How India Looks: Localizing Design Tools for a Billion People

How India Looks: Localizing Design Tools for a Billion People

Charvi Shrimali

Dedicated to Maa-Dada

My grandparents would often repeat this famous proverb to me explain to the diversity of the country where I grew up and spent most of my life, India.

The proverb loosely translates to, “Every few miles, the water changes. Every four miles the speech.”

To put this into perspective, four miles from SVA MFA Products of Design department is Williamsburg.

India is a vast country with a population of 1.4 billion and counting. Its varied geographic, linguistic, economic, social and cultural landscapes means each of these 1.4 billion individuals look, talk, eat, work, and live very differently from one another.

This makes India

It’s many distinct and rich regional cultures manifest as a multitude of art, cinema, cuisines, textiles, architecture, linguistics, customs, and practices. I wish I could share this wealth with you.

a complex, diverse and complexly diverse country.

But when I did a quick Google search, all I could find was Curry, Cows and of course, the Taj.

This lack of representation not only shows an incomplete story but also prevents comprehensive, accurate and compelling storytelling, a giant challenge in this day and age, especially for visual designers in India.

But designers in India find themselves severely ill-equipped with their current arsenal of design tools. These tools fail to respond to the needs, sensibilities, and emotions of a billion-strong audience.

Design, that is local, specific, and targeted, is vital in a rapidly growing world.

You might be wondering, what are these tools?

We look at the same type-foundries, the same inspiration platforms, the same image banks, the same software and exactly the same hardware.

They are exactly the same as yours.

I need to work a little harder to make them work for me.

These are great tools, but the thing is,

How India Looks: Localizing Design Tools for a Billion People

India is a country with over 700 languages, each with their own dialects and often with their own, unique scripts. Google Font, one of the largest free font libraries in the world only represents 9 of these languages. These 9 languages collectively have only 56 font options between them. Compare this to a staggering archive of over 1400 Latin fonts.

This disparity isn’t because there aren’t enough speakers. For example, my mother tongue, Hindi, with its many regional variations, is the third most spoken language in the world with over 700 million speakers. That’s twice the population of the US. But the lack of representation can leave a language even as popular as Hindi marginalized.

A Devanagari keyboard that reimagines the typing experience beyond QWERTY.

Even before we start talking about designing a font, typing in Hindi poses a challenge. A complicated language with an alphabet comprising 52 letters, a system of diacritics and conjunct consonants, Hindi has been retrofitted into a qwerty keyboard that was designed for a language with half the number of letters.

This forces each key to perform multiple tasks, impeding both the user’s intelligence and speed, and making them deprioritize designing in any other language but English.

C. Sah, Visual Designer, Kota, India

“Honestly, typing in Hindi is painful. It slows me down so much and takes hours to do something that could be done in 20 mins for English”

just having chai

A black-tie event to document the undocumented parts of our everyday

Today, visual design is one of the most rapidly expanding professions in India, growing at an annual rate of 25%.

This surge has been a result of increased demand for digital services, especially since the pandemic, which forced businesses, both big and small, corporate and home-rud, to go digital and begin catering to an audience base of over 900 million internet users.

One-third of this base is also highly active on social media platforms such as Instagram | Since access to the internet has moved beyond the urban nucleus, so has the content on these platforms. Today, Instagram offers an endless directory of everyday lives and cultures across the breadth of the country.

This continuous pluralisation of content has shown us what is otherwise often left undocumented.

Two women playing a childhood game with tamarind seeds

An auto rickshaw covered in snow on a winter morning in Kashmir

Tiny bananas being sold in a Manipuri vegetable market

A lonely chabutra in the middle of thar dessert

A puppet show at my brother’s 5th birthday party

This evidence is irresistible, especially when such visual narratives are missing from mainstream media and are continually being erased.

I decided to participate in this new enfranchisement of documenting the undocumented with an everyday activity that takes up to 90 per cent of my parents’ day, just having chai.

D. Jesrani, UX Designer, Hyderabad, India

“I have never gotten so much attention while making chai, something I do every day, but that made me pay closer attention to my own process.”

As friends and I spent one evening having multiple rounds of chai and capturing every ordinary moment on precious Polaroids, they observed slowing down to document an everyday activity also leads to conversations that otherwise wouldn’t take in the absence of this evidence.

vividh

A hyper-localized online marketplace for designers with curated everyday India

As I shared these images from the experience, just having chai on Instagram, it became clearer why many designers in India use the platform as a visual research tool.

Instagram is a visually-forward medium that allows for instant sharing. it provides a storyteller with the agency to tell their own story. This makes for a much richer image bank than popular stock platforms such as Unsplash, which offers limited and unidimensional content from the Indian subcontinent. It made sense why many designers even use Instagram to directly source images from creators.

