Kerala State Institute of Design: Infrastructure and Directions in 2012

Kerala State Institute of Design: KSID - Where do we go now?

Architects visualisation of KSID campus

On 9th and 10th November 2009 I was invited to a vision document meeting at Kovalam and this event was reported previously at this post here on my blog as New design school at Kerala State level.

The proposed institute has come a long way and the infrastructure is now taking shape on the ground and we will now need to review and refresh our approach and take the next steps in the process of establishing a new design school for Kerala State.

For this first meeting I had also submitted a note that raised several questions and proposed some directions that would need to be addressed by the political and administrative establishment in Kerala that is dealing with  the setting up of such a school of design. We would need a working definition of design as well as a strategy that could inform the managers and faculty in shaping the programmes and activities of this new institution. My note of 2009 is quoted below and these questions are still relevant when we go forward towards the establishment of the infrastructure and teaching programmes and other activities of the institute.

Quote

Kerala State Design Institute: An approach paper and some thoughts for the meeting.

Prof. M P Ranjan

National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad

7 November 2009

Design is a very old activity and Kerala is full of great examples of its sensitive but unselfconscious use in most of their traditional buildings and spaces, traditional artifacts, festivals and events and traditional knowledge systems, all of which are the product of great design thinking in the past. However we need to ask the question in the context of the emergence of modern design as a contemporary discipline and one that has now been seen as a critical resource for development and planned change across many sectors of need. We now need to know – What does Kerala really need? Do we know the answer to this question?

This is very different from asking the question – “What does Kerala want?” – another design institute! What shall be the unique differentiators and driving principles here?

Ever since design was imported as a fairly developed offering from the West (USA and Western Europe) into India in the post Independence era we have been asking this question and there has been much confusion on the true role of design amongst even those people who funded and managed design in the country including those in Government as well as at the Institutions that were set up to further the use of design in India. The initial impetus came from Western ideas that were adopted wholesale and it took many years of engagement before the faint questions started emerging about how this genre of design could be adopted to local conditions in a developing economy such as India and at the same time corporate industry went ahead and addressed the consumption side of the equation and used design as a corporate bedfellow to generate hype, style, and a pursuit of business profit.

Many people equated design to being a subset of art and numerous art colleges set up in India over the past century were called upon to provide services in the design sectors and this has produced a vast range of design professionals across many sectors of Indian industry in the absence of any formal design education schools in the country. Design has also been equated with science and technology and numerous R& D centres have been set up across India to deal with technological innovation and technical and scientific research and these too have created bodies of expertise that have impinged on various design contributions in many sectors in India. However, the products from design schools have been few in comparison and it is only after economic liberalization that many of these trained individuals have been able to make a significant mark in the innovation landscape of the country. In recent years design is being seen as a management resource and in particular design thinking is being offered as a critical new approach to planning and creating exciting scenarios for the solution of complex problems facing all kinds of development and business objectives.

A few year ago, in 2005 as part of my Design Concepts and Concerns course, I asked my class in the Foundation Programme at NID to explore and imagine the nature of new design schools that may be needed across a number of regions of India since there was the talk in those days about an impending Design Policy for India and it was under active discussion in Government as well as in some circles of design professionals and academics in India. Many interesting alternatives were explored and offered by the students teams each having looked at the regional resources and their own map of the strengths of each region since the thesis was that design is a local phenomenon that must be based on available resources to meet recognized local needs. Each region has its own strengths that can be leveraged to get it locational advantage as well as traditional resources that could form the platform for differentiated and unique offerings informed by the local culture and its creative reinterpretation as a modern offering to meet contemporary needs.

Around the world new design institutes are springing up each day and the diversity of these new institutes are a challenge for us to try and understand the forces that are at work in the attempts to apply design and design thinking to a whole new set of applications and areas that have so not been addressed by traditional design schools that have been based on the imported models from the West. Over the past 15 or 20 years we have tried to look at the introduction of design capabilities to Indian needs in specific sectors and here I can offer the examples of three specific institutions with which I have had a personal association in trying to articulate and establish in a climate and a context in which design itself is not easily explained nor understood by those who need to nurture it and provide it with sustenance in the form of funds and a climate in which it can take root and grow. This I believe will be one of the biggest challenges for the new institute in Kerala and much of our effort may need to be focused on trying to make a space for it and the people associated to establish themselves before they are asked to deliver great results.

