Handmade Over Hype: Three Indian Designers at Parul Institute of Design on Why Craft Beats the Computer

On the very 2nd day of the VFDF aka Vadodara Film & Design Festival at Parul Institute of Technology, 3 famous designers with different materials, practices and business models sat on one panel to answer one specific question –

Handmade – Is this word a marketing trick that allows multiple brands for charging more, or is it a design philosophy that produces different work?

The panel was moderated by Sameer Sarkar, titled Handmade over Hype. On stage, the panelists were Dhruvkant Amin (furniture designer, founder of Tectona Grandis Furniture), Jwalant Mahadevwala (architect, co-founder of Black Design Studio) and Pravinsinh Solanki (bamboo designer & educator, as famous as Bamboo Man of India). The host opened up with a question that set the room’s temperature – when did homes stop being real & start being for Instagram solely?

Dhruvkant Amin runs Tectona Grandis Furniture, named after the scientific name for teak wood. The company works with reclaimed teak and gives old wood a second life. It started ten years ago in a single workshop. Today it runs a factory with over 85 employees and has worked with over 2,000 clients.

Amin’s opening move was to ask the PID students to define design. Responses included: something you don’t notice, something that solves problems, something that blends into life. Amin agreed with all three and added his own working definition:

• Easy to make
• Long-lasting
• Environmentally responsible
• Capable of making people happy

He spoke about the Threads of Empowerment project, led by his wife and co-founder Jalpa Amin. The programme trains women from rural backgrounds in textile work, gives them salaried jobs making fabrics for Tectona Grandis, and integrates their output into the company’s commercial products. This is not a charity adjacent to the business. It is part of the supply chain. The point he made to students: a serious business has to give back as part of its structure, not as a side activity.

Amin’s advice to PID students was specific. Spend time in the workshop. Draw constantly. Understand how things are physically made. Be patient and disciplined. Good product designers are built in the workshop, not the studio.

Jwalant Mahadevwala co-founded Black Design Studio after working at Zaha Hadid Architects in London. His practice blends computational design with handcraft. The constraint that shaped his philosophy: what the London office could do with robotic fabrication and 3D printing cannot be replicated in India at the same cost.

Mahadevwala’s central case study was a project to build an Islamic-art Muqarnas ceiling. The Muqarnas form is a complex three-dimensional geometric pattern used in Islamic architecture. Building one using the robotic fabrication methods he had learned at Zaha Hadid would have cost over Rs 1 crore in India.

His team’s alternative: break the computational design into 30,000 individual pieces. Send the digital geometry specifications to carpenters and miniature artists in Channapatna (a town in Karnataka known for traditional wood-craft and toy-making). The Channapatna artisans hand-cut every piece to the computational specifications. The ceiling got assembled. The cost was a fraction of the robotic process.

“The grand idea has to adapt to the local resources and the human hands available to you.”

The lesson Mahadevwala drew was not that robots are bad. Robots do certain things faster and more accurately than humans can. The lesson was that importing a foreign fabrication method into India without adapting to local skills is an expensive mistake. Indian design education that trains students to work only with imported tools produces designers who cannot cost-engineer for the Indian market. If you’re interested in having a design career at the intersection of AI & Design, enrol into PID’s B.Des User Experience & Interaction Design with AI program!

Mahadevwala cited additional projects where the same principle applied:

• Vayu: an art installation designed to look like moving wind, made of thousands of sized and colored wooden pieces. The computational output was sent to Channapatna artisans who hand-made every piece
• Furniture made with a KUKA robot arm for rough cutting, followed by finishing by a craftsman named Babu Kaka who used his hands to feel the edges and scrape them to the right comfort
• The Bucky Gallery, a building made entirely of 1mm thin metal sheets, built by two people in a tiny workshop using a numbered puzzle system

The point Mahadevwala made: machines do not have feelings or feedback. Only a human hand can know when an edge is smooth enough to touch without cutting skin. You too can master this skill by enrolling in B.Des in Interior & Furniture Design Program of Parul University!

Design in the Age of AI: why homogeneity is the real risk

Pravinsinh Solanki is known as the Bamboo Man of India for his work developing bamboo as a serious design material. He studied in Italy and designed stores around the world, but said he was not widely known until he started using Indian bamboo in his work. That shift rooted his practice in Indian material culture.

Pravinsinh Solanki’s argument on the panel was the most philosophical. India’s biggest strength as a design nation, he said, is craft. Every state in India has its own unique handmade skills. The country’s relationship to handmade work is not a marketing strategy. It is a several-thousand-year-old material culture still alive in rural communities.

“No computer can bring the body and the soul together.”

His distinction between craft and handmade was sharp:

• Craft: belongs to a culture and tradition. A specific technique rooted in a specific community
• Handmade: the effort of a single human being making something. Any human, any object

Using this distinction, Solanki was direct with Amin’s earlier point. Many businesses do use the word craft as a marketing trick to charge more. This happens. But even when it happens, the money eventually reaches the poor craftsperson whose work is being sold. The exploitation and the support are in the same supply chain. The challenge for Indian design is to build systems where the craft-maker benefits more than the brand.

Solanki’s warning to PID students was direct. Students who spend most of their waking hours on screens are losing touch with the physical feel of materials. AI and generative tools can produce drawings and renderings easily. What AI cannot do is build a chair, cut bamboo, stitch a sari, or feel the weight of a material. Students who learn to make with their hands will always be in demand, because the world’s ability to generate images is infinite but its ability to produce physical objects is constrained.

A PID student named Neha Kumari asked whether the pursuit of perfection in design work stops designers from appreciating the mistakes that make handmade objects special.

The three panelists disagreed productively on this question.

Solanki said designers should always aim for excellence. You cannot be lazy and call it handmade charm. If you accept poor quality in your work, that acceptance spreads to other parts of your life.

Amin took a more balanced position. Yes, aim for excellence. But know when to stop. A designer who refuses to finish a piece because it is not perfect never ships. Value is created when the work leaves the workshop.

Mahadevwala added that the question of preservation and tradition is subtle. Trying to force a traditional craft to change produces inauthentic work. Letting a craft evolve slowly under its own logic preserves its essence while allowing it to remain contemporary. If design is what you are extremely passionate about, enrol into PID’s Bachelor of Design (B.Des) in Communication Design course and say yes to your dream package + sure shot placement!

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A student noticed that all three panelists had worked internationally but their designs still read as Indian. The student asked how they balanced international exposure with Indian roots.

Solanki answered from personal experience. He went to Italy for design school. He designed stores around the world. He was not famous until he started using Indian bamboo. The international exposure taught him technique. Rooting the technique in Indian material culture gave him a distinctive voice. The student who wants to be globally relevant, he argued, should stop copying other countries and start looking at what is specific to India.

Amin shared a specific failure to make the same point. He once worked with a Swiss client and used oil to finish the wood. Oil finishes work well in Indian humidity. They do not work in Swiss winter. He had to learn to use a different polish specifically for European markets.

The lesson: clients can teach you. Making mistakes in international contexts is not a sign of weakness. It is the only way to adapt.

The Handmade Over Hype panel was one of VFDF’s most attended sessions. The reason was structural. PID’s Bachelor of Design in Product Design and Bachelor of Design in Interior and Furniture Design programmes both train students who will spend their careers deciding between machine-produced and hand-crafted approaches. Every student in those programmes will eventually face a version of the Muqarnas ceiling decision: import the foreign method at high cost, or adapt to the hands and skills available locally.

The panel did not resolve the question. It sharpened it. Designers who treat handmade as a marketing adjective will lose to designers who treat it as a design philosophy. The question for students is which of the two they want to be.

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