Recognising the Roots: NID accorded status of "Institute of National Importance"

Recognising the Roots: Indian Cabinet approves status of an "Institute of National Importance" for the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.
Prof. M P Ranjan

Sand sculpture extending the buttress roots of the Big Tree in the Gira Gautam Square at NID Paldi in Ahmedabad created as part of the class experience of Media explorations by Textile Design students under the guidance of teacher Jayanthi Naik (J L Naik) last week. They must have had a premonition about the Indian Cabinets' forthcoming act of passing a resolution according the status of "Institute of National Importance" to the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad at the meeting held on 10 January 2013. See PIB News release here.

The National Institute of Design was set up in 1961 based on a report by Charles and Ray Eames called the India Report of 1958. In the past 50 years the Institute has had a remarkable journey of exploration and discovery that was informed by the spirit of the India report but the Government that had set it up with a great deal of vision  and enthusiasm in 1961 seemed to have been all but forgotten over the next 50 years with the Institute being managed by a small department within the Ministry of Industry while the other major national institutes such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of  Management were placed under the Ministry of Education which is now the Ministry of Human Resources and they were accorded a status of importance that NID was never given for over 50 years of its existance.

The return of the echo of the dramatic roots in the sand sculpture by Naik's students somehow reflects the Governments belated recognition of NID and its value system and the contributions that it has made and the critical role that it can make in the building of the nation in the years ahead which now becomes possible with this significant act of recognition. NID can become an equal partner in the journey of nation building in the years ahead along with the other streams of knowledge that are already recognised and well funded. We should not let this occasion slip into another bout of  extended amnesia since it is so easy to forget the contribution of design since most of it is intangible and hence cannot be measured by the yardsticks of science, technology or management and it needs to be sensed and felt long before the hard measurements begin to make sense. The dramatic roots of the Big Tree  at the Sarabhai plaza were covered up when the platform was built in their honour just as much of NID's educational experiments were undermined by the search for formal recognition from the educational systems that dominate India. NID went through the whole process of trying to get the status of a Deemed University in a mistaken level of enthusiasm that many of us had labelled "Doomed Univerity" since the search seemed to be for qualification and not competence and sensibilities that are so important and central to design action. I hope that the efforts to write the history of NID will look at these significant moments and efforts and contributions and not gloss over the shift to grades and marks (quantitative systems of evaluation) in search of recognition of a deep and stable educational system that was an experiment at NID (qualitative systems of evaluation) that needs to be cherished and perhaps used to inform all of higher education in India in the days ahead.

We need to ponder on those values and processes of education that NID had built and through decades of hard work in the face of great opposition from outside as well as within and this is something from which so many of its alumni have found substance and sustenance to face the challenges of a very hostile Indian landscape for the uncertain and the new that has been India of the past 50 years from our experience in the lack of recognition from both India Governments as well as from Industry. This is not surprising since we live in a very controlled economy even with all the bouts of liberalisation and design can only flourish when there is real competition and an open economy and India is now heading in that very direction and design  will be the core activity going forward from here.

Gautam Gira Square and the Big Tree from the Wood Workshop end. The extended roots were covered when the commemorative platform was built to celebrate the founder Chairman of NID
- http://www.flowersofindia.net/catalog/slides/Badminton%20Ball%20Tree.html -

What are those roots that have been covered or even lost at NID and in Indian design as a whole when design education was struggling to find its feet in the larger Indian eco-system? The gradautes  and alumni of the school must ponder about this and help articulate what may be taken forward and this is a call for such an articulation since we do need a new imagination for design education in india that can inform the next 50 years or more. These roots must be uncovered and revealed and from this uncovering we will reflect and build new knowledge that will help us navigate the future in the days ahead.

The Big Tree when I joined NID in 1969 and later in 2007 after the platform was built.

NID needs to take on the mantle of leadership that has been bestowed by this act of Government and build models for designerly thought and action across the 230 sectors of our economy and not remain restricted to the pandering to the needs of large corporate industry and their short term needs for car styling and graphics when the country needs serious design investments in urban mobility and public transportation, just to give one example where we need to shift our emphasis in real earnest. We need to enumerate such actions and extend these concerns across the 230 sectors of our economy in as many conferences and workshops that may be needed to reach out to stakeholders and build a new agenda for action in the days ahead. We need to invest in design  faculty and the young designers coming out of our schools so that they may serve the real clients, the people of India in addressing their needs with imagination and sensitivity as wel as design expertise and not remain happy with the Jugaad - patchwork quilt of poverty driven innovations for India - that seems to be celebrated by management gurus as the core capability that the world is talking about as the only major innovative ability of India today..

Prof M P Ranjan
Professor - Design  Chair, CEPT University, Ahmedabad
13 January 2013

IL20 Tasks: Thumbnail Images and Expression of the Particular

IL20 Tasks: Thumbnail Images and Expression of the Particular

M P Ranjan

Image 1: Cover and a sample page from IL 20 Tasks by Prof. Frei Otto and his team.

I have long admired the vision and the power of visualization that is represented in the series of publications that came out of the Institute for Lightweight Structures in Stuttgart under the leadership of Prof Frei Otto. Of these great publications numbered from 1 to 41, one stands out for its audacity and brilliance, and this is the IL20 simply titled “Tasks”, (Aufgaben – in German) and it was produced in 1979 as the 20th in a series of outstanding books that captured the research agenda of the school and the founder, Prof. Frei Otto himself. The origins of this comprehensive research agenda date back to the early 60’s with the publication of two books “Tensile Structures” and in the Newsletters of the Development Centre for Lightweight Construction in Berlin where Frei Otto had already made numerous sketches and suggestions for lightweight structures long before they appeared in practice and in the field. These visualizations were the forerunners of things to come and by their very presence they managed to mobilize support from a wide variety of partners and research enthusiasts who would otherwise have not been able to appreciate the finer aspects of the proposals contained in the Frei Otto thesis. The sketches make the proposals comprehensible and credible and is I believe far more effective than long texts of arguments in favour of or in a descriptive mode about the proposed area of lightweight structures.

Image 2: Expressive thumbnail diagrams that appear in the books by Frei Otto in the IL series from 1 to 41.

In May 1976 Frei Otto set out the outlines of the book titled “Tasks” and Jurgen Hennicke took up the challenge of articulation and compilation in the end of 1976. With the IL team getting into “Brainstorming mode” in the early 1977 and based on these sustained dialogues Frei Otto developed a “Work Programme” that included a list of 100 subject suggestions that could be the focus of the IL teams well into 1990’s. The “Work Programme” that appears in pages 306 to 317 is richly illustrated with the famous thumbnail images so characteristic of all the IL publications, in pen and ink style, crisp and expressive of the concept and manifesting a particular form that most represented the prototype of the concept that was being discussed, and in this case 100 subject areas. The IL 20 is then an elaboration and extension of these 100 subject areas that Frei Otto intended to research over the next twenty years, all spelt out in great detail to draw in partners from a host of disciplines that would be needed to carry out this complex set of research tasks in any meaningful manner. Unfortunately this section in only in German while the rest of the book is bi-lingual to include English texts with the images.

