets and biodiversity. She completed her PhD in Geography at the University of Cambridge, where she studied market incentives for biodiversity conservation through the lens of sustainability certifications in the coffee sector, before undertaking a postdoctoral fellowship at ETH Zurich. In 2016, she founded Black Baza Coffee, a social enterprise working with smallholder coffee producers in India's Western Ghats. Over the past decade, she has developed a participatory approach that combines improved producer livelihoods with biodiversity conservation. Today, Black Baza partners with more than 650 producers to strengthen farming practices, restore native tree species and monitor biodiversity across coffee-growing landscapes. Arshiya is an Acumen Fellow, National Geographic Explorer and Associate Director of Kinship Conservation Fellows. In 2025, Black Baza received the Specialty Coffee Association's Global Sustainability Award, the first Indian organisation to do so.

Natasha Sharma, Govandi Arts Festival, Mumbai

Place, People and Power

Photos, Natasha Sharma

When practitioners in the field of arts and design enter spaces of marginalisation with the intent of collaboration, what does it seem like in practice? What barriers are broken, what challenges are created? How do we approach participation from a lens that is not imitating the power it is trying to fight? Where do design practices fail, where do they succeed? How do we move beyond participation to forming agency that lasts? Touching on these questions, through tangible examples across communities I have worked with, I consider how the practice of solidarity through shared power, long term commitment and willingness to unlearn manifests.

Natasha Sharma is an artist, designer, and organiser working at the intersection of urban practice and social justice. She champions the role of arts, design and culture as civic infrastructure, and for over a decade has developed place-rooted, community-led approaches to building cultural ecosystems and public spaces for play, learning, and wellbeing, especially with youth and children. She is Co-founder and Curator of the Govandi Arts Festival, a youth-led arts and cultural movement from the margins of Mumbai's Govandi. She leads Public Art and Design programmes at the Community Design Agency and develops neighbourhood regeneration initiatives, strategic partnerships, and resource mobilisation alongside communities in need. She is currently a recipient of the Dalai Lama Fellowship and serves on the advisory boards of the Global Cultural District Network and the Mumbai Arts and Health Festival. In the recent past she has received UNESCO's Going Together – For Youth Creativity and Wellbeing grant, the Arts4Resilience – Knowledge Into Use Award, and the Reclaim Art Award.

15:30–16:00 IST / 12:00–12:30 CEST
Q&A Session | Panel Discussion

Dipta Bhog, The Third Eye, IND

Fast Forward: Reimagining Feminist Practices for the Digital Age

A still from the film ‘Raat: Night Time in Small Town India’ (2022, dir. Digital Educators), mentored and produced by The Third Eye’s Learning Lab

Feminist movements have long held that the everyday is where power is arranged and where it can be undone. This talk reflects on what happens when that commitment meets a digital platform. It describes building a space where practice itself becomes the site of learning, and where those on the margins connect with and revisit their world through image, sound and text to create new imaginations of self and community. Drawing on feminist ideas of the relational self and of collective life, it looks at how collaborative processes can produce knowledge that is embodied and situated rather than abstract. It also looks at the limits and challenges of the collaborative processes of re-learning and creating in a digital world.

Dipta Bhog has worked on gender and education over three decades, and has co-founded Nirantar, a Centre for Gender and Education in Delhi. She started out as a journalist and a women's rights activist and went on to develop extensive experience in working on women's literacy, adult and girls' education. As part of Nirantar, Dipta coordinated a five-state study titled Textbook Regimes that analysed school textbooks from a feminist lens and went on to write textbooks for state and central government. She was instrumental in initiating Khabar Lahariya, which started as a newspaper in 2002, and has grown to be a digital media platform run by rural women journalists. Her research on young girls and their collectives resulted in Birdbox, an audio-video installation in the shape of a re-engineered bioscope in collaboration with artist Baaraan Ijlal, where you can bear witness to conversations of young girls' desire, love, shame and freedom. Dipta Bhog co-designed The Third Eye, A Think Tank that puts the feminist in Learning. At The Third Eye, Dipta leads its Hindi publishing, research, partnerships and outreach.

Sohnee Harshey, Geneva Graduate Institute, CH

Urban Design in/for the Margins

Waste on the move. Photo by Sohnee Harshey, May 2026

"Things don't work as they are supposed to" or "people don't behave as they are supposed to" are both common refrains in narratives and experiences of urbanisation in India. How do we unpack this "supposed to"? Reflecting from my recent doctoral fieldwork studying municipal planning processes around waste in a small-town in India, this talk responds to the symposium's provocation, "reshaping future pasts." I move away from the spectacular challenges of Indian metropolises and offer a research agenda for urban design anthropology that is localised, engaged, and rooted in dignity.