The experience so far points out that there are several approaches that could be taken and much will depend on the canvas that is available on which to paint our visions. The establishment of IIT’s and IIM’s in India seem to have some consensus as far as scale, reach, content and value but unfortunately no such consensus exists when it comes to the establishment of a design based organization be it a school or a development oriented organization. We will need to cross this hurdle first at the forthcoming meetings on the 9^th and 10^th November 2009 at Trivandrum and if we can get both a political as well as administrative blessings for a shared vision for a new design institute for Kerala the task ahead will be much easier than the various cases shown by many the efforts that have taken place across India in the past 20 years. However there is no ambiguity about the value of design when we are able to embody design thinking and action skills in particular individuals and teams through the process of design education and it is here that we need to ponder as to whether we need specialists or generalists who can be open to work with the huge body of technical and administrative teams that are already available from many fields and use this as a base to make for a vibrant platform for innovation with the use of these capable and flexible generalists who are able to work as team players and provide the essential ingredients to bring sensitive change where it is most needed in Kerala.

The big question is what are these needs and what needs to be changed and how should we go about this?

Some recent efforts to look at design from a fresh perspective are worth noting and we may look at our emerging understanding of design and design thinking in a number of unconventional areas of application before we freeze on directions and content. Design and design thinking have been applied to numerous exciting and complex situations and we need to take stock of these before we spell out the roles and responsibilities of a new institute of design for Kerala that will find its direction and purpose and reach maturity and excellence over the next 10, 20 and 50 years ahead. Can we look forward and jointly draft scenarios that are plausible and feasible and then decide the platforms form and content and articulate the way in which we can navigate our way towards the future?

References

1. Charles& Ray Eames, India Report, 1958, Government of India, New Delhi

2. National Institute of Design, Feasibility Report for IICD Jaipur, Government of Rajasthan, 1993

3. National Institute of Design, Feasibility Report for Bamboo & Cane DevelopmentInstitute Agartala, Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, Government of India, 2000

4. National Institute of Fashion Technology, Accessory Design Curriculum, NIFT New Delhi, 1991

5. Soumitri Varadarajan, Ambedkar University, Service Design Curricullum, AmbedkarUniversity, New Delhi, 2009

6. UffeElbek, Kaos Pilot A-Z, Kaos Pilot, Aarhus Denmark, 2003 (http://www.knowmads.nl/) and (http://www.kaospilots.dk)

7. G K VanPatter, NextD website, Sensemaking initiatives 2002 to 2008 (http://www.nextd.org/)

8. Design for India blog (http://www.designforindia.com)

Unquote

Admin block at an advanced state of construction at KSID campus

The Government of Kerala has taken a step that no other State Government has done so far, that of setting up a design school to address the needs of the region. The only other example that comes to my mind is the setting up of the Indian Institute of Crafts and Design (IICD) in Jaipur as a centre of excellence for creating change agents for the crafts sector using design as a core driver. This institute was set up by the Rajasthan Government based on a Feasibility Report for the proposed School of Crafts that was prepared by me as a member of the National Instituite of Design, Ahmedabad in 1993. In 2001 we helped redefine through our Feasibility Report, the role of the Bamboo and Cane Development Institute at Agartala to use design as a core driver for the bamboo sector of the country, as a sector specific institute that used design, technology and management in an integrated manner to get best results. Kerala too will need a forward looking vision statement in the context of our new understanding of design and the ongoing debates that have been raised by the mindless expansion that has been initiated by the DIPP, Government of India for the premier design education institute of the country, the National Institute of Design that led to a public outcry from groups of concerned design academics and professionals from across India through a new initiative called the Vision First initiative that has called for a serious rethink and wider discourse about the four new NID's that are proposed as part of their plans.

