The role of design in shaping of grassroots innovations in India

ABSTRACT

Design is the process of consciously shaping an artefact to adapt it to specific goals and environment. However, the link between design and innovations has not been studied from the perspectives of the informal innovations. Grassroots innovations which exemplify such informal innovations in India fill the gap created by the markets where a product is either not available or expensive to meet the needs of the people on the margin. Though much is studied and written about grassroots innovations, the design thinking during their ideation and commercialization phase which shapes these innovations remains under studied. The paper fills this gap by taking three cases of grassroots innovations to explore their design process in the stages of idea generation and experimentation. It thus describes how a grassroots innovator conceptualizes and ideates artefact for his personal use or for the use by their community members and later, how this developed innovation undergoes change physically and aesthetically. The paper discusses how design plays a role in shaping of grassroots innovations developed in the ‘social economy’ and their diffusion into the ‘market economy’.

KEYWORDS:

• Grassroots innovations
• informal sector
• design
• India

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to the organizers of 4th IndiaLICS Conference 2017 where the initial draft of this paper was presented. I am also grateful to the reviewers and the editors for their valuable comments and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Axial coding involves the reassembling of large quantity of open data into more abstract conceptual categories in order to synthesise it into more coherent and hierarchical structured categories and sub-categories (Scott and Medaugh 2017).