Image 3: IL 20 Tasks as a source of inspiration for the Design Opportunity mapping assignment in the DCC course conducted by the author at NID.

The very idea that one could draw the future had me rivetted and amazed when I first saw this book in the late 70’s. Since then I have been wondering why we do not use this as an approach to map out the design opportunities that lie all around us in India with its huge set of problems across as many as 230 sectors of our economy. I have since decided to introduce my students to this wonderful pursuit of mapping out all the design opportunities that are a product of their imagination in the form of expressive sketches and then in the form of more detailed scenarios as part of the Design Concepts and Concerns course and each batch we are able to address a particular sector of our economy and make a master list of all that needs to be done and sift out those that can be done with our limited resources, looking at both the possible as well as the viable, to further make a list of priorities that can be taken to the planners if we are given a chance to do so. In this process the students learn to do what we would call design thinking and action at the macro-micro level, that of building the future in the thumbnail sketches that lead on to the scenarios that each one of us holds dear in our imagination and helps build our conviction that stems from this very articulation of the possible and the realisation that something worthwhile is indeed possible in all this complexity around us. These thumbnail expressions help us map the contours of the ideas that are developed into scenarios where the fine tuning can take place through which we also develop our own convictions about its viability and we can identify strategies to make it work. Concepts which start off as being quite general are given a particular form through the medium of sketching and in this way they acquire a very particular manifestation as we explore and compare various alternatives that present themselves to us in the cycles of imagination and articulation that is the design journey.

M P Ranjan

Modeling and Mapping: Tools for Design Exploration

Design Concepts & Concerns: Modeling and Mapping - Tools for Design Exploration and mapping Design Opportunities
Prof M P Ranjan

Image: The Karnataka group used a choreographed skit to tell their story of design opportunity explorations and shared their thumbnail explorations as well as the chosen scenario, both displayed as placards on their body. The front had the thumbs arranged, as a letter form while on their back was the scenario, which would be explained by their team adjacent member. This group missed categorizing the explored design opportunities using higher categories in their focus on the ideas created by the individual.

Design Opportunities can be felt but not seen since they are a product of the imagination that is triggered by a particular perception or insight and these are nurtured by the designers conviction till it can be manifested in the world through the process of visualization, construction and operation. I am therefore not surprised any more when policy makers and the public alike fail to see value in a particular design offering till it is almost fully realized and placed on the market as a compelling offering and at an attractive price with an appropriate set of features. Design offerings take on a particular form and these can be easily differentiated through both deep and - or superficial transformations and compositions which is a strategy that companies use to make a range of offerings to meet a variety of price points and an equally wide range of feature sets to make for an active market where none exists.

Image: The Tamilnadu group used a metaphor of a number of kites in the sky to map out broad areas of design opportunities in the fields of agriculture, industry, and fisheries and at the infrastructure and systems level of action. The thumbnail maps of the individual design opportunities were categorized and arranged along the string that held the kite in the sky and the developed scenarios came out of their group debates and identification of priorities. However most groups did not know much about agriculture and this was visible in the fewer design opportunities being identified for these sectors of collective ignorance, suggesting scope for additional research before these explorations are done once again.

The format for exploration was created earlier this year when the DCC course was offered to the Foundation class in the previous semester and over the past few months we have given this format to each batch of DCC students at Gandhinagar, Paldi and at Bangalore and the results have been very encouraging indeed. Group and individual explorations can be bridged by making the design exploration journey a shared experience by giving the peer group a place in the process of design opportunity mapping and this reinforces the process of exploration through the strengthening of the expression through a process of peer discourse and sharing that would otherwise have not been encouraged in a design class that may be project driven and one that involves individual exploration. Since the group has a shared agenda to realize the best design opportunities with the focus of a chosen theme along with a given bias, in this case the theme is Food and the bias for each group is the chosen State – Tamilnadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh – the process of articulation and choice making is both individual as well as group driven.

Image: The Andhra Pradesh group used the metaphor of the branching tree with its elaborate sets of deep and capillary roots, each part with a particular name, characteristic and attribute that mapped the real world attributes that the students found in their journey into the field during the previous assignment, The group was particularly successful in their exploration and as a group that were able to show a wide range of application areas and fairly developed scenarios for the particular design opportunities that came out of the group selection processes that they had adopted for their task.

Numerous thumbnail images are created on the format provided and each image is supported by a brief write up that describes the salient features of the design proposal or as we call it the design opportunity. These are discussed and debated within the group as they emerge from the hands and minds of the individual creator of the images and these then may go through a further transformation with the incorporation of the feedback that is so critical for the design journey to get a bearing that is akin to the potential responses in the market place. However the conviction levels of the designer would determine whether or not the suggested changes are carried out in full or in part, if at all. The insights that led the designer to make this particular offering may not be seen or be visible to his colleagues which sets up a platform for discourse and debate and these processes at an important part of the conviction building process in design when it comes to making a decision, in favour or against a particular offering or a part thereof, of that particular offering.

Image: Scenario visualization being shared by some of the students from each group as part of their final presentation of the DCC course at NID Bangalore campus.

Students then select one out of many potential directions that are revealed in their design opportunity mapping and this choice is done in consultation with the team members. Each student then sets out to develop his or her chosen design opportunity and in the process sets out to build a visualization in the form of a scenario that would help articulate the particular offering, its impediments and potentials, the business models that would need to be considered to make it a success in the face of known and anticipated competition as well as a host of other factors that would deal with material, function, aesthetics, economics and other meta level criteria such as current and future legislation and the ethics of the offering in the context of society, culture and the ecology in which it is to be manifested eventually. This complex offering applies to all kinds of design situations and the design student is taken through these in the classroom long before they came face to face with these complexities in the field in which they are required to act.

Prof M P Ranjan

DCC2008 Theme Food: Design with participation and discourse

Food, Inflation and innovation in India

Image: A macro view of the Food constituency as a system of related influences and opportunity areas, which is by no means a complete picture. Students from many parts of India will work together and fill in the gaps and unfold hidden possibilities with their experience and their imagination

The Design Concepts and Concerns course which is taught at NID helps our students take the macro-micro design exploration route in their study and journey through the various pressing design problems and opportunities that we find in the Indian economy and that which is affecting the people most at the time when the course is being conducted are chosen each year. Design is always to be understood in context with a particular setting if we are to derive any meaning from the activity otherwise the meaning will be provided by the observer and this may not be the intended approach of the designers, in which case it is usually back to the drawing board. This year we have chosen to focus on “Food and Inflation”, two major issues that threaten the continuance of the Government of India if it is these concerns are not managed well enough and the global cues are not very helpful either, what with oil hitting the 145 USD mark over the weekend and with experts talking of a 200 USD level by the year end before things may start to cool off a bit, if at all.

