Direct Create is the founding practice of Cultural Intelligence, a discipline that pairs modern capability with civilizational depth, restoring specificity to a world that industrialization has homogenized. The practice reads culture at its source, organizes it into knowledge any design discipline can use, and works as the cultural intelligence layer alongside the design team on hospitality, residential, institutional, and publication projects.
The end product. A place-and-purpose Study a designer builds on, delivered as a deck of Chapters and Exhibits. Hyper-local by design. A substrate, never a solution.
The analytical framework that reads a craft tradition as a language of vocabulary, grammar, and expression, and holds the artisan as the speaker of that language. Distinct from Daniel Coyle's 2018 book of the same name.
The published body of knowledge in the discipline. Open, dated, citable. The wiki, the essays, the Annotations, the workshop. The surface through which the discipline is released to the world.
Direct Create runs a five-stage process called Culture Stacking: Scoping, Fieldwork, Mapping, Argument, Edition. The first three gather and organize; the fourth gives the study its shape through Emphasis; the fifth composes it into the delivered Study. The method is non-deterministic by design. The same Findings under different Emphasis produce different and equally valid Studies.
A Culture Stack for a luxury residential tower at Worli, Mumbai, developed alongside Foster + Partners. Mumbai read as accumulation, from fishing village to financial capital, with Worli's textile-mill heritage and Maharashtra's Warli folk-art tradition woven into one residential argument.
A Culture Stack for a luxury hospitality property in Coorg, Kodagu. Kodava cultural substrate and Western Ghats forest ecology read as one positioning, with a coffee-and-honey agricultural thread. Currently under wraps; more to share soon.
Three handmade floorcoverings for Broadway Malyan's Mumbai studio. Kharad weaving, Panja dhurrie, Bhadohi tufting. Mumbai written in wool and cotton.
The Substack and the Jaipur Dialogues. The practice's public articulation of Cultural Intelligence, written in the open and tested with peers.
Rajeev Lunkad is the founder of Direct Create and Direct Create Projects. Architect and designer of three decades. Author of the Jal Mahal Mansagar book. Builder of the Culture Stack and the Culture Stacking method that produces it, and of the canonical "What is Culture Code?" talk.
Every concept, project, craft, and person the practice cites lives in the open reference. Dated, sourced, citable, and free to read.