Web of Connections: Indian Design education with influences from the HfG Ulm

Web of Connections: Indian Design education with influences from the HfG Ulm

M P Ranjan

Professor– Design Chair, CEPT University, Ahmedabad

I was invited to write a reflective piece on the connections between the design pedagogy of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and that of the HfG Ulm to be included in a proposed issue of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s magazine issue that would look back at the impact of the Bauhaus and Hfg Ulm on the Tropical nations of the world long after both these German schools were shut down for different reasons. I have been researching their connections with India for many years and this invitation gave me an opportunity to continue my research a bit deeper into the connections between the schools. I interviewed four former NID faculty who had studied and worked closely with faculty from HfG Ulm in the early 60’s when the NID was being founded at Ahmedabad and used this to build my paper. Interesting new facts were revealed in these interviews and we will need to do more before we have a deeper understanding of the real influences and how these have shaped the foundation of design education in India.

My paper was not carried in the Bauhaus 5 – Tropics issue released in June 2013 but on pages 76 to 79 they carried a brief interview with me about a set of questions that their editors had set for me to respond. However, they have also provided a link to my blog “Design for India” www.designforindia.comand their own website at www.bauhaus-online.de  for extracts from my paper that is reproduced below in full text.

Image: Paramanand Dalwadi, H Kumar Vyas, Gajanan Upadhayay and Jayanti Panchal — all former Faculty of NID who had close connections with HfG Ulm in the 60’s and later.

Web of Connections: Indian Design education with influences from the HfG Ulm

M P Ranjan

Professor – Design Chair, CEPT University, Ahmedabad

Paper prepared at the invitation of the Bauhaus Dessau foundation for inclusion in "Bauhaus 5 ‑—Tropics" magazine. in June 2013

Prelude

In his 1999 article titled – The “Ulm Model” in the Periphery – Gui Bonsiepe discussed the various manifestations of the “Ulm Model” especially its reach and establishment In India in the process of bringing design education to India. He states – “HfG influences had a part in the founding of the National Institute of Design (NID) at Ahmedabad in India, where HfG faculty members gave guest courses (Hans Gugelot, Herbert Lindinger, Wolfgang Siol, Christian Staub and others). These institutions based themselves in policy, design, curriculum and teaching methods (problem based learning in design courses), on the experience of the HfG. This experience was brought to them through contacts with HfG faculty members, through Ulm alumni who came there to teach, and also through the publications of the HfG, especially the magazine Ulm.” This statement from “Ulm Design” (1999) provided the setting for me to research deeper the connections between HfG Ulm and NID in the early years as well as in contemporary times particularly in the context of the invitation from the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation who are setting up a retrospective of the exhibition that had been shown in Calcutta in 1922 that included works of the Bauhaus of which very little is known here in India in the context of the arrival of modern design and its taking roots here in India. Little is also known about the various connections between the HfG Ulm and NID and I used this occasion to try and correct these lacunae.

Image: HfG Ulm Faculty (from top left clockwise) — 1. Visiting faculty at HfG Ulm and at NID - Charles Eames. 2. Hans Gugelot with architecture students at NID in 1965, 3. Horst Rittel author of "wicked problems" and 4. Tomas Maldonado author of "Design, Nature, Revolution".

I had detailed interviews and video recorded four former NID faculty who had substantial contact with Ulm and Ulm faculty in the 60’s and 70’s and these interviews as well as other resources and information available with me I proceeded to build the final article. I interviewed Kumar Vyas who started the Product Design Programme at NID in 1966 after spending 11 months at Ulm in Gugelot's office in 1965-66, Paramanand Dalwadi who set up the NID Photography Department was a student of Christian Staub at NID in 1963-66 and Wolfgang Siol at Ulm in 1970. Gajanan Upadhayay started the Furniture Design activity at NID and worked with Hans Gugelot during his brief visit in 1965 and finally Jayanti A Panchal who also worked with Hans Gugelot in 1965 on the tangential fan project at NID and later went to Gugelot office in 1970-71 as a product-engineering designer. All of them had intense interactions with Prof Hans Gugelot when he visited NID in 1965. As we know Hans Gugelot passed away in 1965 some time after his return from India but not before he had set up the faculty training exposure programme for Kumar Vyas to undertake at Ulm over 11 months in 1965-66. I also got in touch by phone with Prof Sudha Nadkarni in Mumbai and reviewed his papers for the Ulmer Model Exhibitions in 2010 at Ahmedabad and Bangalore. Sudha Nadkarni studied at HfG Ulm from 1962 to 1966 and came back to India to work at NID 1966 to 1969 and then went on to set up the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay in 1970. Kirit Patel of CEPT University had apprenticed in Frei Otto's studio in the 80's and this interview too provided insights about the approach to design that was followed by one of the prominent guest faculty at HfG Ulm.

Herbert Lindinger in his forward to the book “Ulm Design” tells us that the HfG Ulm had been through six phases of development and before the NID teams interacted with them they had already developed a critical approach to design education and design theory that was well documented and disseminated by the Ulm magazine 1 to 21 from 1955 to 1968. He states – “The third phase, 1956-58, was dominated by the teaching of Otl Aicher, Maldonado, Gugelot and Vordemberge-Gildewart. These instructors tried to build a new and markedly closer relationship between design, science and technology. This was the first manifestation of the Ulmer Modell, the Ulm model, which has lost none of its relevance. The HfG evolved a model of training that aimed to give designers a new, and rather more modest and cautious, understanding of their own role. As design was now to concern itself with more complex things than chairs and lamps, the designer could no longer regard himself, within the industrial and aesthetic process in which he operated, as an artist, a superior being. He must now aim to work as part of a team, involving scientists, research departments, sales people, and technicians, in order to realize his own vision of a socially responsible shaping – Gestaltung – of the environment. Under Maldonado, a new Basic Course came into being, which broke away more and more clearly from Bauhaus concepts and absorbed the lessons of perceptual theory and semiotics.”