The Indian Government at the Centre, is led by the Congress Party, which is a historic cousin of the Indian National Congress that brought Independence to the country, and in this avatar it is having its own set of problems with its coalition partners, particularly on the contentious issue of signing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty with the USA and the international partner members which will give India some degree of energy security in the age of exploding oil prices. Energy is one of the key drivers of the Indian economy as it is the worlds and with rising oil prices all nations will have to address their energy security, especially if they are as dependent on imports as India is in its efforts to keep growth of the economy at a healthy 9 percent plus for the next few years. Here again it is not clear if going nuclear is the only way forward with a country that is endowed with plenty of sunshine and wind along its coastline, many possibilities could emerge if only we tried. Inflation kicking in at over 11 percent in the last week puts paid to all claims of sustained growth and in a democracy heading towards an impending election across the country the Government is pulling out all stops to help stem the inflation tide, particularly in the very sensitive food price front, which hits the common man in the street the most, and therefore would be a sore issue at the hustings. The search for stability is hard to find in a shaky coalition when the partners are unwilling to budge from the nuclear stand. During the last budget the Indian food situation came into sharp focus this year with many instances of farmer suicides in many parts of the country, especially in the Vidharbha region, and the Government made a magnanimous gesture of waiving all farm loans of small and marginal farmers and promised to support the banks through fiscal supports to provide them the safety net needed. This gesture ran into several tens of thousands of crores, and according to The Hindu, about Indian Rupees 60,000 crores (one crore is equal to ten million Rupees) when it was first announced in the budget speech by the Indian Finance Minister and later modified to a much higher sum, very generous indeed, but the problem that lies at the heart of this dilemma still remains unchanged.
“Loan waivers are at best temporary palliatives to the problems facing rural India. Regrettably, the powers that be and the powers that want to be have rarely been willing to confront the difficult and complex problems.”
A. Vaidyanathan

Image: A Vaidyanathan in The Hindu, Thursday, Mar 06, 2008. (Read on here)

I wonder what would be the impact if even a small portion of this humungous sum of money were invested in the area of innovation in the food and agriculture sectors with a slightly longer term view, rather than by just looking down the barrel of the next General Elections a few months away? The use of subsidies when there is a political and economic crisis is quite commonplace but making investments in basic innovations that can provide long term answers to wicked problems is not seen as a practical move in our land of five year terms of public office and short term politics. Can we continue in this strain for long with all the negative cues coming from the global warming front and the economic downturn that is raising its head from the rising oil prices and to top it all the social unrest unleashed due to pressures of change and transformation like the opposition to the SEZ’s at Nandigram and Singur where the local farmers are up in arms against the TATA Nano project?
The Hindu Business Line, Monday, Jan 21, 2008: Bengal verdict on Singur
The Hindu Business Line, Friday, Jan 11, 2008: Inclusive innovation

Image: University of Industrial Arts, Helsinki’s historic building, the tram that is a sustainable tradition of the city and the Rector, Yrjö Sotamaa speaks out in favour of innovation of a softer kind. (Read more here)

These are not simple problems but we do believe that the boundaries of these problems can be explored through the use of design rather than on the streets through negotiations between adversaries from opposite parties. Design can if given a chance can indeed find and show alternate models that could then be presented to all stake-holders for a negotiated settlement of the conflicts. This form of innovation and change is at the heart of the future of politics and many countries are now beginning to recognize this power of design visualization and a recent example is the Helsinki event that merged three major Universities to form the new Innovation University which has been christened the Aalto University after the great Finnish architect and designer, more about this in my previous post on this subject.

We will not wait for the Government of India to change its policies about education and innovations in India but forge ahead instead with some basic explorations that can be done on our own in the classrooms at NID with the creative human capital that is available in the motivated students who have come to learn design at our school. In my paper titled “Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education” that I had presented at a peer reviewed design conference, EAD06 in Bremen, Germany in 2005, I have given an outline of the course called “Design Concepts and Concerns” that has been offered to NID students of all programmes over the past fifteen years. The blog that was set up last year to document this course in a contemporaneous manner can be seen at this link below and last year the theme was Water, which happens to be the most contentious issue across India and the world, which is getting worse by the day. Here we looked at the macro-micro design analysis of the context to understand the situation at a personal level of each student participant and then went on to build alternate models to address these issues through design imagination and innovative offerings. The course ended with a long list of design opportunities and some of these were selected by the groups of students to be visualized as scenarios that could make the imagined outcomes more visible and tangible for decision making processes that would be political and participatory, both people and the Government could be stake holders along a long chain of interest groups, al of whom could have an informed say in the matter that would affect all of us. Take a look at what they had to offer and give your comments and feedback for this year’s theme, FOOD & Inflation.

More at the Design Concepts and Concerns blog here.

Design and Media: Producing Meaning for Indian Society

Image: Illustrated frames from an animated film from Auryn, “In Winter Still” directed by Umesh Shukla in the Claude Monet style using specially designed software to tell a moral tale for children.

Design and Media: Producing Meaning for Society
Design as actively is entering every field of human endeavor, or it soon will and the media is discovering it in India as it explodes into our homes and work-places like never before. Simultaneously, all other fields are looking at design with an active interest through numerous new initiatives, and this includes the fields of production of illustration, still image photography, motion pictures & animation for the TV and live action cinema industry in India. Now an even broader arena of moving images that communicate is emerging through our cell phones and digi-pods that we carry around with us all the time, not to mention the browser based flash animations and quicktime productions that has brought the individual from the street, so to speak, to become a producer of these images, and not just a consumer, thanks to Youtube, Flickr, and a host of social networking sites and discussion platforms that dot the internet today..

The media is exploding all around us and the digital wave is aiding the convergence of many distinct media types on a borderless space, which I had talked about on my previous outing with the media moguls at NID. At the conference at NID on 10th December 1999, on the topic of Emerging Media, I had presented a paper titled “Niche Programming: Narrowcasting the Internet”. The TV celebrity, Vikram Chandra, then from Star Network News (now with the NDTV) and a speaker at the conference, whispered into my ears, “Professor, do you really think all this is going to happen soon?” my reply was in the affirmative, and now he is himself heading the web initiative for the NDTV, besides continuing to anchor many news and special interest programmes for broadcast TV in India.

