Beyond the Designer: Everyday Object Adaptation and Household Problem-Solving in Indian Homes

Abstract

Design does not stop at the studio door. When a household object breaks, becomes unsuitable, or outlives its original purpose, the people who own it often repair it, modify it, or give it a new job, usually without any design training. This paper examines that informal activity as everyday design intelligence, using Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, as its local context. It combines secondary research (scholarship on everyday design, repair and jugaad; government material on reuse and waste reduction; media documentation of household reuse) with a small online survey of three Bhopal residents aged 18 or above, collected in October 2026. Rather than treating adaptation as a single act of reuse, the paper reads it as a sequence of decisions and proposes the Adaptation Loop, a five-stage working framework: Notice, Decide, Source, Make, Judge. The survey shows that all three respondents met household object problems often or sometimes; that two drew on an online idea or tutorial and one on personal experience; and that two reported a complete solution and one a mostly complete one. Respondents also named recurring barriers: finding tools and materials, knowing how to begin, durability, time, cost and safety. Because N = 3, the findings are descriptive and are used to illustrate and test the usefulness of the framework, not to estimate behaviour in the wider population. The paper closes with design implications and a research agenda for larger, observation-based studies.