Interaction design in India is really taking off. New schools are opening up everywhere. Big companies are hiring interaction designers like crazy. The calendar is packed with conferences and exhibitions. If you just look at salaries, it seems like the field is thriving.

But look a little closer and you'll see the foundations aren't as strong as they appear.

The growth is real, but it feels empty. What was supposed to be a way to really think about how people and technology interact has turned into a service for the software industry. Education is now about getting people ready to work for companies. Experimentation only happens in fancy art spaces that aren't accessible to the public. You rarely see anyone writing critically about the field.

It's strange that we've gotten to a point where the conversation is being controlled by people who haven't even mastered the fundamentals.

This isn't about missing some golden age that never existed. It's about seeing that something is structurally wrong. The problems aren't about individual people—they're about the system itself. And they're getting worse.

How Education Became All About Getting a Job

Here's what happened: as India's IT and platform economy took off, design schools figured out they could sell themselves as gateways to high-paying jobs. And they did exactly that.

Look at how institutions present themselves now. Placement rates. Corporate partnerships. Alumni working at Google, Meta, Amazon. Workshops named after software tools. Course materials that read like job descriptions. Teachers celebrating LinkedIn updates about student offers like they're major achievements.

NID and IDC—schools that were started to be intellectual leaders in India—are now being run based on these metrics. I'm not saying they've abandoned research entirely, but the balance has shifted. When survival and reputation depend on placement statistics, intellectual risk becomes expensive. It's harder to justify. Easier to cut.

And students aren't stupid. They see the incentive structure clearly. Many arrive already thinking of education as just credentialing for employment. Which is rational! India's economy is brutal, and design jobs pay well. But when both students and institutions align around employability, depth gets squeezed out.

Martha Nussbaum calls this the "education for profit" model, and she's right. But in India it's intensified by scale and economic precarity. The result? Students learn to execute briefs, not question them. They become fluent in design patterns without understanding their origins or assumptions.

The Admissions Bottleneck

The problem starts at the front door.

When demand for design education surged, selection processes struggled to scale. You can't really assess thousands of applicants deeply, so schools started looking for things that are easy to measure: polished presentations, familiarity with current aesthetics, performance in expensive coaching classes.

These things don't correlate well with actual capacity for critical thinking or genuine inquiry. But they're what gets tested.

I don't blame the students. The system selects for the wrong qualities, then makes it worse by lowering standards to accommodate larger cohorts. Teaching adapts downward rather than challenging students upward. Standards erode slowly—you might not even notice—but they do erode.

Donald Schön warned about this decades ago: when professional education focuses too much on technique and not enough on reflection, you get competent operators, not reflective practitioners. That's exactly what's happening. Interaction design is being taught as a set of procedures to follow, not as a way to ask questions.

The Screen Obsession

Ask most people in India what interaction design means, and they'll tell you it's about UI/UX for apps and websites. Screens. That's it.

This is bizarre. Interaction design historically came from human-computer interaction, ergonomics, embodied cognition, tangible computing—fields that explicitly rejected screen-centrism. Paul Dourish's entire argument in Where the Action Is is that interaction isn't about interfaces; it's about embodied action in the world.

Second, India has incredibly rich traditions of material culture, ritual interaction, spatial negotiation, and tacit knowledge. Walk through any informal market or public transport system and you see complex interaction choreographies that have nothing to do with screens. These could be incredible resources for design thinking.

But design education here remains oddly disembodied. Physical computing, speculative objects, performative systems, alternative interfaces—if they appear at all, they're electives. Novelties. Not core methodologies.

Why? Because the industry doesn't hire for that. Job descriptions ask for Figma skills, not critical making. So schools teach Figma. The loop closes tighter.

I've visited universities in India where interaction design teachers genuinely believe students should only learn things that help them build portfolios and get jobs quickly. That's what they think interaction design education should be.

The Elite Bubble of Experimentation

Parallel to the corporate pipeline is experimental work happening in galleries and biennales—new media, tech-art, interactive installations.

Some of it's genuinely good. But a lot of it is aestheticized ambiguity. Artist statements full of buzzwords: AI, data, futures, posthumanism, entanglement. Ask what those words mean in the actual work and you get evasion or silence.

Here's the problem: these projects circulate in closed loops. They're shown to other artists, curators, the occasional academic. Public engagement is minimal. And because peer review is weak and funding criteria are opaque, work gets rewarded for sounding complex rather than being grounded.

Claire Bishop talked about this problem in participatory art years ago—the gap between rhetoric and reality, between claiming social engagement and actually producing it. In India it's amplified because there are so few platforms for serious criticism. We're not comfortable with public disagreement. So weak work accumulates legitimacy just through repetition and visibility.

This matters because when experimentation becomes inaccessible even in intention, it reinforces the perception that contemporary design and art are for insiders only. Elitist. Disconnected. Which justifies ignoring them, which weakens the ecosystem further.

The Silence of Critics

Perhaps the most glaring gap is the absence of writing.