The media is moving from analog to digital and in the process opening up many new opportunities for design interventions both at the professional as well as the level of the am-admi (the man in the street) as we say in India. News and stock market programmes use ticker tapes to provide dynamic data on call and the set top boxes and direct to home offer to blur the distinction between TV and internet, telephone and music videos, besides those new channels of delivery which we are yet to dream of just now. I now have all the options available at my home on the NID campus with telephone, and broadband internet competing for time with the cable network, direct to home satellite TV and radio and the daily newspaper and occasional magazine providing the icing on the media cake that I consume on a daily basis. My stock market investment and my staying in touch with my subject all require the use of these media sources in a selective manner to meet my professional and everyday need. My family too need these resources and in some cases we have simultaneous feeds from multiple sources necessitating multiple access points which are now the order of the day. Multiplicity of media and of demand has triggered a spiral of opportiunities for design interventions since those who wish to reach us are realizing that we have choices and that the remote button will be used unless

Design as a capability lies at the cusp of the manifestation of dreams and intentions in this powerful and lucrative media space, and it is beginning to take centre stage from both art and science, let me explain. While new media was technology driven and experimental cinema was propelled by art and science expressions and research, all these are taking a backseat to the commercial and intentional capabilities of design that can marry both art and science in commercially and socially desirable ways. Of course, our artists will continue to give us their critical perspectives on our life and our times and our scientists on the other hand will continue to search for new truths, while design will learn to use these to communicate and to tell stories in new and increasingly effective ways. In the final analysis it is the compelling presence of the message in a particular context that makes these offerings so effective and necessary.

Image: Media clips from the scrap book on Indian designer Rajiv Sethi

For instance, new opportunities for powerful expressions exist in the reconstructions of major news driven events, from bank heists to public executions, celebrity cavalcade routes to sports analysis tools (cricket – tennis – swimming….stop action, motion capture and display tools, to name just a few possibilities) to the capture of the spread of fire on the oil rig and the 9/11 type reconstructions for the evening news, all of which are designed offerings, across many competing media, all the time, OK 24x7….Illustration, live action, animation and storytelling, interviews providing facts and expressive fiction with hyper-reality in TV space, all use design capabilities. After an effective entry into the TV space we now see design literally invading Bollywood, Tollywood and our Southern bastions of cinema, the biggest in the world. Hollywood and the West, by the way, is already taken, witness Saul Bass, the famous Graphic Designer of the 70’s and the big budget design promos and trailers for all major offerings from the West, design is an integral part of that offering. This assault is not restricted to production design, costumes and pre-release advertising, but is extending to visual scripting, storyboarding and direction, and in other instances to special effects and animations for stunts, special equipment and props, the Bond cars and gadgets and Free Willie the whale, software for compositing and new business models for the delivery of media content through all available and competing channels, the opportunities are growing exponentially.

From my vantage as a design teacher at NID I see many of our alumni entering the moving picture space through a variety of opportunities that are opening up for trained designers. A quick online query on the “designindia” discussion list has shown very interesting convergences of many design specialists heading for these media opportunities, at a very high level of performance, located in Hyderabad and Mumbai, Dubai and Hong Kong. TV advertising and documentary production used to be the traditional spaces for design and designer action, but now it is being extended to feature films and animations, as the industry gets organized and broader at the base. Product, Furniture and Exhibition designers are working on production design in the TV and film industry. Textile and Apparel designers in costumes and Graphic designers in Art Direction and storyboarding and our Animators are expanding their reach from the short comics and single concept films to feature length stories and documentaries for global partners, special effects and a combination of live and animated offerings. There is a lot of creative trespassing going on here, since digital tools have lowered the entry barrier and the inherent core design skills of visualization and synthesis, capabilities of all designers can now be mobilized through the common sets of software skills that cut across many design disciplines today.

Image: Web site snapshot from Corcoise Films Pvt Ltd with showreel links from ace designer Prasoon Pandey

Design visualization skills are being sought after by both advertising and feature film makers to create expressive visual storyboards that can bring a whole creative and production team up to steam very quickly on the intentions of the producers and directors, and the cost saving and effectiveness of this tool is very convincing indeed. Converting a verbal script into a visual storyboard is not just an artistic interpretation of the record but it would include key decisions such as the selection of locations and frame angles that are viable and effective for the actors and stunt scenes, give cues for costumes, sets and trolley and camera movements, a right-hand support for the director-producer, who would take the final decision call in all cases. Surely this requires more designerly capabilities, both cognitive and effective capabilities, than just the skill of good drawing. Understanding structure and form as a composite whole in the production of meaning is central to the effectiveness of the exercise.

The design intention would be to tell a story in the most effective manner, which would suit the particular context and the occasion. Story telling in culture contributes to the expressions of that culture and Gilles Fauconnier’s, concepts of conceptual blends and fields, provides us tools for the creation of new structures for storytelling and games design. This is in a way similar to the masterful analysis by Levi Strauss when he de-coded the myths of many tribal communities and showed us the similarities and differences, the symmetries and dualities inherent in these myths. Today NID animators and game designers are exploring the use of these structural diagrams, models and scenarios, that can capture the core of a virtual landscape to help maintain continuity in the fictional characters in an equally fictional spaces that they inhabit. A formulae that is successful will be revisited by many with new forms of expression while the underlying structure is faithfully replicated, the Ram Lila being revisited in all our villages across that land, each in its own regional variant, as a case in point.

Raw & the Cooked, structuralist stories and myths from Claude Levi Straus, demonstrate that stories have structure and that stories have form. The great Bollywood imitations of the Hollywood movies, adopts the structure and customizes the form to suit the local context. The Bollywood movies that imitate its own success formulaes, all in new forms and with new players or actors, dubbed in language and with new songs …… many possibilities, hundreds of offerings each day, round the year. Many aspects that are copied are action sequences and interesting structural relationships and these can be easily managed in the digital form, by the use of templates, like in PowerPoint presentation made by managers, but effective in the hands of a master storyteller. The new digital form of entertainment can have mix and match (like fashion street) and offer many possibilities, using the same successful formulae each time in a new way. With the use of motion capture and digital models used for the generation of the story and using a range of optional actors, all digital models that perform to the script and motion capture sequences that are computer mediated, a new masala mix in cinema is possible. Jackie Chan being replaced by Amitabh Bachan, or Chun win Fat, whoever that may be, depending on the audience, a new form of visual translation for the 24x7 world of localized TV content, mix and match, direct to home? All new opportunities that is just now at the horizon but soon inside our homes, for sure. These can be designed and delivered with imagination and great power when it is handled well.

Very soon we can imagine and expect to see content of the great cultures being reinterpreted in the media by audience choice, as in text being converted to image in the comic books and moving image with action sequences and music videos, just as text is converted to voice with the now effective text to speech software programmes. As we understand structure better and figure out new forms of expression, we will or can have automated stories on call, with actors of our choice and with twists and turns as dictated by the viewer, a totally non-linear offering. These are already here with us in the form of the digital games that children and adults play all day, offline as well as offline in great multi-player environments that unfold as the game progresses, never to be repeated in the storytelling traditions of yore. This emergent form is like the video game and the child and playing adult are actually manipulating the course of the story with dynamic animations and with deep immersion in the game play all the time. These interactive games hold the seeds of a new genre of interactive cinema that will be upon us through our cell phones and our other media access devices, very soon indeed. The “Cell phone cinema” of low-resolution storytelling, and home movie editing, the Indian MMS craze. Wapp, rapp and zapp, Bluetooth dating and digital flirting, are all here to stay. Some of these will be used to sell us credit cards and insurance, or toothpaste and adhesives, or entertain us round the clock, online, offline, at home and elsewhere.

