Design History in India
---
Design History in India is a bit like a forgotten library book—interesting, potentially valuable, but inexplicably missing from the shelf when you really need it. Despite a rich post-independence history where tradition and modernity mingled in strange and wonderful ways, hardly anyone thought to write any of it down. I suspect it’s because designers, by nature, are far too busy designing things to stop and write about them.
Last week I stumbled upon one of the strangest and most delightful stories of forgotten tech and design history: the Apple Newton in India. Yes, the Newton—the 1980s precursor to the iPhone and iPad that promised the future but tripped and fell into the past instead. Someone I met in Ahmedabad, who’d been on the front lines of this saga, told me about how Apple, in a final fit of desperation, decided to bring the Newton to India. The idea? Sell it to the government. You know, as one does when one’s cutting-edge tech product is at death’s door.
The plan was simple: Apple would pitch the Newton as a revolutionary tool for social development, something field workers could use to collect data. And because governments like buying things in large quantities (especially if it sounds vaguely useful), this might just save the Newton. The best part? They even carried out research in rural Rajasthan, where, much to everyone’s surprise, people actually liked and understood it. Sticky that Apple products are, field workers couldn't get their hands off them. Imagine someone in the middle of a desert casually collecting soil data on a device that looked like it belonged in Star Trek.
For a year, everything was going well. And then, in true Apple fashion, they pulled the plug. The Newton project here was shelved.
Of course, this reminded me of another quirky bit of design/tech history: the Simputer, a handheld device designed in Bangalore in the 1990s. If the Newton was the eccentric aunt, the Simputer was the mad scientist cousin—another ingenious, mostly forgotten attempt at reshaping the future by Indian technologists that didn't work out. This thing even had an accelerometer. Yes, you heard that right—an accelerometer, in the ‘90s! To demo it they created a Ball Bearing Maze game, which, had the Simputer survived, would’ve probably been more addictive than Snake on your trusty Nokia. But alas, like all good things, it vanished before we could waste hours tilting LCD screens in sheer joy.
What really gets to me is this: there are so many stories like these lurking around in dusty corners, waiting to be told. Yet, as the original storytellers grow older (and some shuffle off this mortal coil), we’re losing these tales faster than we can say, “Please back up your hard drive.”
History is slipping through our fingers, and I can’t help but think that somewhere in all this mess of forgotten devices and discarded dreams, there’s a manual on how to fix it all. It's probably filed under "Things We’ll Get To Eventually."
---
No comments yet