The National Institute of Design (NID)

It was this Basic Course that Kumar Vyas understood deeply at Ulm and introduced to the new batch of Product Design students when the Postgraduate course was offered to graduate engineers in 1967. The NID documentation from 1964-69 shows examples of the Basic Design assignments as well as the early projects and the methods used in these projects that echo the Ulm paradigm as well as the muted shades of grey and colours that were a hallmark of the HfG Ulm way. According to him, while the spirit of Ulm may have directed the assignments a lot of innovations were brought into the teaching to meet local needs and challenges. I joined NID as a student in the postgraduate programme in Furniture Design in 1969 and Kumar Vyas, Sudha Nadkarni and Rolf Misol conducted the interview. While the Furniture Design projects that started from day one were formulated by Misol and his teacher and chief consultant, Arno Votler, the Basic Design assignments conducted by Kumar Vyas were the same as those done by the Product Design students. The evening discussions that we had with the Product Design students and those from Graphics and Textiles did show different threads of pedagogy that were being explored at NID by the various departments and each was informed by the specific positions of the selected consultants and visiting faculty who were involved in these programmes. While Product Design was based on Ulm the Graphic Design programme was modeled after the Swiss school at Basel and the Textile Design programme came from Cranbrook and the Scandinavian traditions of weaving. Furniture Design and Ceramic Design had German consultants to set the curriculum and to conduct the early programmes. Arno Vottler and Hans Theo Baumann developed the Furniture Design and Ceramic Design programmes respectively.

Image. H K Vyas conducting class at NID in 1967 and Exhibition at NID of basic design work done in the first Product Design programme in 1969 and GIRNAR scooter designed by H K Vyas and Sudha Nadkarni with J A Panchal in 1969.

NID too had a large number of visiting consultants and guest faculty members in the formative years and many were involved in project work where students actively participated. The first of a string of major exhibition and multidisciplinary projects was the designing of the Nehru Exhibition and in 1964 the entire team of faculty and students in the Graphic Design and Architecture programmes were involved with the team from Eames Office and this helped set up a very vibrant work culture at the new Institute located in a building that was designed by Le Corbusier where NID had access to the loft spaces which had been suitably modified to start the school of design and host its activities till the new building was made ready across the street at Paldi in Ahmedabad. Gautam and Gira Sarabhai with their vast network of contacts in the art and design community worldwide were able to attract the best talent available to Ahmedabad and with the generous grants from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations the talent pool, that they assembled reads like a who’s who of world design and the students and faculty were exposed to these ideas and work methods. This procession of international talent continued well into the late 80’s with the support of the development grants from the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). The first UNIDO- ICSID conference on Design for Development was held at NID Paldi campus and at IDC in Mumbai in 1979 and amongst the speakers were Victor Papanek and Gui Bonsiepe along with designers from Europe, Asia and Latin America. I mention this here since NID had been evolving internally as well towards development oriented design action and there was much discussion at the Institute on what would be an appropriate of design action for a country like India and these debates continued to impact the education programmes at the Institute over the years.

Hans Gugelot and Product Deign

For the formulation of the Product Design programme Kumar Vyas was asked by Gautam and Gira Sarabhai to stop by at HfG Ulm in early 1965 on his way back from the opening ceremony of the Eames designed Nehru Exhibition that opened in New York. This halt at the HfG Ulm turned out to be quite significant for the NID’s Product Design programme. Kumar Vyas met Hans Gugelot there and it was agreed that Gugelot would travel to India and help in the formulation of the new programme for the NID. Gugelot traveled to India in the summer of that year and spent a little over two weeks working with NID designers and craftsmen to develop the new pedestal model of the tangential fan with Kumar Vyas and Jayanti A Panchal and with Gajanan Upadhayay a range of furniture using wooden strips in a T section arrangement and canvas and plywood strips inserts for stiffness. The model making for the tangential fan was made by the legendary Haribhai, a Guajarati craftsman and carpenter of fine skills and an amazing ability to make models in a wide range of materials, plastics, metals and woods. The wooden furniture system was detailed and developed by Gajanan Upadhayay and he made the full set of scale models as well as the prototypes himself. Gugelot returned to Ulm but passed away before Kumar Vyas could commence his planned training programme at his office in Ulm. Kumar Vyas did however travel to Ulm and work under the guidance of Herbert Lindinger at HfG Ulm and Horst Diener at the Gugelot office where he spent the next ten months understanding the Ulm approach to design education and practice. He also met and befriended Sudha Nadkarni at HfG Ulm and this set the stage for the next level of partnership since Nadkarni joined NID as a faculty and designer and worked there from 1966 to 1969 before moving to Bombay to set up the IDC as part of IIT Bombay. Jayanti A Panchal traveled to Ulm in 1974 to work in Gugelot’s office under E Reichl and Horst Diener and during this period worked on many ongoing projects of the office as a design engineer.