"Design and Moving Image: Let the Twain Meet", was the title of my “Cut Here” paper of 2005. Design as we know it today is unfolding to new levels of understanding from which it can help us communicate both the trivial and the profound, and our value systems will dictate how we will eventually use these capabilities for a sustainable future. When the world is shrinking and as Mike Davis tells us, it is becoming a global slum, we need to use the media to address these dimensions like never before, and in my view the effective communicator with leadership qualities is the challenge of the day. Design at this level is very political indeed. Designers need to learn about politics or our politicians will need to learn to use design a whole lot better. I wonder which one will come first.

Based on paper for “Cut Here” Journal of NID, August 2005 and revised in May 2008. Download pdf file 68 kb from here.

Download the copy of the journal "Cut Here" issue No 4 pdf file 2.94 mb

KaosPilots at NID and in Mumbai: Design for India being redefined

Image: KaosPilots at Gautam and Gira square at NID, Paldi campus.

KaosPilots at NID and in Mumbai: Design for India being redefined
The new age business school called KaosPilot was set up in Aarhus, Denmark more than 15 years ago in response to a pressing need to get young people to think afresh about their careers as entrepreneurs and creative professionals in a world that was becoming very commercial and market driven. Uffe Elbeck, the founder Principal of the school in the intro to his book, KaosPilot A-Z, says this about his school, looking back over the past 15 years. Uffe is currently the Chairman of KaosPilot International Board from 2006, now that it has taken roots in many countries and growing in influence and locations.

I quote – “In the historical rearview mirror it’s nothing less than an educational, economic and organizational miracle – and fairytale – that the school and education have survived. And we just have’nt just survived – we’ve thrived. We’re alive, – really alive. With a pulse in the heart, sweat and blood, here and now. In the centre of Aarhus – but the whole world as our playground.” – unquote.

In 15 years of experimentation the KaosPilots have been able to redefine management education and make it a creative enterprise that drew inspiration from the field, live and in real contact, rather than through the use of dry case studies that are discussed threadbare in a crowded classroom. The KaosPilot is an International School for New Business Design and Social Innovation, a way forward for many management schools that want to embrace the value of creativity, innovation and design in their approach education and change making processes in our various activities.

The KaosPilot schools do not produce plain vanilla managers who will then work their way up a corporate ladder. They produce leaders who are both playful as well as committed to a cause, something close to their heart and meaningful to society as well. They are trained in the ways of the Fourth Sector that lies outside the traditional three sectors of Government, Private and Non Government sectors but draw the strengths of all these in good measure in order to build sustainable and socially equitable business models in a creative manner, all to produce great value. This is what I call design.

35 KaosPilots and two teachers are now in Mumbai for their three month “Outpost” where in a project mode they would explore the city and its resources and then build sustainable business models for those in need of their skills, all in a sensitive manner. Working in groups and connecting with other committed souls in the city, they would explore, experiment, dialogue, model, build and test the proof of concept offerings that are a product of their research and imagination before going all out to establish the enterprise with local participation and leadership in each of the areas that have been chosen by the sense-making that precedes the intense-action of implementation.

Why 35? This is the batch size at all KaosPilot schools and each student is called a Navigator at their website that is full of exciting detail of their tasks and experiences in the field. While the school offers a bachelor’s degree equivalent, the students are over 21 years of age, mature and with a clearly formed purpose in life, to make a real difference. They come to the school to pick up skills and to address needs that most business schools ignore. In the words of Marco Visscher, Managing Editor of Ode, a Netherland based international magazine – “It sometimes seems that while the world economy has drastically changed, business education has stayed still.” KaosPilot offers another way. He goes on to say – “And now, after being Scandinavia’s best-kept secrets, KaosPilots is aiming to breakthrough internationally”. Now they are in India, welcome.

Image: KaosPilots with Prof M P Ranjan in his office at NID.
Three members of the Mumbai Outpost team traveled over the weekend and arrived at NID, Ahmedabad yesterday and spent two days with us at the Institute, very refreshing ideas and process of working. Perhaps this heralds a new period of cooperation between NID and a business school with the same values and commitment to change, real change in the right direction. KaosPilots, Sophie Uesson and Finnur Sverrisson and their teacher Mans Adler spent two days at NID and interacted with students and faculty in order to understand our processes and experience our facilities on the Paldi campus. We look forward to seeing the results of their stay in Mumbai and the bonds that this visit will forge with designers and managers in Mumbai and Sweden in the days ahead. We are keen to be in the centre of all this action as we move forward from here.

Poverty and Design Explored: Context India

Image: Dr Sam Wong speaking to students at NID in the DCC class about design for sustainable development

Poverty and Design Explored: Context India
Last week we had a couple of visitors to NID, both looking at the macro issues of design and development as well as how we at NID looked at these same issues from our perspective of many years of experience of using design for situations that addressed rural poverty and design policy at the national level. Dr. Sam Wong from the School of Earth and Environment who asked us a question about our methodology for village intervention with design for sustainable living. Dr. Wong is on his way to Rajasthan to conduct a first hand study of development opportunities in rural areas and to look at the various roles for design in that process. This gave me an opportunity to reflect on the various projects done at NID over the years from the Jawaja project, through the Chennapatna toy project to numerous textile design projects such as the Dhamadka Block Print project and more recently to our “Katlamara Chalo” project that integrates bamboo cultivation with product manufacturing as a means to alleviate rural poverty using local skills, resources and local enthusiasm as the primary resource. In my reflections we were able to discuss and build a more generalized sketch model (shown above) that explained the process leading to the selection of the village through research and the building of an understanding of the context from which a number of design opportunities are identified and modeled before they are taken through a participatory development process that used the local strengths and resources in a sustainable manner, all with a design strategy layered with design thinking and action that is aimed at creating the product innovations and business models that could bring self reliance and sustained development to that particular situation. This process has been repeated many times by our students and faculty teams at hundreds of village centres across that country in numerous crafts pockets with a great deal of success. Unfortunately not many of these projects have been published although they are all live examples of success of such design interventions in the field in a very complex social and economic milieu that makes up the India village situation.

Image: Gisele Raulik and Darragh Murphy speaking to NID students in the DCC class about National Design Policies and their research in India and elsewhere.
The second visitor was Gisele Raulik Murphy, a design researcher from the SEEdesign Programme of Design Wales at Cardiff who is visiting India to examine the contours of the Indian National Design Policy and compare it to those of Finland, Brazil and South Korea. Gisele and her designer husband, Darragh Murphy, had an occasion to talk to my students in the DCC Foundation class about design policy, design promotion and design support programmes in many countries that they are researching just now. Gisele had invited me to the conference that she had helped organize on Design Support that was conducted by Design Wales in 2004. My paper on the status of design business in India can be downloaded from this link here. (conference paper 39kb pdf and visual presentation 573kb pdf) Her current visit to NID and India gave me the opportunity to share our thoughts and ideas about design policy and on my personal views about its larger role in India. I am eager to see her interactions with Indian designers and design administrators compiled and discussed in her forthcoming report and to review her insights through her extended study of a comparative analysis of numerous design policies across the world.