We now need a second meet on the proposed KSID's directions and this should lead to a clearly articulated vision statement that can help both Government of Kerala and the KSID functionaries to steer the institutes fledgling infrastructure as well as its new education programmes through the political channels of approval and public acceptance in the days ahead. Just yesterday evening, I was discussing the status of the KSID proposals with the members of the vision meet in 2009, Prakash Moorthy and Sangita Shroff, while having tea at the BMW at the NID Paldi campus and later last night I saw P T Girish's note in my mail box with the attached photographs of the KSID as it stands today. Another interesting coincidence is that I have just started teaching a course at the CEPT University for the Masters level programme at SID, the MIAD class on
Understanding Crafts and its Context in India where we have assigned the students three States to research, Rajasthan, Orissa and Kerala and they have an assignment to explore the use of local crafts in space making tasks that could be applied to the creation of a new holiday resort in their region. More about this course in another post soon. These connected set of events triggered this particular blog post and I hope that Kerala sets up a leadership position with the use of design for development and that this move will go well beyond what is needed in the crafts sector but also look at the needs for "Design across the 230 sectors" of our economy where design is critically needed but our political and administrative class do not yet seem to know this from the kind of support that design gets in the national and state budgets today. Can Kerala show the way? Only time will tell.

M P Ranjan

Service Design for India: Change in Design & Management Schools needed

Image: A page from the booklet "Design for Services" launched by SEE Design Network of Design Wales, Cardiff. Full pdf files can be downloaded from the links below.

Service Design for India: Change in Design & Management Schools needed

Service Design is an emerging discipline that lies between the various fields of Design and Management. It is the cusp of both these major disciplines, which in India have rarely met or exchanged expertise in an educational setting. Design schools do not teach management in depth nor do management schools teach about design, leave alone design management. We have thousands of management schools in India when the pressing need is for the creation of experts who can innovate great services across a huge number of sectors of our economy. In my view design is needed critically in as many as 230 sectors of our economy and I have written about these in the past.

Across the world many management schools have started embracing design and innovation as a core offering to their students and in this the charge is led by the Rotmans School of Management, Toronto and a less known school in Scandinavia called the KaosPilot, both of which have been covered in previous posts on this blog. In the 80’s the London School of Business had produced a book on Design Management and at both the Stanford University, USA and the University of Industrial Arts, Helsinki, there have been concerted efforts to bring together Design, Technology and Management through a planned series of projects that bring together faculty and students from all these disciplines in a transdisciplinary format. The Design Council, London had spearheaded an initiative called RED where a series of innovative design and management exchanges had led to the development of some very interesting new services, all designed by keeping users in mind. The Design Wales too has been working with SME’s and local businesses to assist them to refine their service offerings and their booklet on service design is a very refined offering that can be downloaded as a pdf file. (see link below)

Several unusual experiments have been taking place in this space and the work done at the Mayo Clinic, USA is one that stands out in using the IDEO methodology to improve the service offerings of the medical establishment and their hospital chain, which has been covered in an earlier post on this blog. This year the KaosPilot school from Sweden has deputed 35 of their students to spend their “Outpost” session of three months in the field at Mumbai, and they are in the city till the end of May 2008 to explore the creation of new and compelling services that can build local entrepreneurship in a number of areas of service offerings from transportation to health systems. The Welllingker School of Management in Mumbai has started a masters programme in Design Management and NID Ahmedabad has a programme on offer called Strategic Design Management, but these are very little for a huge country like India and many of the other management schools should consider offering such programmes if we are to make headway in improving our services with the use of design and innovation, all managed by expert hands that are trained to do the job. The National Design Policy must take this into account when we try and take design forward in India.

There are many online resources that provide insights into service design and its emerging boundaries and some of these are listed below for immediate access:

1. Design Council, UK: Service Design

2. Rotmans School of Management, Toronto: Integrative Thinking

3. KaosPilot, Denmark: Design of New Businesses

4. Service Design: Wikipedia: Definition and links

5. Service Design Research: Rich Collection of Papers

6. ServiceDesign.org: Resources hosted by live/work UK

7. Design Wales, Cardiff: SEE Design Journals

8. SEE Design, Design Wales, Cardiff: Service Design booklet Download pdf files links: Part 1: Part 2:

9. Design Management Institute

10. Domus Academy - Business Design Department

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.