Christian Staub and Wolfgang Siol – Photography at NID

Photography Department at NID was set up by Christian Staub who lived in Ahmedabad for three years and trained the early students at NID including Paramanand Dalwadi who became the main photography faculty at NID after his period of training at NID under the mentorship of Christian Staub. Dalwadi recalls that period with warmth and deep respect for his classical perfection in his work. Staub introduced Dalwadi to the finer aspects of photography, camera work as well as lab and darkroom techniques and in his own words gave him confidence to teach the subject as well as carry out complex professional tasks in studio and architectural photography using various formats that were available at NID. The assignments were all refined at HfG Ulm these formed the basis of teaching at NID as well. In 1969-70, Dalwadi was deputed for training at Ulm under Wolfgang Siol for four months and there he had complete access to the equipment in the studio although he arrived as an apprentice from India. This gave Dalwadi insights into the Ulm classic techniques of “isometric photography” that was achieved by perspective correction and appropriate camera position in relation to the subject, unwritten rules of composition learned by practice and attention to detail. He had another occasion in 1974 to return to Siol’s studio and spend one month there to be immersed in the studio practice as a refresher dose. Dalwadi had joined NID as a student in 1963 and he started teaching at NID and built his own reputation as one of India’s leading photographer and teacher.

Guest Teachers at HfG Ulm and at NID

Herbert Lindinger tells us – “The HfG was planned as a place for experiment, an institution open to new hypotheses, theories, and development, in itself the enormous preponderance of guest instructors (around 200) as opposed to permanent faculty members (20) led to a sustained dynamic, a constant state of mental unrest. The list of those guest instructors, then still young and largely unknown, now looks like a Who’s Who of science, literature and art.” Lindinger visited NID in 1970 to review the new curriculum for the undergraduate programme that was started then.

Klaus Krippendorff whom I met at the IDSA conference in 2006 writes about his experiences at Ulm where the visiting lecturers and faculty included Charles and Ray Eames (1955 and 1958), Buckminister Fuller, Bruce Archer and Horst Rittel, his favorite teachers. Krippendorff’s paper of 2008 states – “The school seemed to look for students who connected intellectual, cultural, political and technological conceptions and willing to act.” He also has a comment on the politics of the HfG Ulm and he states – “Perhaps the lack of appreciation of the virtues of higher education by the design faculty explains at least part of its shortsighted politics.” This seems to be true of NID as well as other design schools in India where a lack of scholarship and publication is sometimes seen as a virtue.

In later years both NID and IDC managed to obtain UNDP funding and faculty from both schools revisited contacts from HfG Ulm as pert of their training programmes and guest faculty from HfG Ulm also came to India as UNDP consultants to bring a renewed level of exchange between these organisations. Detailing these will need additional research that I hope will be done in the near future by Indian as well as German scholars. These experts include Kohei Suguira from Tokyo, Herbert Ohl, Herbert Lindinger, and Gui Bonsiepe. I also had a conversation with my colleague, Kirit Patel at CEPT University to explore his contacts with Frei Otto and his team at IL, Stuttgart. Frei Otto was an active guest faculty

The Ulm Journals at NID Library

Tomas Maldonado and Gui Bonsiepe provided intellectual leadership to several generations of Indian students as well as faculty at both NID as well as IDC through their sustained efforts to publish the HfG Ulm Journals and books in later years that were followed with awe and respect. NID Library had a bound volume of these and many of the assignments documented here were also followed explicitly at NID as well as at IDC over the years. For instance in Ulm Journal 10-11, Maldonado and Bonsiepe argue for a unique position for design and design thinking in a world dominated by science. This is a position that we are still to resolve and in my view an important debate that will continue to attract research attention for years to come. I met Bonsiepe on his several visits to India and also Maldonado when I made a visit to Milan in 2010 and I interviewed him on a number of research questions that I had in mind that stemmed from his perceptive writings.

Image. Look Back Look Forward workshops were conducted at Bangalore and Kolkatta in 2010 to accompany the traveling exhibition of the HfG Ulm work and design pedagogy. These workshops looked at the impact of HfG Ulm on design pedagogy in India and at basic design education in particular. Prof M P Ranjan (sitting on the Ulmer Stool) chaired the two conferences along with Suchitra Balasubramanian, Prof Sudha Nadkarni and Prof Kumar Vyas (seen above) were keynote speakers at the Bangalore event while Prof Kirti Trivedi delivered the keynote at Kolkatta.

In 1994 Kirti Trivedi of IDC approached me at NID to obtain Xerox copies of Ulm Journals in the NID Library. He used these as a backdrop for the conference at IDC, “Ulm and After” and selected papers were reproduced in a book for the benefit of Indian teachers for the first time. In 2010, NID in collaboration with the Ulm Archives and the Max Muller Bhavan hosted the traveling exhibit at Ahmedabad and later at Bangalore and Kolkatta. I organized the conferences titled Look Back Look Forward: HfG Ulm and Design Education in India at Bangalore and another on Basic Design at Kolkatta and we released a digital set of the Ulm Journals for Indian academics for the first time and since then these have been available for a wider audience. The impact of these Ulm Journals on design education is still unfolding and they will be in active use for many years to come I am sure.

Further Research Questions

Science and Design article raises many research questions about the nature of design and science that are still active in our debates on various online discussion lists to this day. HfG Ulm had raised these in their corridors and these questions still reverberate in our minds. The HfG Ulm is a rare case of design thought and action that was both intense and comprehensive and the various threads that started there may need to be followed up by current day researchers to build a body of scholarship that will help put design at a new level of acceptance in India and elsewhere. One wonders what discussion Eames had the HfG in 1955 and 1958 and what impact if any it had on the Eames Report of 1958.

