Designing for Policy Dialogue: Reimaging Mobility in India at COP30

Image courtesy: India Climate Collaborative

Some projects challenge your design skills. Some challenge your storytelling instincts. And then there are the rare ones that challenge your understanding of how an entire system works. The book titled, 'Mobility Reimagined, 10 ways Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) can transform Transportation', designed by Crossed Design, in collaboration with WRI India, was one such project.

Image courtesy: The Guardian

The book made its debut at COP30 in Brasil, a space where the world’s mobility, sustainability, infrastructure, and climate thinkers shape the agenda for the future. There, it served not just as a publication but as a narrative instrument designed to spark dialogue around a central question:

How Digital Public Infrastructure can address the socially complex and culturally delicate future of Urban Mobility in India?

Urban mobility in India is a multilayered ecosystem. It is an intricate web of dialectical forces such as people & products; private-public transport networks; manufacturers & service providers; financial institutions & payment systems; governance & policy; and data & cultural contexts. These layers interact in a way that is chaotic, yet synergistic. WRI’s mobility experts had already verbalised these realities through rich scenarios, detailed pain-points, and future opportunities. However, the goal of design was to make complex interdependencies immediately understandable without oversimplifying the realities on the ground. In order to achieve this, Visual narratives had to be rooted in the lived experiences of people. Systems maps were anchored in India’s mobility context and they were structured to reveal multi-layered relationships.

Designing this book began not with colors or layouts, but with answering larger questions eg:

How do millions of people actually move through Indian cities? Where do systems break?

Where does dignity disappear? 

Rather than illustrating isolated ideas, the design sought to convey systems thinking to help policymakers see, not scattered problems, but a connected ecosystem.

This helped in representing complex ideas & future systems in a way that enables policymakers to identify gaps, envision future possibilities, visualise DPI driven solutions and recognise leverage points for action.

The book facilitated policymakers to empathise with the real people in real systems — their journeys, their frictions and their possibilities. The book helped translate knowledge into choices that can improve the daily lives of millions who navigate India’s transport systems every single day.

Design may not directly write policy, but it has the potential to illuminate pathways. It brings human experience to data, highlights invisible patterns & provides clarity where complexity dominates. Design in this context was not ornamental rather, it was functional: a tool for insight, clarity, and convergent action. Design became more than a medium. It became a quiet catalyst for systemic change, shaping decisions that ripple far beyond the pages.

Image courtesy: India Climate Collaborative

This work aligns with broader conversations around Digital Public Infrastructure for People and Planet, exemplified at COP30 by the India Climate Collaborative (ICC). In partnership with Beckn, WRI India, and the DPI for People and Planet Innovation Challenge (DPI4PP), ICC’s session “Digital Public Infrastructure for People and Planet: Local Pathways to Global Action” highlighted how DPI empowers communities, connects innovators, financiers, and governments, and drives climate action.