The Story
OrganizerWhen Kyoorius launched Designyatra in 2006, Indian design lacked a national stage of real ambition: a place where the country's designers could gather, hear from the world's best, and see themselves as a community. Nearly two decades on, Designyatra has become exactly that, India's biggest and most celebrated design conference, and, in the words of Creative Review, one of the best-curated design conferences in the world.
Held each year in Goa, in recent editions at the Taj Cidade de Goa, Horizon, and organised by Kyoorius, the not-for-profit creative platform founded by Rajesh Kejriwal, Designyatra unfolds over three days as a mix of long-format talks, workshops, experience zones and a designers' pop-up market. Its programming spans the full breadth of design, architecture and interiors, branding and communication, digital, experiential, graphic, motion, packaging, product and type, and its stage has hosted a roll-call of global figures, from typographic iconoclast David Carson and book-cover legend Chip Kidd to illustrators, product designers and studio founders from around the world, alongside India's own leading designers. Each edition takes a provocative theme, from On The Contrary to Academy of Play, that frames the conversation.
Around the conference, Kyoorius has built a wider design ecosystem: the Kyoorius Design Awards, running since 2013, honour excellence across visual communication, marketing, architecture and interiors with their distinctive Elephant trophies, and a quarterly magazine documents the field. With more than eighteen thousand delegates having attended since its start, and the 2026 edition set for 10 to 12 September, Designyatra has become the definitive platform where India's design community learns, connects and grows.
Designyatra is significant as the central institution of India's design community and a driver of its creative economy. By bringing world-class design thinking to India annually and giving Indian designers a stage of genuine scale and ambition, it has helped professionalise and connect a field central to contemporary visual and material culture. Its awards set benchmarks for excellence across design disciplines, and its themes and speakers shape national conversation about design's role in business and society. As a sustained, well-curated platform, it has been instrumental in raising the visibility and self-conception of Indian design.
As design becomes ever more central to India's economy and culture, Designyatra matters as the community's definitive annual gathering, connecting Indian designers to global practice and to each other, setting standards through its awards, and framing the field's direction. For the Atlas, it is a distinctive node linking design, the creative economy and India's cultural production.