Sohnee Harshey is a PhD researcher in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research interests include urban political ecology, particularly intersecting questions of waste, small-town planning and conservation in India.

Yatharth, Strangerobot Design, IND

Interfaces of Injustice: Platforms, Caste & Labour

Yatharth, 2024

Interfaces are not neutral surfaces; they are a terrain that carries its politics in each button, image, text, and feature: visible, invisible, and absent. "The app" is an interface through which the positionality, politics, and economics of the platform, its creators, and its users are operationalised on its workers, whether they are gig workers toiling in harsh weather or data annotators spending sleepless nights far away. In this presentation, we look at how the design of digital platforms like delivery and domestic work apps gives evidence of and inflicts injustices on their users, whether they are workers or marginalised users. We uncover how caste, an omnipresent yet invisibilised social order, embeds itself behind the visual language, UX patterns, and marketing copy of platforms that arbitrage labour. We ask, what makes caste invisible for interface designers and engineers to see? Why does it show up in the first place? And what must we do to fight the injustices of the Interface?

Yatharth is a researcher, designer, and artist based in Bengaluru, India. He runs a design practice that helps organisations working on digital and human rights. His practice explores the intersection of caste, design justice, and the digital economy. Specifically, his work examines how the design of digital platforms and gig apps encodes, perpetuates, and builds upon historical injustices of caste, gender, and class. His work also investigates questions of AI, justice, and creativity, examining methods for auditing AI systems and envisioning radical possibilities for digital technologies beyond Big Tech's prescriptions. He has worked across various non-profits, research institutes, design schools, and studios as a researcher, educator, creative technologist, and designer.

18:00–18:30 IST / 14:30–15:00 CEST
Q&A Session | Panel Discussion

Anthropology of Design Objects in India

Photo by Haku Shah

Objects hold more than function. A brass lamp, a terracotta votive figure, a stitched kantha, a UPI screen, a WhatsApp voice note – all carry relationships, obligations and hierarchies within them. They mediate how people meet each other, how cultural meaning is made, and what counts as ritual. Participants will read objects closely using tools from design ethnography and material culture, then project forward through speculative and critical design. You will leave with a method for moving between material culture, ethnographic interpretation and design practice. Open to designers, researchers, anthropologists, curators and students.

Venugopal Maddipati, Krea University, IND

Social Problems and Social Design

In this presentation I will be emphasising my efforts at drawing on a 1971 symbolic interactionist text by Herbert Blumer titled "Social Problems as Collective Behavior" while teaching in a Social Design programme at Ambedkar University, Delhi. In the studio, Blumer's work often serves as a critical provocation for students who are eager to jump directly into addressing "problems." Blumer's essay slows students down, encouraging them to pause and think more substantively about the nature of the social problems they claim to be addressing as social designers. What exactly are social problems? At what point in time do issues become social problems? This presentation will provide a few answers.

Dr. Venugopal Maddipati is an architectural historian, researcher, writer and associate professor at Krea University, Andhra Pradesh. He holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Minnesota. He has been teaching in the MDes programme in Social Design at Ambedkar University, Delhi and at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi where he received his BA in architecture in 2001. He is a former fellow at CSDS, Nehru Memorial Library and the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. He is currently writing a book on ecological aesthetics and heat in South Asia.

Sehjo Singh, Independent Climate Crisis Convener, IND

The Un-Heroing of the Hero

This talk explores how getting re-connected to the communities that I have worked with over the last four decades (in the context of the looming poly crises) has reaffirmed a conviction towards collaboration as being the only way ahead. The term 'collaboration' itself is insufficient or even inadequate in describing the process that involves the connection between individuals. What I see, feel and hear is more porous and wanting to be even more diffuse, more in the flow of receivers and givers in a river of ideas, of thoughts blessed by the local deities of forest, water and land and aided by the occasional expert who wants to belong.

