Jugaad: India’s Hack Culture Meets West Coast Design Thinking
In India, my uncle once repaired a ceiling fan with a spoon, a shoelace and a piece of an old radio. In a Portland co-working space, I later watched a team spend an hour arranging colour-coded sticky notes to “ideate around airflow problems.” Both were trying to innovate. Only one carried a real risk of electric shock.
💡 QUICK INTEL
Key Term: Jugaad = frugal, improvised problem-solving
India Context: Scarcity, unreliable systems, big families, small budgets
West Coast Context: Frameworks, funding, formal processes
Takeaway: Each can learn from the other
What “jugaad” actually means on the ground
Jugaad is Hindi slang for getting something done with limited resources, often by bending rules and expectations just enough to make it all work. A delivery cart turned into a makeshift school bus. A broken chair stabilized with bricks. One internet connection shared across several homes through a web of improvised wiring. You see it in Indian streets, homes and small businesses that find workarounds for bureaucracy and bad infrastructure.
It is tempting to romanticize this as pure ingenuity. Jugaad is clever and often necessary, but it has a shadow side. It can normalize unsafe setups and patchwork fixes in places where structural change is actually needed. That ceiling fan my uncle repaired really should have been replaced. The quick fix kept it running while also postponing a safer solution.
How West Coast “design thinking” frames the same instinct
On the U.S. West Coast, especially in tech, problem-solving is packaged. Workshops offer “design sprints.” Post-its bloom on whiteboards. People talk about “minimum viable products” and “user journeys.” The basic impulse is similar to jugaad: test cheaply, learn fast, iterate. The difference lies in documentation, power and budget.
West Coast Indians often sit in the overlap. They grew up watching parents repair pressure cookers instead of replacing them, then joined offices where every change request comes with wireframes and decks. One world operates on scarcity and hustle. The other assumes time, space and venture capital.
What happens when you carry one culture into the other
In India, adding a bit of West Coast structure to jugaad can be powerful. Startups in Bangalore and Gurgaon take raw survival skills and layer tools on top: user research, testing, documentation. The result is fewer one-off fixes and more resilient systems.
In Portland or Seattle, injecting a little Indian-style pragmatism into over-designed processes can be just as healthy. Not every problem needs three committees and a long pilot. Sometimes you simply test a low-risk change, measure the impact and then decide whether to scale.
“India taught me that perfection is optional if the train still runs. The West Coast taught me that some trains should stop long enough to repair the tracks properly.”
— Maya
The Verdict: Jugaad and design thinking are not enemies. They are complementary instincts. Learn when to hack and when to rebuild and you will move more gracefully between Indian streets and West Coast boardrooms, with fewer dangerous ceiling fans in both.