Abstract
Prevailing accounts of co-design remain anchored in Western formal practice. This study repositions Indian folk music as a culturally embedded site of collaborative design. Drawing on Murphy’s anthropology of design and a grounded theory approach, we analysed 1,621 coded segments from interviews with 23 first-generation folk artists across 14 Indian states. We show that musicians function as cultural designers who translate lived experience and shared moral economies into adaptive musical forms through participatory routines: community observation, collective ideation, performance-based prototyping, and iterative calibration through audience feedback. We formalise these dynamics in the Cultural Co-Design Flow model, illuminating how layered semantics, vernacular resources, and formal architectures mediate continuity and situated change. Participants prioritised social transformation over commercial success, foregrounding alternative value systems and collective authorship. We argue for folk music as “co-designed cultural artifact,” with implications for decolonial design theory, plural intellectual-property regimes, and policy frameworks that sustain creative ecosystems.
Keywords
Co-design, Participatory Design, Design Anthropology, Decolonial Design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.671
Citation
Agrawal, A., Chaturvedi, M., and Agrawal, G. (2026) Co-designing culture: A grounded theory of participatory practice in Indian folk music, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.671
Creative Commons License
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Included in
Co-designing culture: A grounded theory of participatory practice in Indian folk music
Prevailing accounts of co-design remain anchored in Western formal practice. This study repositions Indian folk music as a culturally embedded site of collaborative design. Drawing on Murphy’s anthropology of design and a grounded theory approach, we analysed 1,621 coded segments from interviews with 23 first-generation folk artists across 14 Indian states. We show that musicians function as cultural designers who translate lived experience and shared moral economies into adaptive musical forms through participatory routines: community observation, collective ideation, performance-based prototyping, and iterative calibration through audience feedback. We formalise these dynamics in the Cultural Co-Design Flow model, illuminating how layered semantics, vernacular resources, and formal architectures mediate continuity and situated change. Participants prioritised social transformation over commercial success, foregrounding alternative value systems and collective authorship. We argue for folk music as “co-designed cultural artifact,” with implications for decolonial design theory, plural intellectual-property regimes, and policy frameworks that sustain creative ecosystems.