Building Design Culture One Play at a Time

Roshnee Desai, Founder and Creative Director at LOCAL, writes about reimagining design culture in India — not as something imposed, but as something nurtured through play, collaboration, and shared creative spaces

Team LOCAL hosting Playground Edition 03 at Bengaluru Art Weekend

I don’t believe culture can be forced — especially not by a brand. It isn’t something you prescribe or instruct. It’s something you make space for. Not telling people what to be, but allowing them to become.

It builds quietly. Through gatherings. Through shared energy. Through creating platforms where people feel safe enough to express, question, and explore.

When I started LOCAL Labs, I wanted it to be a sandbox — a space for experimentation, for asking better questions, for rethinking what design could be.

Because in India, design still carries the weight of gatekeeping. It often feels exclusive, coded, and colonised – shaped by narrow definitions of who gets to participate and what counts as "good".

I wanted to challenge that. To open it up. To create something like a Coke Studio for Design — where people from different disciplines (and especially non-designers) could come together, collaborate, and play across forms.

Over time, this took shape through multiple initiatives – Open Collab, The Indian Graphic Design Story, LOCAL Lens, and most recently, LOCAL Playground.

At Playground, each session invites participants to engage deeply with a specific genre of design. We’ve also begun collaborating with guest curators to bring new perspectives and depth to the experience — shoutout to Kimya and Edmund.

What’s been most meaningful is the shift we see. People leave differently. Something softens, something opens up. We receive messages — sometimes long, heartfelt ones — about how just a few hours of play helped them reconnect with why they started in the first place.

I’m deeply grateful we get to build this. And even more so, that in some small way, it’s helping move the needle on design in our community.

Warm regards,

Roshnee.

I am Roshnee Desai, I run a design studio called LOCAL where we design with culture and social nuance. Because a well designed country is a powerful country.