Sessions | Talks
10:30 - 10:45 ⋅ Afternoon
Bangalore International Centre
Majestic in Bengalure handles 3 lakh daily commuters, 300+ routes and 36 platforms. Its maps hadn't changed in 20 years. This talk traces what it took to redesign them.
Shubhra Agarwal
Creative Lead·Bengawalk
Majestic is the heart of Bengaluru's transit system. Over 3 lakh people pass through it every day, navigating 300+ bus routes, 36 platforms, a railway station, and now a metro interchange. For twenty years, the maps guiding them had not changed.
Shubhra worked with BMTC, WRI India, and Villgro at Bengawalk to change that. This talk traces the full process behind the redesign: from user research and site analysis to categorising public data, building a design system, gathering feedback across multiple iterations, and finally implementing it on-site.
Before any of that could happen, 150+ routes had to be made skimmable in seconds. Relationships between platforms and their directions across the city had to be made visible for the first time. And the people who actually use the station, not designers, not planners, had to be the starting point.
The talk also covers the part that rarely gets discussed: working with government. Getting civic bodies to see the value of user-centric design, to invest in a pilot, and to trust that good wayfinding is worth the effort. The argument is simple but not easy to make: cities that work for people start with design that starts with people. And that can begin with one map at one station.
Shubhra Agarwal is a multidisciplinary designer and filmmaker working at the intersection of people, culture and planet. Shubhra graduated from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India and works on visual design, web design, data viz and filmmaking projects.
Their award-winning short film '火焰山的人们 People of the Flaming Mountain', one of the only films on Chinese Uighur Muslims, is recognised and celebrated across the globe. Shubhra believes that the goal informs medium, not the other way around, and uses both design and film to achieve it. Their recent interests include public transit signage, birding and travel-food memoirs.