I also wonder what roles Guest Faculty could play in Design schools of the future, particularly in the transmission of knowledge and cross fertilization of ideology and techniques that seems to get lost in the implementation of narrow curriculum that is being attempted here in India in an effort to expand the reach of design education without adequate research. I believe that the seeds of these questions and their answers lie in the archives and memories of Ulmers, NIDians, IDCians and others and this need to be researched urgently. I traveled to Ulm in 2005 at the invitation of Rene Spitz to be part of the round table organized there. I followed this with another visit in 2008 when I had a memorable experience of staying at the HfG Ulm campus in a faculty studio thanks to the hospitality of Nick Roerich and the Ulm Archives and I hope more researchers will explore this rich space to appreciate design and shape the education of the designer of the future. The Max Bill building of 1953 is still in pristine condition and the Ulm Archives has now moved back to the campus and this bodes well for future research on the people and activities at HfG Ulm that has had such a huge impact on the world of design education.

References

01. Charles and Ray Eames, The India Report, Government of India, New Delhi, 1958, reprint, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, 1958, 1997

02. Thomas Maldonado, Gui Bonsiepe, Renate Kietzmann et al., eds, “Ulm (1 to 21): Journal of the Hoschule fur Gestaltung”, Hoschule fur Gestaltung, Ulm, 1958 to 1968

03. Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimer, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1969

04. Tomas Maldonado, Design, Nature, and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology, Harper & Row, New York, 1972

05. Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World, Thames & Hudson Ltd., London, 1972

06. Stafford Beer, Platform for Change, John Wiley & Sons, London, 1975

07. Frei Otto, IL20 TASKS, Institute for Lightweight Structures, Stutgart, 1975

08. R Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, St. Martin's Griffin; 2nd edition, New York, 1982

09. Gui Bonsiepe, Estrutura e Estetica do Produto, Centro de Aperfeicoamento de Docentes de Desenho Industrial, Brasilia, 1986

10. Herbert Lindinger, Hoschule fur Gestaltung - Ulm, Die Moral der Gegenstande, Berlin, 1987

11. Kirti Trivedi ed., Readings from Ulm, Industrial Design Centre, Bombay, 1989

12. Otl Aicher, the world as design, Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, 1991

13. Otl Aicher, Analogous and Digital, Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, 1994

14. Gui Bonsiepe, Interface: An approach to Design, Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, 1999

15. Herbert Lindinger, Eds., Ulm Design: The Morality of Objects, Hoschule fur Gestaltung – 1953 – 1968, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999.

16. Rene Spitz, HfG Ulm: The View Behind the Foreground  – The Political History of the Ulm School of Design –1953-1968, Edition Axel Menges, Stuttgart/London, 2002

17. Martin Krampen & Gunther Hormann, The Ulm School of Design – Beginnings of a Project of Unyielding Modernity, Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, 2003

18. Klaus Krippendorff, The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design, Taylor & Francis CRC, New York, 2006

19. M P Ranjan, Lessons from Bauhaus, Ulm and NID: Role of Basic Design in PG Education, in proceedings of DETM Conference, NID, Ahmedabad, 2006

20. M P Ranjan. Design for India blog, http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.in/. Ahmedabad, (2007 – 2013)

21. Klaus Krippendorff, Designing in Ulm and Off Ulm, University of Pennsylvania, 2008

About the Author

M P Ranjan

Professor – Design Chair, CEPT University

Design Thinker & Author of blog Design for India

Ahmedabad

Prof M P Ranjan is a design thinker with 40 years of experience in design education and practice in association with the National Institute of Design. He helped visualize and set up two new design schools in India, one for the crafts sector, the IICD Jaipur and the other for the bamboo sector, the BCDI Agartala. His book Handmade in India is a comprehensive resource on the hand crafts sector of India and was created as a platform for the building of a vibrant creative economy based on the crafts skills and resources identified therein.

His book on bamboo opened up new frontiers for design exploration in India. He has explored bamboo as a designer material for social transformation. Bamboo has been positioned as a sustainable material of the future through his work spread over three decades. His work in design education covered many subjects including Design Thinking, Data Visualisation, Interaction Design and Systems Design

His blog “Designfor India” has become a major platform for Indian design discourse. http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com

He is on the Governing Council of the IICD, Jaipur and advises other design schools in India and abroad. He lives and works from Ahmedabad in India. He has been acknowledged by peers as one of the international thought leaders in Design Thinking today

~

Royal College of Art (RCA): Linkages with NID & Indian Design: Major Influences (Part 2/3)

Influences in the formative years at NID and in India

Picture: NID Lawns and Building

The design world has been a rather small place with a lot of exchange of ideas and with a considerable movement of people and ideas across boundaries, even during and after the wars. We now know that Charles Eames visited Ulm and interacted with Max Bill at about the same time as Raynor Banham and Bruce Archer traveled from London to teach at the great German school. Archer was a researcher and teacher at the RCA at that time in the early fifties before the setting up of the NID in Ahmedabad. Eames wrote the India Report in 1958, exactly 50 years ago, and his contacts with teachers at Ulm and the RCA must have shaped his ideas about design for a country like India when he worked on the report that proposed the National Institute of Design as a way forward for India in a period of rapid transition. That Charles Eames may have been influenced by the Ulm and RCA teachers is not documented but from the sequence of events that led to the India Report we can conjecture that Eames connected with both these great institutions before he finalized the concept of a National Design Institute for India in 1958.

