IOT For India.

When we are designing a IOT product for Indian Homes, Its very crucial that we understand the user’s context. Their religious & cultural beliefs, background in education & tech savviness, their relationship with people & products around them.

We Indians are not very fond of buying new things, we believe in fixing / repairing the products, recycling from friends / relatives, and second hand buys.

Whenever we are introducing a new product for indian homes, I’m talking of those upper middle class home not the rich — super classy residential villas. We have to amalgamate the new technology into their antiquated world. This could be explained with a metaphor of a Tree and a vine.

Indian homes are the ancient tree, we can’t just plant another tree and wait for them to grow into one tree and expect the birds to start nesting in the new tree. IOT, or any medium of technology has to grow on the tree as a vine, to meld or merge into the world of the tree’s residence.

The journey is quite perplexing for any designer. It would take a lots of iteration / user testing and sweet time to reach the solution, a dream of making indian homes smarter and simpler.

I do believe we are dependent of western technology, but we can’t just ape the process and force it on our country’s users. Our lifestyle, belief, reasoning are very different from the west.

For example, a baby monitoring device is not a need for an indian homes, because we never make the baby sleep alone in a different room, even if we does a mother or a relative is always close to the baby. We should make sure that by building a baby monitor, we are not changing this behaviour over time instead of coming up with a better / different solution.

There is a crucial need for a thoughtful design solution with a bit of indian philosophy merged into it. Being designers from India, we play a pivotal role in designing our next generation’s behaviour and lifestyle. To learn from Japan’s products designed keeping their users in mind, instead of importing it from west, I do agree the industrial revolution made it possible.

It’s easy to say Indians and their homes are not ready for Smart Devices. They’ll never be. Instead of framing technology smart and it’s users as dumb. We have to design the it to understand the user’s context and be useful to them.

It’s time to learn and design better for India, It may be an IOT product or an app. Everything plays a role in our lives and changes a bit about us to grow into a new person, group and generation. Because everything we design, will design us back.

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