Designs get made. Exhibited. Posted on Instagram. But where's the argumentation? The disagreement? The attempts to situate work within broader intellectual traditions?

Theory circulates, sure. But it's often decorative. Designers drop references—"speculative design," "critical AI," "design justice"—without unpacking them. It's conceptual garnish. Big words attached to shallow practice.

Bruno Latour argued that critique needs to move from debunking to assembling, from tearing things down to composing better alternatives. Fine. But India hasn't even institutionalized critique strongly enough to do the debunking part. Without rigorous writing and debate, the field risks becoming repetitive and intellectually hollow.

Is There a Way Out?

I don't think everything is bad. Small studios and independent educators across India are doing interesting work with indigenous knowledge systems, ethical technology practices, speculative tools. They're blurring boundaries between art, engineering, philosophy, craft.

These efforts exist. They're just marginal.

For the field to actually mature—not just expand—several things would need to change. Education would need to be understood as intellectual formation, not just skill transfer. NID and IDC would need to reassert themselves as intellectual leaders, not staffing agencies. Admissions would need to value curiosity and rigor over polish.

And fundamentally: interaction design needs to be understood not as interface production but as inquiry into relationships between humans, technologies, and worlds. This means embracing friction, ambiguity, politics, ethics, cultural specificity. Not smoothing everything into frictionless flows.

Can that happen? Maybe. But right now the incentives point the other way.

Why These Aren't Just Opinions

I realize this might sound harsh. People could dismiss it as subjective griping or nostalgia for imaginary standards.

So let me be clear: these observations are grounded in documented patterns in higher education globally, intensified in India for specific structural reasons.

On marketization

Universities worldwide have undergone what sociologists call marketization. They increasingly operate like businesses, optimizing for metrics: placement rates, employability statistics, rankings, corporate partnerships. This isn't India-specific, but it hits harder here because of economic precarity and demographic pressure—millions competing for stable jobs.

Slaughter and Rhoades call this "academic capitalism"—when institutions reorient knowledge production toward market value rather than epistemic value. You can see it in curriculum language, evaluation criteria, marketing materials, workshop topics. These aren't random choices. They're structural responses to funding models and accountability pressures.

On admissions

When applicant pools grow rapidly and institutions expand capacity, selection processes default to standardized, scalable methods. These favor surface-level creativity, portfolio polish, coached performance over depth of thinking or research potential.

Research on higher education assessment consistently shows that creative aptitude and critical reasoning are hard to measure in short tests. Meanwhile, applicants approach design education instrumentally because job outcomes matter in an uncertain economy. That's rational. But when both students and institutions optimize for employability, the system structurally discourages depth.

On screen fixation

Interaction design emerged from HCI, ergonomics, embodied cognition, tangible computing. Foundational thinkers like Lucy Suchman and Paul Dourish explicitly argued that interaction is situated, embodied, social—not just interface-based.

But institutional curricula, job descriptions, portfolio expectations, and recruitment tests overwhelmingly equate interaction design with mobile apps, web dashboards, design systems, usability flows. Physical computing, tangible interfaces, spatial interaction, performative systems appear marginally if at all.

This is especially strange in India, where everyday life is deeply interactive beyond screens. Informal infrastructures, gesture-based negotiation, spatial improvisation, embodied knowledge systems. Ignoring these isn't neutral—it reflects epistemic bias toward Western platform-centered models.

On experimental work

Claire Bishop and others have shown how participatory and new-media art can be rhetorically progressive while socially hollow. The issue isn't experimentation itself—it's lack of accountability.

In many funding ecosystems, selection criteria emphasize novelty, alignment with trendy keywords, conceptual framing over methodological rigor, artist statements over demonstrable inquiry. When peer review is weak, vague conceptualism circulates unchallenged.

Rigorous experimentation requires clear research questions, articulated methods, accountable claims, conceptual literacy. Without these, it becomes aestheticized ambiguity.

On fragile leadership

In emerging or weakly theorized fields, symbolic capital can substitute for intellectual depth. When a discipline lacks strong traditions of critique, peer review, or writing, visibility can outweigh substance.

Bourdieu described how cultural fields operate through symbolic power: those who control language, platforms, or institutional access often define legitimacy. When evaluation criteria are unclear, confidence and vocabulary can outperform rigor.

This gets amplified when there are few critical journals, when discourse happens mainly through talks and exhibitions, when mentorship is thin, when disagreement is culturally discouraged. The result: a fragile ecosystem where weak foundations can generate authority.

Final Thoughts

I'm not arguing that industry collaboration is harmful or that employment doesn't matter. I'm saying imbalance has consequences. Healthy fields sustain tension between utility and inquiry, skill and thought, making and questioning, practice and theory. When one side dominates completely, resilience collapses.

This critique is a diagnosis of drift. If interaction design in India is going to be significant—rather than just large—it needs to reclaim its capacity for reflection and disagreement.

Without that, we're just trading purpose for productivity. And design loses its ability to think.