The way economists use the term planning today it seems that they do not take into account the various processes that we consider to be at the core of design as explained above, particularly, that of the core design ability of visualization through which design intentions are made visible to all stakeholders before the matter is taken up for sustained implementation with zeal and local participation. The economists prefer to use statistical and mathematically modeled projections and verbal constructs which do not touch upon the core areas of realisable innovations and this is an area that I think that design can help in bringing about a better understanding of even statistics itself. The work of people like Richard Saul Wurman and others in the field of information architecture and data visualisation have touched upon this use of a specific design ability to make visible, structures and forms of processes, situations and happenings, all explored in many complex manifestations. There are many other areas that design can be used in the planning and decision process of governments and industry where it is not used today and this is very evident to me each time i look at the work of our Indian Planning Commission and its publications. These bodies are filled with economists but at many times they seem to have very little faith in imagination and the creation of new and innovative offerings that the situation really affords, at least in my mind this is true. I do believe that these are not adequately addressed due to lack of understanding of what design can do in such situations by being a part of the process from the inside and designers too have not taken on the task of making all these possibilities visible by their own work due to lack of involvement, engagement and of funding at one end and stark apathy at the other. Many designers have taken the easy path of doing what they are told to do by their corporate masters who use their skills to slick up annual reports or company brochures.

I do feel that we need to raise this debate and explore the various roles of design and its potential application that is today ignored by design education and practice alike, including my own school, and we may need to raise that debate at a global level so that a new sense of commitment is brought into the use of design in areas far outside industry and business, and that is one of my objectives in setting up this 'Design for India" blog in order to create a platform from which I can share my thoughts on the possibilities that I see. I also find the peer review system of the research publications as not so perfect although it does work wonders for science analysis and knowledge creation but it may be extremely defective for design demonstration since the idea of “design opportunity”, a very specific term, as a combination of perception and imagination, excludes the viewer or reader from "seeing" the imagination part of the designers statement and therefore it compels the designer to take the idea far down the visualisation path before it can even dawn on others that the idea is truly credible. This means that we may need to create a platform or even many platforms for design incubation and development that can be accessible to many across numerous areas of application and need and these kinds of platforms just do not exist in India today, or if it does, it is dominated by administrative controls that stifle innovation and exploration which is critically needed to make the demonstration. Even at NID, our policies for faculty research and action are very restrictive and the sanction mechanism through administration is very stifling indeed. Some of us have had to battle hard to achieve a small degree of autonomy of action and this is not a good climate for addressing these complex problems which surround us here in India in an effective manner.

Jeffrey Sachs, author of “The End of Poverty: How we can make it happen in our lifetime” and Director of The Earth Institute, is an economist and a respected guide of many International programmes but I fail to see any signs of his deep understanding of design and innovation as we understand it today and here we, as designers and design teachers, have the task of educating our economists and the United Nations and World Bank statesmen, about the possibilities of design use just as the science community has managed to do over the past few hundred years of demonstration and application, their message to the world. This is where I feel the design policy of nations need to be directed to look at areas of real value and I am trying to get the attention of the Government of India to this possibility and to its potential in India and thanks to the internet we can make these statements directly today through our blogs (if managed properly) and I am aware that these have an impact, almost as much as any message in a peer reviewed journal such as the Design Issues or some other such respected platform with a claim of being scientific, but the challenge and problem is located in how we can get the people who need to listen to this to come to the table when the dominating theme in India and the world over is still science and technology and also management top a large extent, while design is not at all a part of that agenda at the level of discourse at the policy level in our nation. Most people, including Sachs, seem to believe that giving “development aid” is the way forward to poverty eradication and the whole aspect of building self reliance is often underplayed or even forgotten altogether. Many NGO’s turn out to be self serving agencies where the dependencies that are built between the donor and the recipient gives the donor a life long kick that they are doing some good in the world as good samaritans while they are in actually serving themselves and their ego needs. It is here that Ravi Matthai’s advise that the interveners must be completely dispensible in the process of building self reliant communities becomes relevant as he had advocated when we entered the Jawaja Project in the early 70’s.

Poverty and the Village Economy: Design Strategies for India

Image: Models prepared by systems design students from Product and Graphic Design after their recent visit to Jawaja in Rajasthan.

Poverty and the Village Economy: Design Strategies for India
This year the Design Concepts and Concerns course offered to the Foundation batch at the NID is looking at how design can help address some pressing needs of our villages, particularly in dealing with the problems associated with systemic poverty and how design thinking and action can help the people help themselves. The theme of this year’s course is water and its numerous manifestations and applications and the students have explored this space through mapping out design opportunities while trying to understand the needs of the five selected regions that have been assigned to the groups for their study and action. The Government of India has all but admitted that they have failed to deal with the huge problem of rural indebtedness and failure of agriculture and the only thing that they could think of was to give sops (as usual) in the form of a Rs 60,000 crore farm-loan-waiver scheme which addresses the symptoms and not the cause. I wonder what would happen if such funds were applied to the creation of imaginative solutions that are specific to each location through the use of design and through local participation? The massive and repeated occurrence of farmer suicides that have been reported from many parts of our country are the symptoms for a deep seated malaise that Government with all its massive investments in science and technology programmes on the one hand and in numerous financial and management schemes on the other, all of which have come to no real solution to this endemic problem.

This magnanimous gesture on the part of Government was further compounded by another show of opulent entertainment through a lavish indulgence that was exhibited by a group of corporate leaders and their wealthy and loaded counterparts from the entertainment world in a weekend bash at Jamnagar, all in a land of farmer suicides and abject poverty that is a real concern across thousands of villages that make up much of India. Mukesh Ambani is reported to have spent upwards of Rs 400 crores for this three day bash and I wonder if other rich farmers and our feudal zamindari system in rural India will try to emulate this act in the days ahead, some leadership, great role model!! Not that designers are far behind if one examined the luxury based projects that they carry out regularly with great aplomb and an uncanny disdain for any form of poverty that surrounds us in India, all while working for their corporate masters in the form of opulent trade shows, glamour events and branded experience merchandise and lifestyle products for the very very rich. Design itself is unfortunately seen as an activity aimed at the very rich and rarely as a process and an activity that can address the pressing needs of our country and its needy poor, which is a whole world apart.