Sehjo Singh is currently working as a 'Climate Crisis Convener' with grassroots organisations, bringing together her experience and skills from her eclectic career spanning development work, social enterprise, filmmaking, and academics centred around her concerns of social and economic justice. She set up a worker-owned weaving enterprise in Ethiopia supported by the International Trade Centre and has served as Director of Programmes and Policy at ActionAid India from 2011 to 2018 where she was responsible for programme implementation, organisational policy positions and briefs, developing and rolling out local and national campaigns, communications, and institutional fundraising. She supported the strategy designing process in India and for the worldwide ActionAid Federation. She headed the National Centre for Advocacy Studies from 2010 to 2011 and has been an award-winning independent filmmaker with several national and international awards to her credit for over two decades. She has also written and taught on related themes.

Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan, Independent Scholar, IND

Designed to Endure: Field-Based Communication Design in Rural Sanitation Projects

In the late 1980s, the Dutch and Indian governments began a technical cooperation programme to provide safe drinking water and sanitation facilities in rural areas in several parts of India. As part of this initiative, communication materials were developed to encourage community participation and support behavioural changes needed to adopt the proposed technologies. This talk focuses on a project in rural Uttar Pradesh, where materials were created to encourage village residents to build latrines. It explores the field-based design processes used to develop multi-use materials, with the potential to remain relevant long after the project ended. It suggests that when designers challenge the 'planned obsolescence' often built into development communication initiatives they can contribute more than simply serving as "implementation partners" in development projects.

Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan studied Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. Her design practice focussed on social issues with NGOs, grassroots organisations and social movements in western India. She taught at the School of Design at Ambedkar University, Delhi where she was part of the team that developed the first postgraduate programme in Social Design. Suchitra's research interests centre on nineteenth and twentieth-century craft and design in India against the backdrop of decolonisation and nationalism. She is currently working on a biography of master craftsman Maneklal Gajjar.

15:30–16:00 IST
Q&A Session | Panel Discussion | Closing Comments

Alison J Clarke

Alison J. Clarke is Professor of Design History and Theory and Director of the Papanek Foundation, University of Applied Arts Vienna. As a design historian and trained social anthropologist, her research deals with the intersection of these disciplines, specifically in terms of their shared focus on the politics of material culture and social relations. Her recent monograph Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (MIT Press, 2021) explores the controversial origins of social design, casting a critical perspective on the origins of a movement that has claimed to promote social justice through people-centred approaches. Her present book and research project Design Anthropology: Decolonizing and Recolonizing the Material World (MIT Press) explores the blurred historical boundaries between design practice and anthropology. Clarke's research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Austrian Science Fund and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She lectures internationally.

Tanishka Kachru

Tanishka Kachru is the Discipline Lead of Exhibition Design at National Institute of Design, India. She holds an MA in History of Design and the Decorative Arts from Parsons School of Design, New York, and a B.Arch from the University of Bombay. Her research focuses on design histories from postcolonial and feminist perspectives, digital heritage interpretation, and heritage in smart cities. She is author of "Sujata Keshavan: Women designers in India" in Resnick, Elizabeth, ed. Women Graphic Designers: Rebalancing the Canon, Bloomsbury (2025) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Craft and Sustainability in India (2024) and has published widely on design history and exhibitions. Her professional work includes exhibition and museum projects for institutions such as IIMA Archives, Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum, and the Ramakrishna Mission.

Babitha George

Babitha George is a director at Quicksand, a design and innovation studio, where she has spent twenty years working across health, environment, and digital equity. Much of her work has focused on evolving design research methods for complex contexts and co-design with vulnerable communities in India and beyond. She is part of Land Body Ecologies, a global network examining the interconnections between mental health and ecosystem health. She is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD at Northumbria University, using design probes to attend to people and places living through marginality and ecological change, grounded in the backwater landscapes of Kerala, where she is from. She co-founded Unbox, a platform that brings together social change, art and culture, and open research. She is also on the advisory board of the Papanek Foundation and was part of the Mozilla Foundation's first Network50 cohort for work on internet health.

Shemal Pandya

Shemal is an intersectional, queer design educator from suburban Bombay. They acknowledge that they benefit from the existing caste norms. Over the last decade, they have worked at various institutions; CEPT University, School of Design, Ambedkar University, MIT Institute of Design, SPA Bhopal, and Centre de Sciences Humaines, Delhi in various capacities. They have also worked on various projects while being an educator: Sikkim Design Week, International Film Festival of India, India Pavilion at Cannes Film Festival, Parcha Project, National Film Awards, to name a few. They are interested in critical feminism & queer theory, urbanism & the queer subject, agency of designers in spatial geographies, intersectional design, & political practices. They currently ponder on queer pedagogies & inclusive education as a Faculty in the Exhibition Design Programme at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.