NID Documentation 1964-69 (download pdf 25 mb) lists two people from the RCA of having contributed to the programmes at NID in the formative years. P P Hancock, wood working expert from the RCA was involved in the setting up workshops and furniture traditions at NID who contributed to training NID staff alongside George Nakashima whose furniture was batch produced by the NID workshops and Arno Vottler who was assigned the task of formulating the Furniture Design education at NID of which I was a student in the first batch, joining in 1969.

Bob Gill, Lecturer in Advertising & Public Communication, RCA and a professional designer of repute was involved Family Planning workshop and contributed to graphic design thinking dealing with substance and meaning rather than just form. Social communication was already at the top of the NID agenda in the early 60’s but most of the projects that came from professional contracts dealt with symbols and logos for Indian corporate entities, and a great many of such projects were carried out by the NID graphic design teachers and students.

Maxwell Fry & Jane Drew, visited NID in the early years of my study at NID and I remember attending their lecture at NID auditorium. According to Christopher Frayling in his book, Professor Fry and Jack Pritchard were responsible for bringing Walter Gropuis to London in 1934 to explore the possibility of his contributing to RCA education in art and design which did not however fructify due to the politics of the times.
Jane Drew Wiki:
Maxwell Fry Wiki:

For me the other reminder of the RCA influence on NID was the Ark magazine, a student journal from the RCA, copies of which were available at NID library, and a wonderful influence on some of us who were eager to know more about the nature of design in our formative years at NID. I was then involved in editing the first student magazine at NID, called SNID (Students National Institute of Design) in 1969 and 1970 along with a few colleagues, and I believe the effort was directly motivated by the presence of the Ark in our library and through our discussions of the contributions through our “bakwas committee”, or informal chat group as it was fondly called, which sat for hours on end at the Old Madras Café just outside the NID main gate in Paldi, to discuss all matters NID and design in those heady days of learning and exchange. The other influence was the Design Methods course conducted by Prof Kumar Vyas which was modeled after the structure proposed by Bruce Archer in his papers titled “Systematic Method for Designers”, 1964, a rare copy of which is in the NID library.

Bruce Archer, one of the pioneers of Design Research and the Design Methods movement as a faculty at the RCA visited NID with a mission to deliver in person the Sir Misha Black Award to Mr. Ashoke Chatterjee for excellence in design education that was recognized at the National Institute of Design. Ashoke Chatterjee joined a long list of awardees and he has been active in his interactions with the RCA ever since and this has contributed to the strengthening of the relationship between the NID and the RCA.
Prof Bruce Archer Wiki:
Sir Misha Black Wiki:

Christopher Conford, Head of General Studies at RCA formulated a programme which was called Science & Liberal Arts programme at NID and the formulation was carried in an incisive report left behind after his brief visit to the Institute.

The other person of significance mentioned to me by Askoke Chatterjee in his recent communication was Frank Height who according to AC is “the most important remaining link with the great years of Misha Black and design education at RCA”. AC attended the Misha Black memorial Dinner in London in March 2008 for the award ceremony for this year.

Sir Christopher Freyling visited India in 2001 and participated in the CII NID Design Summit at Bangalore and followed it with a visit to NID, Ahmednabad to sign an MOU on an era of cooperation between NID and the RCA.

Picture: Prof John Chris Jones at the British Library in 2004

I was happy to meet John Chris Jones in London during my visit there in 2004. We met in the British Library which was the location suggested by him for a meeting that was set up over a round of email communications prior to my visit. I had written to John Chris many years earlier when a former student of mine who was studying at the RCA told me that he was the best person who could help us formulate new directions for the use of digital resources at the IICD Jaipur where I was officiating as the Director. Nagraj Seshadri had told me that JCJ was perhaps the only person in the late 90’s who had a deep understanding of the internet and could help us develop strategies for its use in the crafts sector in India. I wrote to him and shared our IICD reports with him but due to his involvement with the book, Internet and Everyone, at that time he was not able to participate with that effort. However he had been a strong influence as part of the Design Methods movement and his book on the subject and hid other books were much sought after at NID in the 70’s till date. Now many NID students regularly catch up with his writings on the web at his website called Softopia.
JCJ Softopia:
JCJ on wiki:
JCJ conversation on NextD:
JCJ Design Methods on wiki:

Jasper Morrison – Furniture Designer visited NID very briefly and I spent one evening with him at Ahmedabad over dinner at a friends home. He is one of the influential young minds that RCA has produced and his influence is very strong through his work as well as his exhibitions such as “Super Normal” which was curated with Naoto Fukasawa.
Super Normal at Vitra 2008:
Jasper and Naoto Dialogue:

The other contemporary influence from the RCA was that of James Dyson – Product Designer, particularly through his book “Against the Odds” which is widely read at NID and all the design schools around the world
Dyson.com:
Dyson on Dexigner:
Dyson on RCA pages:
James Dyson Foundation:
Dyson School:

The other significant alumni of the RCA from India include Uday Shankar – Choreographer and Dance and Dhruv Mistry – Sculpture.

This post is the second of three such posts where the first deals with the early years of RCA and the influences on world design and the third with contemporary influences and the creation of a new generation of international designers from India.