Dr. Verghese Kurian, the great Anand milkman and founder to the Dairy Cooperative movement in India, has been calling repeatedly for the creation of rural support systems and educational institutes such as the IRMA, the Indian Institute of Rural Management, across several geographies in India but the Government continues to bash on with the setting up of more IIM’s, the Indian Institute of Management, that address the needs of corporate India when these particular entities are quite capable of looking after themselves, or should be doing so by all the means available to them. Some of us have been calling for an increased allocation of Government funds into the design education sector as well since we believe that this would help solve many of our human resource imbalances that are due to the excessive leaning towards science and technology on the one side and on corporate kind of management on the other hand, particularly at the higher education levels. This year the national budget has earmarked funds for yet more IIT’s and IIM’s while continuing to ignore the dire need for design schools as well as rural management schools that Dr Kurian has been talking about. The late Prof. Ravi Matthai, the founder Director of the IIM Ahmedabad had initiated a visionary programme for experimenting with rural education called “The Rural University Project” in the early 70’s and through this initiative he had inspired faculty and students of the IIMA and the NID Ahmedabad to cooperate in the field and build solutions for the rural poor. The Jawaja Project, as we called it at NID, had many initiatives that took design teachers and students to the villages of Rajasthan and Nilam Iyer through her Diploma Project had developed strategies as well as products using the skills and materials of the leather workers of the Jawaja village cooperative. The NID-IIMA involvement continued for many years and the stated objective of the Jawaja team led by Prof Matthai was to make the interveners dispensible completely through the building of the self reliance of the village people. This was indeed a very wise piece of advice when we look back at Jawaja after a period of 25 years. Ashoke Chatterjee in his 1997 interview with Carolyn Jongeward talks about the design journey with conviction and satisfaction. The interview was later published in Seminar magazine and can be seen at this link.

Image; Model and metaphor of the Raigar system of product based entrepreneurial venture prepared by the student team to understand the system.
The Raigar community, the Dalits of the region, were the poorest of the lot, and today they have gained the self confidence and the means to make their own living from the craft of making leather products which the are able to market in India as well as to many locations overseas. It is a confirmation that design support and local entrepreneurship can transform a communityt from being dejected and helpless to become confident and self reliant through a process of hand holding and encouragement which could induce local sustained action. It seems that the strategies that were developed and embedded into the design offerings for the Jawaja community has worked at many levels of complexity and today when a team of senior Product Design students from NID make a presentation of their field visit and findings from the Jawaja region, the message is very clear, that the design interventions have worked so well that the Raigars are the most financially secure community in the region today. These field studies were done as part of their systems design class at NID in their search for meaningful occupations for design in India today. It shows that design works and should indeed be used locally in each and every development situation to get the “Jawaja effect” to spread all over the country. Is the Government of India listening? I do hope so.

This strategy has been tried time and again by the NID faculty and students across numerous crafts communities all over India with a great deal of success. Paul Polak in his book “Out of Poverty: What works when traditional approaches fails”, tells us that his own experience with dealing with poverty in agriculture has used entrepreneurship and design strategy at the grassroots level to help eradicate poverty in many places across the world. His work and that of his organization, the International Development Enterprises, can be seen at their website link here.

Making of a design entrepreneur: Learning from peers

Image: Pankaj Varma and Julie Bose talking to Foundations students about their business experience of setting up a new brand called “Namo”, a series of Devotional Accessories as a design offering in the Indian marketplace.

Learning about business processes and business models has a two fold role in the making of a designer in India. The knowledge will hold them in good stead when they actually start practicing design and some of them will become entrepreneurs in their own right, by getting involved in start-up businesses using their design skills and entrepreneurial urge just as many of our graduates have done in the past. Many of such businesses have grown over the past ten or fifteen years and in my recent reflections in conversation with colleagues and students in the DCC class at NID we have identified several classes of such businesses that have been set up by our young designers who have graduated from our institute. The second aspect of business is the understanding of the channel through which the design solutions developed during the design journey are delivered to the public in an extremely competitive space of the marketplace. Many a time great design solutions get sidelined due to some other factors that are usually beyond the control of the manufacturer, promoter or even the product creator. These could be factors in the legal space, the financial strategies employed or even in the layers of branding and positioning that may have been adopted by the marketing team. It is clear that even these offerings can be designed and explored to both reduce risk as well as to respond to current aspirations of users as well as conditions in the market that may call for a revision of the offering in line with the time and place in which it is being made.
Image: The Namo design collection launched by designer entrepreneurs Pankaj Verma and Julie Bose

Making of a design entrepreneur: Learning from peers
I have asked the Foundation students explore the field by contacting our graduates in the field in order to find role models for themselves to emulate when their time is ripe for action in the field. India has been a particularly hostile territory for young design aspirants since we have had a protected economy for so many years and design and the risk that it entails was far from the minds of the trader manufacturers who managed our industrial empires as well as the Government that was more interested in control through standards and laws and taxation and special privileges and subsidies rather innovation and market excellence. In my presentation at the Conference on Design Support at Design Wales in 2004 I had the occasion to reflect on the Indian Design landscape and offer a number of categories for design businesses in India. This conference paper (pdf 39kb) and visual presentation (pdf 573kb) show the categories and these can be downloaded from my website at the links provided here. In order to give our students a framework to do their own research about their peers in the design business in India I offer a broad set of categories below which is in no way exhaustive but can give them a head start to look at this space and fill in the details for themselves as we go forward with their education.

Design schools and their curriculum has been focused on the creation of skilled personal for industry but many of our products, our graduates from the design programmes, end up being self employed and very happy indeed in that self appointed space. The journey may be traumatic for some or just as easy for others, but the lessons of the street food vendors that was explored by the DCC class would I am sure give our young aspiring designers some insights about how they too can survive in a hostile business environment which is not too supportive of design and the design activity in India has been just that over the past fifty years since the modern design movement started at Ahmedabad with the writing of the Eames India Report in 1958 (pdf 359kb). Perhaps this has something to do with the nature of design itself and only time will tell. The National Design Policy too is perhaps barking up the wrong tree and trying to create designers to serve industry masters, but are they ready to listen? We need to look at other models where designers can work directly with people who need their support and the policy frameworks could be moulded to facilitate such a direction. Here I would draw the attention of my students to the experiments in the Northeast of England where the Design Council UK has carried out the DOTT07 initiatives with John Thackara of Doors of Perception fame as the design leader. Their book, publications link and online documentation pdf (5454kb) of this live one year long initiative is very exciting indeed and could be a model for decentralised design action in India as well. Design schools may need to reexamine their curriculum to ensure that entrepreneurship is included in their mandate and this may bode well for design profession in India going forward.