K. Trehan, Creative Director and Founder, Studio Ping Pong, Kolkata, India

“We often reach out to small creators on Instagram who are already making images that fit into the brand language to request for reposting or enquire for a bundle shoot.”

But this is a Jugaad, a makeshift hack in place of a precise solution.

Instagram is not an easily searchable platform. It is ruled by an ever-changing, often unresponsive, algorithm that makes it easy to drown in a sea of content. You need to know the right people to reach the right image.

Most importantly, Instagram isn’t designed to be a design tool.

Vividh is a hyper-localized online marketplace for designers, with curated images that capture both everyday and extraordinary life in India, clicked by ordinary users from the country.

The platform allows designers to search by location, Save and purchase images sourced from Instagram through its wide base of regional content partners.

Location-based search is a critical intervention. Especially in a country where the same image can be interpreted differently, and the result can greatly vary based on your search term. So localisation can not be an afterthought.

Instead of a centralized headquarters, Vividh operates through 6 different regional teams that interpret each entry and help pluralise search term results.

This is done to ensure that when searching for an image of a athanu, a type of pickle, you will also see results for achaar and pachadi, regional variations of the same dish.

But this is a monumental undertaking, and there are still lots of gaps in representation. Sometimes, despite this localised, responsive, and collaborative model, Vividh might not have the image you need.

To bridge that gap, Vividh would take your failed search term results and turn them into incentivised prompts for the growing community of content creators.

It operates through a co-op model that is designed for sharing profits with the creators. Along with the fixed percentage of profits, creators would also receive bonuses for addressing the visual gaps.

The aim is to pluralise, localize and optimize your image search, responsibly.

localize captcha diversify data

A speculative partnership with Google’s reCAPTCHA to train bots better

You might be wondering, why talk about collecting images in the age of generating images?

AI is our latest design tool. Platforms, such as Dall-E, Adobe Firefly and Midjourney are extremely powerful tools, that are drastically changing how we approach image-making. But just like all the other tools before them, it doesn’t work for me as well for me as it does for you.

The speed at which AI is being integrated into our lives makes it tougher for communities with a limited digital footprint to seek authentic and diverse representation.

This lack of representation also results in AI-generated images that propel the same harmful stereotypes.

This risks the danger of a single story.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they aren’t true, but they are incomplete.”

The problem isn’t in the image generators, but rather in the data set fed into these systems. So I looked at how data was collected to train AI, and the answer was right in front of me.

To use these AI tools, I had to prove I was a human. So I did that, by picking out every lighthouse, every fire hydrant, and every crosswalk in every single frame.

reCAPTCHA is a free service from Google that helps protect websites and tell bots and humans apart. It’s also used to train the same bots.

If you are going to make me train the bots, let me help you, help it help me.

Instead of making everyone around the world identify that same lighthouse, localize captcha, and diversify data. This is how we train the tools of the future, for the future.

Imagine if we could train AI to recognise an Activa on the streets of Jaipur, everyone’s favourite ice-cream tricycle or hand-drawn kolam on the footpath?

What if we could train AI to look at India, the way India looks at itself?

last words

I am one of a complexly diverse and rapidly growing billion, and this is how I look at India. Imagine the richness when each individual gets to share the plurality of their reality. Because in a country where every few miles the water changes, every four miles the speech, there is no one way to look. We want not only to protect this plurality but also to celebrate it, in every possible way.

special thanks

Nayonika Ghosh

Kritika Trehan

Vimarsh Bhatt

Charmaine Sah

Prarthana Dixit

Vidhi Patel

Shreyas Srivatsa

Jennifer Rittner

Guidione Machava

Kgothatso Lephoko

Y. L. Lucy Wang

Fernanda Flores

Jaryn Miller

Ryana Burrell

Kristina Lee

Esty Bagos

Aradhana Goel

Swati Piparsania

Navaya Vishnoi

Inês Ayer

Zoha Tasneem

Cyntia Abarca

Dinky Asrani

Yuvraj Khanna

Svarina Karwanyun

Rini Singhi

Rhea Bhandari

Shivani Bapna

Anjali Kamat

Aarman Roy

Pea PoDs PoD Faculty

Ashutosh Sharma

Rudrakshi Kumari

Aditya Jain

Nikita Biswal

Dhruv Jesrani

Mumma-Papa

Bhaiya

Images by Harshita Gurjar

Srikara Prasad

Rini Singhi

Naveli Choyal

Aamir Wani

Daksha Salam

Yamuna

Siddharth T.

Typefaces

Adobe Garamond Pro

Baloo by EkType

DM Sans and Poppins by Indian Type Foundry

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