Royal College of Art (RCA): Linkages with NID & Indian Design: Early Years (Part 1/3)

Royal College of Art, London and its significance to the world of design

Picture: Prof M P Ranjan in his office at NID. Pic by Darrag Murphy and Gisele Raulik

I have written about the strong linkages between the German design schools of the Bauhaus and the HfG Ulm with their education philosophy and teaching methods at the National Institute of Design earlier. I have outlined these influences in some detail in my paper that was presented at the DETM conference at NID in March 2005. The paper and presentation can be downloaded from here. (Paper pdf 69 kb) (Presentation Show pdf 2.5 mb)

While these two German schools have had a huge influence on world design, especially in the educational space, we will need to look at the influences of the Royal College of Art (RCA, London) in the shaping of world design as we know it today and in particular I will use this occasion to look at the influences of the RCA on Indian design education and research.

Picture: The great London Taxi (left) and The Royal College of Art on the web.

According to the RCA communication, I quote:

"The Royal College of Art is a very special kind of ideas factory.

It is the world's only wholly postgraduate university institution of art and design which specialises in teaching and research, offering MA, MPhil and PhD degrees across the disciplines of fine art, applied art, design, communications and humanities.

Over 850 masters and doctoral students drawn from all around the world interact with a teaching staff of over 100 professionals, all being leading art and design practitioners in their own right. It is therefore one of the most concentrated communities of artists and designers to be found anywhere on the planet.

Along with an impressive roll call of visiting professors, lecturers and advisors, students are given first-class opportunities for major collaborations with cultural and industrial partners. It all adds up to a creative environment that's unrivalled elsewhere."

UnQuote.

Historically, the events that led to the construction of the Crystal Palace in 1850 in London and the conduct of the Great Exhibition of 1951 launched the industrial revolution and also set the stage for the entry for design as a major partner with industry of the day. The British Government took cognizance of this influence and decided to invest in design and art education to help the process of assimilation of these new ideas into industry so that British industry continued to hold a leadership position in world trade with the use of these special skill sets.

The Royal College of Art was set up in 1837 as the Government School of Design with the charter of training designers for the industry as a national responsibility. The history of the great school has been captured and made accessible through the book “The Royal College of Art: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Art and Design”, by Christopher Frayling, Barry & Jenkins, London, 1987. I will not repeat what the book does admirably, that of documenting the illustrious students, Professors and administrators of the school but try and explore the connections between this great school and the NID, which was the first design school set up by the Government of India.

In the two following posts I will expand on the major influences during the formative years of Indian design movement and in another post deal with the contemporary influences with exchange and collaborative between the RCA and Indian design schools, particularly the NID. The second post deals with the formative years of Indian design while the third post with the contemporary exchanges and the creation of new generation of international designers from India.

Intellectual History of Design: Lecture at IDC, IIT Bombay

Image: The "Big Tree" in the courtyard on the "Design Street" at the "Gautam-Gira Square" outside my office at NID – as it was when I joined as a student in 1969 and on 7 September 2007 before my departure to Mumbai for the lecture at IDC.

The invitation to speak to the students at the IDC Mumbai gave me the opportunity to reflect on the various influences that have shaped design in the last century. Reading the very limited published resources that are available on design history and particularly on the development of the peragogies and inetllectual positions I see a few threads that have had a strong influence on design thinking, especially from the Indian perspective and from our vantage at NID, Ahmedabad. This is a personal view and included a reflection of my own personal experiences since the early 1969 when I joined NID as a student in the Post Graduate programme in Furniture Design. The early years of NID were those of excitement and learning for me and having had the opportunity to meet and work with some of the key players in the history of modern design this personal view may provide some fresh insights into the establishment of design in India and the flow of ideas and influences that shaped NID and the other schools of design in India and other parts of the world in the past century.

In my paper “Lessons from Bauhaus, Ulm and NID: Role of Basic Design in PG Education”, (download pdf 69kb)that was presented at the DETM Conference held at NID in March 2005, I had explored the threads of influences and now I have been able to revisit the space and further expand on the developments. I the meantime I have had access to some new books on the Bauhaus as well as the HfG Ulm and the benefit of visits to HfG Ulm in 2005 and the ID IIT Chicago in 2006 which gave further links to the chain of information and insights that I was actively seeking to further my understanding of design in India. In 2005 I also visited Bremen, Germany for the EAD06 conference and my paper (download 255kb .doc file) presented there too looked at design education at NID and for the first time I made a public international presentation of the Design Concepts and Concerns course that I had developed at NID since I started teaching Design Methods in 1986. My visit in 2004 to the UK and my brief but stimulating meeting with John Chris Jones at The British Library and later a visit to the Royal College of Art in London gave me another occation to reflect on the developments of design thinking and action in the West. I will reflect on some of these occasions and what I learned from these journeys in the days ahead as lecture and talking opportunities come up that call for such sharing.

John Chris Jones and Bruce Archer had both been asociated with the RCA in the 60’s and through to the late 90’s as active researchers and teachers in various capacities during this period. In 2004 they were both honoured by the Design Research Society, London for their Lifetime Achievements in the field. Bruce Archer had also lectured at the HfG Ulm and so had Charles and Ray Eames and R Buckminister Fuller just as the same teachers had been visiting faculty at NID, Ahmedabad and the parallels are interesting and need to be explored fuirther to glean the kind of influences that they have left behind. Frei Otto, Hans Gugelot, Christian Staub, Herbert Lindinger, Herbert Ohl, Gui Bonsiepe, Kohei Sugiura and others who will be identified as my research progresses.

