At a stone workshop just outside Jaipur, things move fast, but not in the way you’d expect. Inside Frozen Music, a bespoke stone atelier outside Jaipur, India, designers and master artisans work side by side, cutting, shaping and testing materials in real time. It’s here that the Shakti Design Residency comes into focus.
The premise is simple: bring international designers into India’s most skilled workshops and let the work happen there. No distance, no outsourcing, just direct collaboration. Across the residency, that might mean working with glassblowers shaping molten forms, metalworkers hammering brass into suspended structures, or textile artisans building complex woven compositions from region-specific dyes and fibres.
For Shalini Misra, the idea for the Shakti Design Residency came from a frustration that kept repeating itself. “It came directly from the experience of as an interior designer,” she says. “When you work seriously with material and making, when craft is not decoration but structural thinking in your practice, you inevitably start to trace things back to source.” What she found wasn’t a lack of talent, it was the opposite.
The gap wasn’t in the work. It was in the system, she recollects. “The problem wasn't the quality of the work, it was that the systems connecting making to market, and making to media, simply hadn't been built for them.” That disconnect becomes obvious the moment context changes. “Put an object into the right conversation, the right exhibition, the right room, the ‘right’ circle and suddenly its intelligence becomes legible to an entirely new audience,” she says. “There is nothing different about the object in these places, but situation and context shift perception.”
That’s the space Shakti is trying to occupy. “I realised that what was missing wasn't ambition on the part of the artisans, nor was it interest on the part of the international design world. It was the infrastructure between them. Shakti is an attempt to build some of that infrastructure.”
What actually happens inside the residency
The residency runs as an intensive, month-long programme. Designers are embedded directly into workshops working with stone carvers, metalworkers and textile specialists with an expectation to produce new work on-site.
The work is made, tested and finished in situ, often using techniques that are becoming increasingly rare. In recent editions, this has included everything from sculptural glass lighting based on some of India’s earliest glassmaking traditions to undulating cane structures developed with artisans in Nagaland, where material is pushed to its limits.
Take thikri, a mirror mosaic tradition from Rajasthan. “Tiny fragments of glass are cut and set by hand into elaborate geometric and floral compositions,” Misra explains. “The level of precision required is considerable… and I have commissioned it for residential work and seen first-hand how few studios can still execute it at the standard the tradition demands.” In a residency context, this kind of work might be translated into contemporary surfaces or furniture pieces, but the underlying technique remains unchanged.
Or jali, the carved lattice screens found across Indian architecture. “The carved lattice work in stone or brick requires a mason who understands both the structural architecture of the screen and the geometric language that gives it meaning,” she says. “There is a tendency now to replicate the visual effect through casting or CNC cutting, which produces something that looks related but is categorically different.” Within the residency, working with these makers often shifts a designer’s understanding of both structure and ornament entirely. That difference — between replication and real knowledge — is exactly what the residency is built around.
The same applies to materials. Jaipur’s blue pottery, for example, breaks expectations entirely. “It uses no clay in the conventional sense but a composite of quartz, ground glass and gum,” she says. “The making process is unlike almost anything else.” In practice, this can result in objects that feel visually familiar but are materially unexpected.
And then there’s parchin kari, the painstaking inlay of semi-precious stone into marble. “Each fragment of stone is cut to fit a recess carved into the marble surface. There is no tolerance for error,” she explains. “The craftspeople who can do this at the level the tradition demands are very few.” In some cases, designers have adapted this technique into highly detailed contemporary pieces that rely entirely on that same precision.
Not about preserving — about keeping things alive
For Misra, none of this is about nostalgia. “The word preservation is interesting because I don't think of it primarily in terms of conservation, freezing something in place,” she says. “What I want is for these traditions to remain alive and generative.”
That means letting them evolve and letting designers be shaped by them. In many cases, the final outcome of a residency project looks nothing like what a designer initially imagined, precisely because the process redirects it. “They need to be in conversation with the present, with contemporary design, with international audiences,” she adds. “That's what the residency is attempting: not to preserve craft as artefact, but to sustain it as a living practice.”
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Part of what makes Indian craft so powerful is its specificity. “Indian craft traditions are not generalised. They are extraordinarily particular to a region, a community, a material,” she says. That level of detail can’t be scaled or replicated. “The loin-loom of Nagaland is not interchangeable with the weaving traditions of Rajasthan… That granularity of knowledge… is something that no industrial process can replicate and no archive can fully capture.” It’s also what allows each residency project to feel particular to a place, rather than abstracted from it.
And crucially, it’s not lacking in sophistication. “Some of these makers are solving formal and material problems of genuine complexity,” she says. “The intelligence is already there.”
Who gets to take part
The residency opens up globally. “In May we issue the worldwide open call for entries,” Misra says. “We want to hear from designers at different career stages, working across disciplines, from anywhere in the global design community.”
The process is structured; applications, scoring, interviews, but the selection isn’t about finished ideas. “The residency isn't looking for designers who already know what they want to make,” she says. “It's looking for designers who are rigorous enough, and open enough, to let the encounter with the maker genuinely shape what emerges.” That openness is key.
From workshop to Milan
That willingness to be informed by place is already materialising, and the design community will soon see the results firsthand. This year, the residency returns to Milan Design Week 2026 with a presentation of its second group of residents at the 2026 Alcova fair, with year-one participant Duyi Han shaping the exhibition design. In addition to Zofia Ursic, the participants will include Rodolfo Agrella, in residence with the atelier Vikram Goyal Studio; Victoire de Brantes with Jaipur Rugs; Daniel Garber with Klove Studio; and Tadeáš Podracký and Maria Tyakina, each working with Heirloom Naga Centre. Because, as Misra puts it, the issue was never the craft itself. It was everything around it.
The residents’ projects are on show from April 20–26, 2026, at Alcova, Milan. Pieces will be available in limited editions through Misra’s online platform, Curio.Space.
