Urning a living

What have an ancient pot, India’s first Prime Minister Nehru, and the famous design duo, Charles and Ray Eames all got in common? Answer: a seminal tale about India’s position in the world that is relevant today as we battle to understand our relationship with new technology.

I learned this extraordinary story on a trip to Ahmedabad in September 2007. As the then CEO of the UK Design Council, I was the guest of the Dr. Darlie Koshy, then Director of the National Institute of Design. On a humid June day, we ambled through the white modernist blocks of the NID campus. I asked how a new-style Bauhaus got re-born in India. Dr Koshy’s answer has lived on with me.

In 1957, ten years after the upheaval of the “midnight hour” of independence, Nehru turned his mind to how India would out-innovate global competition. What would it make? Who would create the intellectual property, products, and brands to lift the fortunes of many millions living on the breadline?

Amongst others, Nehru turned for advice to Charles and Ray Eames – the American designers, then at the height of their creative powers, turning bent plywood into mass manufacture products for aspirational households around the world. Nehru invited the Eameses to India – a new nation ten years into independence. With funding from the Ford Foundation, the duo toured the nation. They studied people, crafts and industry and published their insights and ideas.

The India Report of 1958 by Charles and Ray Eames opens with a description of the Lota.

The Lota is the ubiquitous pot that you’ll find in homes across India. It dates back millennia. Originally clay or terracotta and then in the modern age, in metal. As the Eameses, said,

“Of all the objects we have seen and admired during our visit to India, the Lota, that simple vessel of everyday use, stands out as perhaps the greatest, the most beautiful.”

The point they go on to make is that the design of the Lota has evolved incrementally through the generations. It is product of collective intelligence. Many hands. Many passes. Many changes. Quietly and perfectly, the Lota fulfils many purposes: medicinal, ceremonial, cleansing, retrieving, carrying, and storing water. The Eameses muse on what a design brief might look like for such a successful product – the factors to address including transportation, balance, fluid dynamics, sculpture, opening size of an aperture, texture, heat transfer. They reflected on aesthetics too: “the village women have a process which, with the use of tamarind and ash, each day turns this brass into gold.”

At the time, in the 1950’s, the Eameses drew several lessons from the allegory of the Lota. In essence:

• No individual design team can match the ingenuity and problem-solving force of a whole culture

• Design and production are a living dynamic conversation with customer-users

• Designers are mediators who need the skills to help others solve their problems

The Eameses added a further prescient insight, which I didn’t appreciate until revisiting this story now, during the AI and technology revolution that surrounds us. The additional point they make is that India is well-placed to be at the forefront of innovation, because of its dominant philosophies that embrace creative destruction. This nugget, planted by the Eameses back in the 1950’s, has new currency.

In a recent article, entitled “When Schumpeter meets Shiva”, the economist Dr. Bidisha Bhattacharya expands on the idea that Indian philosophy sees creation and destruction as “two sides of the same cosmic dance”.

Schumpeter, in the 20th Century, dubbed creative destruction as the heartbeat of capitalism. Almost a century later, the winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Economics, Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt, have advanced the thesis that innovation is not a luxury, but an act of renewal.

The India Report raises important questions for us today. As we embrace new fast-moving technologies, we need to discover the new balance between evolution and revolution. We can learn from Shiva not to fear taking risks and to embrace innovation. But in the same breath, we may want to push back on tech bros who tell us the answer is to “move fast and break things”.

Is there more to learn from frugal innovation and the evolution of ideas? What further inspiration can we derive from the women and artisans who collectively developed the Lota over time? What are the criteria that define a healthy balance of evolution and revolution? How do we embrace the new without discarding what is precious – such as our culture and what it is to be human and ingenious?

Post-script

In the same year that I visited Ahmedabad, met Dr. Darlie Koshy, and learned about the India Report, I also spoke at a conference called Kyoorius Designyatra in Goa. It was an exciting event with inspiring designers on the bill, such as the late Wally Olins, Stefan Sagmeister, Harry Pearce, and Simon Sankarayya. A special highlight for me was a quiet fish curry dinner with the graphic designer, Sujata Keshavan – founder of Ray+Keshavan, and a pioneer of brand design in India. She is a polymath and a great creative force. No surprise that she is one of the many remarkable alumni of the National Institute of Design.

The India Report has a living legacy of multi-disciplinary talent shaping India’s fortunes. We have much to learn in the West from the success of NID.