Image: Last slide in my IDC presentation

This post was drafted at the IIT Guest House this morning and uploaded in the presence of Kirti Trivedi and Raja Mohanty who had invited me to IDC this time. Kirti Trivedi had conducted a conference at IDC in 1989, "Design Education: Ulm and After" when he had released an edited volume titled "Readings from Ulm" which were based on a xerox copy of the originial set of the Ulm Journal 1 to 21 which has been a great source of inspiration and is still in the NID Library. I had helped prepare the copy for the IDC Library a few years earlier. This informal Sunday morning meeting was a good occasion to reflect on the experiences at the school and on areas of mutual interest, which is design and design philosophy with an Indian flavour.

IFA exhibitions in Stuttgart and Berlin: NID’s Bamboo Initiatives and Design from India on show in Germany.

It is exciting to see design work on show as models, prototypes and installations – and particularly thrilling when Indian design is being appreciated and showcased in far away Germany. Bamboo products from the NID Centre for Bamboo Initiatives are now being shown at the IFA Gallery in Stuttgart and later next month at their Gallery in Berlin. See the links to their website at this place below:
IFA Gallery, Germany

The National Institute of Design was invited to show bamboo furniture that was developed as part of the ongoing projects and research activities at the Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID (CFBI–NID) in their effort to position bamboo as a sustainable material of the future. The examples shown are drawn from a number of projects that were handled at the Institute by me and my colleagues, students and other partners in the field, especially our craftsmen and trainees from the BCDI, Agartala and elsewhere. These individual products may be seen as the tip of the ice berg, since each of these just represent a trace of a fairly large collection of products and design strategies tailored for specific contexts in India which have been developed in each of the initiatives that they represent. While some things about the design can be seen and touched there are numerous intangible aspects that can only be appreciated when they are seen in the context for which they were created. A full description of the strategies and the individual products as well as comments about the species of bamboo used in each exploration can be found in the writings and documentations that have been published from NID and the CFBI–NID in the form of books and CD ROMs that are available from the Institute. Several of these reports as well as product descriptions and photographs can be downloaded from my website at the Bamboo Initiatives links below:

Bamboo Initiatives
Beyond Grassroots
Bamboo Boards and Beyond
Katlamara Chalo
BCDI, Agartala

I will be discussing more about these Bamboo Initiatives on this blog in the days ahead and share how we have been using design as a vehicle to concretize our intentions of bringing development initiatives to communities and situations in India particularly for rural communities that are in need of some catalyst that can help them fend for themselves in a rapidly changing world that is increasingly globalised and in a manner that is both dignified and satisfying for them in many ways. That these aspects of design are not tangible in the exhibits is both a problem and a challenge for the design initiative and it would be appropriate for us to remember here that Germany is the home of both the Bauhaus (1919 – 1936) and the Hfg Ulm (1950 – 1968), both great design schools, nay great design movements, that showed the world the power and subtlety of design – from shaping form to structure, and from the creation of meaning and beyond – at one level a play of aesthetics and technology, at another economy and style and at yet another politics and philosophy and about the shaping and manifestations of a vision or intention – the shaping of culture itself.

The bamboo products are part of a larger showing that covers the Interior Design talents from India as part of an exhibit titled

in site
Interior Design in India

ifa Gallery Stuttgart: June 15th – August 12th, 2007
opening: June 14th, 2007
Charlottenplatz 17, 70173 Stuttgart, Germany

ifa Gallery Berlin:
August 24th – October 21st, 2007
opening: August 23rd, 2007
Linienstrasse 139/140, 10115 Berlin, Germany

Talking about the theme of the exhibition and of Interior Design from India, the organizers have this to say on their website and publication which accompanies the event –

“Young Indian interior designers use steel, stone, glass, wood, plastic and silk fabrics when creating homes and offices, bars and restaurants, hotels and shops. They combine high tech with craft artistry, Indian tradition with a modern, international lifestyle; they create spaces that unfold sensual qualities that go well beyond any Bollywood clichés.”

The exhibition presents examples of this in the form of work by the following designers and teams:
Canna Patel and Parul Zaveri/ Nimish Patel from Ahmedabad
Samira Rathod, Rajiv Saini and Shilpa Gore-Shah/Pinkish Shah from Mumbai and
Lotus Design Services from New Delhi (Ambrish Arora, Sidhartha Talwar, Ankur Choksi and Arun Kullu).
The Indian Institute of Interior Designers (IIID)
Their work and descriptions can be seen at the web links shown above.

The National Institute of Design show of bamboo furniture is but one part of this larger show in the exhibition. Our products are shown below with a brief caption about the product as well as the context for which they were created. each of these projects helped create many new products as well as train numerous students and craftspersons in the field. These experiences will be reflected upon in future posts.


1. Cube Stool: Designed to be made through mechanized splitting at Common Facility Centres (CFC’s) and later hand fabricated in several small scale production units located in the surrounding villages of Northeast India.
Designer: M P Ranjan.
Sponsor: DC (Handicrafts), Govt of India


2. Laminated Chair: Designed as part of the Bamboo Boards and Beyond project as well as the Systems design class at NID it is part of a collection of products that were used to demonstrate the future potential of laminated bamboo as a timber substitute for India.
Student designer: Mann Singh. Faculty Guide: M P Ranjan.
Sponsor: APCTT and UNDP, New Delhi


3. Rocking Horse: Designed specifically for production with local bamboo (Dendrocalamus strictus or Bambusa affinis) and local skills using very limited set of traditional tools and very low investments and the product also has to be easy to sell locally and use no metal hardware so that local craftsmen can easily become entrepreneurs rather than remain as wage labour. We could call this a “poverty buster” type of product due to its self-help character. (My father started his tiny toy factory in Madras in 1942 with almost no capital by making wooden rocking horses and grew it into a big business before his passing away in 1988 – this was a source of inspiration for this product – however that is another story)
Designers: G Upadhayay and M P Ranjan.
Sponsors: State Govt of Madhya Pradesh, Bhopal and the BCDI, Agartala


4. Katlamara String Chair and Arm Chair: Designed to be made using the simple joint that can be made using a drill machine and a saw as well as in a knock-down construction for easy transport to local and upcountry markets it is part of a strategy to build local entrepreneurship in a village that grows bamboo.
Designer: M P Ranjan.
Sponsors: DC (Handicrafts) Govt of India, Northeastern Council, Shillong and the CBTC, Guwahati.