The broad categories that we identified for design action in India are listed below:
1. Design Consulting Offices (DCO’s) (a few names in each category)
Design Directions: Satish Gokhale and Falguni Patel (Product & Graphic Design)
Ray & Kesavan: Sujata Kesavan (Graphic Design & Branding)
Incubis: Amit Gulati and Sabyasachi Paldas (Product Design, Architecture and Branding)
Korjan Design Studio: Dinesh and Rashmi Korjan (Product Design)
Elephant Design: Sudhir Sharma and colleagues from NID (Graphic, Branding, Exhibition etc)
Idiom Design Studio: Sonia Manchanda, Jacob Mathew et al (Branding, Graphics, Retail)
Design Workshop: Devashis Bhattacharya (Graphics, Branding & Exhibitions)
Icarus Design: George Mathews (Product Design)
Whisper Design: Niladri Mukherjee (Product Design and Branding)
Lopez Design: Tony Lopez (Graphics, Branding)
Lokus Design: Chandrashekar Badve, Molond Risaildar & Siddharth Kabra (Design, Architecture and Branding)

2. Designer Producers (DPO’s)
Quetzel: Sandeep Mukherjee and Sarita Fernandez (Furniture and Architectural Accessories)
Dovetail: Sunder S and John Mathew: (Furniture and Architectural Accessories)
Bodhi: Mala and Pradeep Sinha (Textile and Fashion products)
Designwise: Mukul Goel (Hand Crafted Metal artifacts and accessories)
Namo: Pankaj Verma and Julie Bose (Devotional Accessories)
Curiosity Workshop: Mala and Bela Shodhan (Soft Toys and Furnishings)

3. Designer Producer with Retail outlets (DPR’s)
Abraham & Thakore: David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore (Textile and Fashion products)
Tulsi: Neeru Kumar (Textile and Home Furnishing)
Bandhej: Archana Shah (Textile, Fashion and Accessories)
The Design Store: S Sunder, John Matthew, Jacob Matthew & Anand Aurora (Furniture & Accessories)

4. Interior Design and Exhibit Design services (IED’s)
Design Habit: Amardeep Behl: (Exhibition Design)
Design Core & Design Laboratory: Vikram Sardesai and Surya Gowda (Exhibition Design)

5. Design Research Services (DRS’s)
Onio Design: Mahoj Kotari (Product Design and Trend Research)
Variations Art Gallery & Freedom Tree Design: Latika Puri Khosla (Colour Research Services)
Sonic Rim: Uday Dandavate (People oriented Trend Research)

6. Design Led Institutions / NGO Activists (DLI’s)
Riverside School: Kiran Bir Sethi (Primary and Secondary School)
Khumbam: K B Jinan (Craft Based Production of Terracota Murals)
Industree: Neelam Chibber (Grass based village and artisanal initiatives)
Daily Dump: Poonam Bir Kasturi (Organic Waste management system)
Vikalp Design: Laxmi Murthy (Communication for Rural Health)

7.Interaction and Interface Design (IID’s)
Codesign: Rajesh Dahiya (Interface Design and Graphics)
Edot Solutions: Sanjay Sarkar (Information Design Software)

8. Corporate Design Intrapreneurs (CDI’s)
Atmosphere & Himatsingka Design Studio: Jayshree Poddar (Silk Furnishing)

I am sure that we can think of many more such initiatives and see that these are not exhaustive in any way. However, with the creation of the Design Business Incubation Centre at NID with support from the DST perhaps more alternatives will be explored in the days ahead. Perhaps the practicing designers in India can share their experiences and disclose closely held business strategies to design students so that it would encourage several of them to think of taking the entrepreneurial route when the time is right. Data on their business turnover and what they do and how they operate is rarely available since the whole area of design journalism is so poorly operated and structured in India today. I hope that this too will change in the days ahead.

Jewellery and Retail Sectors: Design as an Business Service Integrator

Image: Display units at the Jewellery exhibit in Bangalore by faculty and students of Retail Design Experience (RDE) from NID Bangalore. Jewellery is specifically listed as a sector of focus in the National Design Policy (NDP) along with Toys and Automobiles as they are seen by the NDP administration as potential areas of export and growth with huge employment potential. The South Indian Jewellery Show 2008 (SIJS 2008) at the Kanteerava Indoor Stadium in Bangalore from 18th to 20th January 2008 gave the new discipline of Design for Retail Experience (DRE) at the NID Bangalore Centre an opportunity to explore the use of new and sophisticated materials to exhibit jewellery in a refined setting. Sponsored by the DuPont Ltd. The students and faculty of the DRE explored the material Corian, which is manufactured by DuPont, and through a process that led from exploration to prototyping in the classroom setting they were able to show that design straddles several sectors. In this case the use of a new material for exhibit design that could be used in a high value setting to showcase jewellery in the Trade Show which had the presence of hundreds of manufacturers from South India.

Image: View of the DuPont Corian stall at the Bangalore exhibition designed by NID Bangalore centre. The display stands and the backdrops were all made from Corian and the students and their faculty, C S Susanth have been able to demonstrate the specific properties of the material such as seamless joints and translucency through routed relief motifs that were used to apply these patterns. The Gems and Jewellery sector in India is currently stated to be employing about 4 million people with a gross turnover of USD 35 billion. This is based on a very large labour based gem cutting and setting industry that is trying to reinvent itself to a higher value based on the introduction of design and branded product offerings. Much of the design that was shown at the fair was traditional in nature and there is a huge opportunity to move this to a more sophisticated design driven market. The items on display at the NID designed DuPont stall were all designed by the NID students from the Lifestyle & Accessory Design discipline at NID, Ahmedabad while the Bangalore based students and faculty helped create the exhibit design and the display structures at the stall. The software used to merchandise the products, in this case the contextual use of Corian for the jewellery sector, were also designed with the involvement of the students and faculty from the Design for Digital Experience discipline which is another offering from the NID Bangalore Centre. This exhibit project was a follow-up to the very successful material exploration workshop that was earlier conducted by the DRE at the NID Bangalore Centre on behalf of DuPont. Such material exploration workshops help new material introduction into industry by demonstration of their features and by showing good examples of innovative uses across a number of application areas, and the numerous applications in the retail sector is one such space that was discovered through the design exploration work.

Image: Jewellery concepts designed by NID students from the Lifestyle and Accessory Design discipline at nid, Paldi Campus. The jewellery sector has several other areas with opportunity for design action since all the tools and machines used in the manufacture of finely crafted or mass-produced jewellery also need to be designed and with the growing realization of the value of differentiation through branding the sector has opened up new opportunities for the sue of visual merchandising skills and graphic design in the retail space as well as in the print and web based promotional materials. All these applications would need an understanding of the unique needs of the high value jewellery marketing sector and the other opportunities that these provide would include new digital security devices and procedures that could be incorporated at the point of sale as well as in the manufacturing situations. This industry is expected to grow to a USD 60 billion industry over the next 3 to 5 years time according to estimates by the Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council. While design can provide integrated supports for the anticipated growth of this industry it can be used across 230 other sectors, which are as yet not aware of the integrated offering that can be used to bring value to each of these sectors. Besides such industry driven design action we can look forward to new initiatives in the social and public space if the real benefits of design are to reach the Indian public at large. It is here that the Government and public bodies will have to take the lead with making the necessary investments needed to make this happen.