Not its skyline.
Not its roads.
But the systems that quietly hold it together.

Take stormwater drains.

They run for hundreds of kilometres beneath our feet – unseen, unmarked, and rarely thought about.
They shape how the city responds to rain yet only enter public conversation when they fail: flooded streets, overflowing drains, moments of disruption.

That was the starting point for the campaign’s website.

At Mod Foundation, we’re interested in making cities observable – not just visible, but understandable. And that meant asking one simple question:

How do you make something as complex as a stormwater network legible to citizens?

The making of the website wasn’t linear.
(It rarely is.)

Research, design, and testing didn’t follow each other – they unfolded simultaneously.

While one part of the team mapped over 800 kilometres of stormwater networks, another walked along them—testing what it means to read a drain. At the same time, datasets were being cleaned, notes were being compared, and debates around terminology kept surfacing.

And somewhere in between, a small rain-drop mascot named Hani began to take shape—because sometimes, the only way to make a complex system feel approachable is to give it a face.

The website grew out of these overlaps. Out of field notes. Out of debates. Out of the challenge of explaining systems that don’t sit neatly within a single institution but are fragmented across agencies and responsibilities.

Then, slowly, the website began to take shape—not just in structure, but in how it felt.

The design had to hold two things at once: rigour and accessibility.

A palette of blues and greens grounded the platform in water and landscape. Bold, high-contrast typography made dense information easier to navigate.

Our approach was not to provide a platform with information. As information alone does not create awareness, understanding does, and understanding requires visual translation.

Hence, every part of the website is, in some way, an attempt to translate –

Data becomes maps you can explore.
Infrastructure becomes stories you can follow.
Audits become something you can carry into your own neighbourhood.

But what doesn’t show up on the website is just as important.

The testing.
The iterations.
The moments where something that worked on screen failed on the ground.

Before inviting citizens to audit the city, we tested the tools ourselves – walking drains, refining questions, and adjusting how observations are recorded.

Because this was never just a digital project.

It was an attempt to build civic infrastructure – something that helps people see, understand, and engage with the systems that shape their city.

That’s the real making of the Building a Resilient Bengaluru website.

Not the code.

Not the interface.

But helping the city learn to see itself again.

-By Shravya M Ponnaluri