Design inside education: A strategy for India

Yesterday I was invited to speak to a group of school teachers at the Riverside School in Ahmedabad about the need for placing design inside education if we are to bring change and effectiveness to the way our children are groomed to face personal and professional challenges as they pass through the education processes in the days ahead. Riverside School
The pdf file of my presentation to the teachers can be downloaded from my website link here.

Riverside School is setting new standards for primary and secondary education in the city and it is being noticed for the change that their efforts and style of functioning is bringing to the behavior and confidence of their very young students. They seem to be doing something right. Founded in Ahmedabad by Kiran Bir Sethi – an NID design graduate – a graphic designer turned educationist, it is now showing clear demonstration of the results that can come from using design principles and sensibilities at all levels of the school’s functioning. The infrastructure, the curriculum, the style of teaching and the content and delivery are all child friendly and not parent or government dictated as most other schools in our region tend to be. Being a designer herself and an educator by experience and choice, she has been able to create a unique framework of relationships and models of action that are a test-bed for a innovative new school experience for both child and parent as well as for the teachers who choose to work with Riverside, and now more schools from far and near want to learn the methods and have signed up for teacher training and curriculum sharing arrangements and the influence is growing rapidly. Kiran has now launched a campaign to make Ahmedabad a child friendly city by a design strategy called “Aproch” which can be seen at this site below. The Riverside School with design inside now promises to make the city child friendly – and next the country? APROCH

So what is this “Design” that Kiran and her team are managing to put inside education at Riverside and is this something that can be extended to more levels of education across India. Last year I asked this question along with my teaching colleagues at NID when we set the theme of the “Design Concepts and Concerns” (DCC) course for the Foundation programme students at NID. The course that is now called DCC was previously labeled Design Process (DP), Design Methods or Design Methodology (DM) in the past having been borrowed from international traditions of Bauhaus and Hfg Ulm as well as the RCA driven movement in the UK in the 60’s but I changed the name after teaching it for many years when we realised at NID that design was not just about concepts and skills and techniques but it was also about feeling and values which were at the heart of all the thought and action, irrespective of the discipline and the field of enquiry. In this DCC2007 we chose the theme of “Design inside Education” and assigned five batches of students areas of focus that included “Pre-school education in India”, “Primary education in India in the Rural and Urban sectors” respectively and the other two groups looked at issues and perspectives that would influence the “Education of youth in India”, all based on their own fairly recent immersion in the Indian school system from their personal journey through it.

Students were taken through a series of assignments that I have outlined in my paper titled “The Avalanche Effect”, which can be downloaded from my website and these assignments took them through the DCC course from articulating and visualizing their personal experiences, their collective experiences by brainstorming, followed by model building to understand the structure and content of the educational system as it applied to each of the focus areas that were assigned to each of the five groups. The first assignment had them sharing with us their school experiences which revealed both the pleasures and the traumas of school systems in India as scenario visualizations, some elevating and others shocking by the expressions that were shared in the class. During the class we all made a trip to Riverside last year and our design foundation students were both surprised and excited by the fluency with which the little kids from Riverside took them through the school and explained its working methods and teaching content and style, all with a great deal of confidence and pride.


Model showing: Issues of Pre-Primary Education

The DCC class of 2007 that set about exploring, researching and imagining alternate scenarios that could help them build models and identify design opportunities across each of the school educations sectors that had been assigned. The models suggested deep understanding and empathy and these led to each group exploring numerous design scenarios that could transform the education sectors in India by addressing imaginative and innovative alternatives for infrastructure, products, procedures, services and communications opportunities in each of their groups assigned projects.


Model using a tree metaphor: Issues of Rural Primary Education

This five week assignment was for the student a journey through the design landscape from the macro and the micro perspectives which is in keeping with our design philosophy of macro-micro design action from policy to the very minute details, all of which have to be in perfect fit and balance if the design is to be truly successful as a whole and not to be seen as fragmented parts.


Model using "Nataraja" and Creeper metaphor: Issues of Youth Education and Renewal of existing systems

Education is just one of the 230 sectors in which design can be used at the macro-micro levels of action and I do hope that we see it being used more in India in then days ahead. Other themes in the past for this DCC course have been macro issues such as “Impact of Globalisation” (2004), “Khadi as an Ideology for Design” (2003), Retail as an Emegring Experience (2001), pictures of which can be seen at my website from this link below. Others which are not yet on the site include “Creative Industries of the Future” (2004), “Six Design Institutes for Six Regions of India” (2005), “Response to the National Design Policy for India” (2006), “Design inside Education for India” (2007) – each year we took a new theme and this went back many years, but are still to be documented, hopefully soon on this blog. For instance “Home Office and New Services” was the topic for the 1996 batch of foundation students which was particularly memorable, but others will also be reflected upon and discussed in the days ahead.

The author's home page can be viewed at this link Prof Ranjan's website