The NextD Leadership Institute, New York: Can its message offer a direction for design thinking in India?

Image: Screen-shot of the NextD Website

NextD Leadership Institute and the lessons for India?

Design is changing and there is one organization that has perhaps contributed most in the past few years in mapping this change and in building tools to cope with the change that they call Design 1.0, Design 2.0 and now Design 3.0. This is the NextD Leadership Institute in New York and through the NextD Journal as well as the series of NextD Workshops they have been spreading the good word about the considerable change that is being seen by some of us today at the leading edge of design action across the world.

Their website, NextD.org and their inspiring online Journal and pdf download (all for free) has been a source of great strength for my students who were often perplexed when confronted by the complexities of their design challenges in India but having a resource that could be easily referred was a boon, the value of which only time will tell. Great resource, and we wish that there were more like this one around.

The NextD Leadership Institute was an outcome of some soul searching by GK VanPatter and Elizabeth Pastor as an experiment in innovation acceleration back in 2002. In their process of re-inventing design they set out to try and influence design education as well as how it is practiced as an cross-disciplinary activity to address the complex tasks that needed resolution in our society. With the marketplace having changed dramatically they were looking for directions and approaches to make design relevant at the leading edge of this change and one of their key offerings to explain this change was embodied in "Mindscapes" a series of examples, stories, diagrams and models that helped capture the contours of this changed landscape.

Recently, in response to the provocative article by Bruce Nussbaum – Are designers the enemy of design – on his blog at BusinessWeek online, the NetxD team quickly sought views from the design community around the world and from this came the rapidly compiled text titled "Beautiful Diversions" which set off another round of debates about design as it is understood today. For me the small NextD team were able to demonstrate the huge change which in the world of internet enabled communication gave equal reach to both small teams as well as established media moguls like the BusinessWeek and the other corporate giants alike. We are indeed heading towards a world that is shaped by the emergent creative economy of the future. The world is indeed changing and as we have seen the KaosPilots as a very small school with very few students making an indelible mark with their ideology and approach to using design, the NextD Leadership Institute too has made an impact in the design space with their Journal, Mindscapes and Workshops, besides other initiatives that have been offered from time to time over the past few years.

That we need to bring the message of the NetxD to India is a foregone conclusion. I have recommended their message to all the students in my classes, to my Institute and colleagues as well as to many corporate and design schools in India and many of them are actively using the NextD offerings having bookmarked their website or having subscribed to the regular journal offering which comes free for all those who are interested. Our efforts to find sponsors to get the NextD team over to India continues and we hope to see them soon in India so that the message that they offer can be used in all the 230 sectors of our economy in mission critical applications that are sadly missing in the design activities of the kind that are needed to bring about real transformation in our society as well as in our business offerings, both of which need design, but both seem to be blissfully unaware of this need, notwithstanding the announcement of the National Design Policy in the beginning of this year, on the 8th of February 2007 to be precise, by the Government of India. Just that day I was in downtown New York in a meeting with G K VanPatter along with my colleague Sudrshan Khanna in order to explore the possibility of some collaborations between our two Institutes. I do hope that we can move this forward quickly and that we can then move on to an application stage in the use of these ideas in transforming design education as well as practice in ways that are needed in India over the next few years. By the way, we were in New York to attend the "Design with India"event on the 5th February 2007 at the Asia Society, New York,which was spearheaded by one of our graduates Uday Dandavate founder of SonicRim, Columbus,Ohio.

It is not just I who is excited by the NextD it seems, if we are to assess their impact through the varied partners who have agreed to be interviewed by the NextD team for the NextD Journal using a unique format of conversations rather than bland interviews that are usually used in the traditional media or the other form of sage pronouncements by experts who are given space by the media to expand their ideas about the subject of their expertise. The procession of experts who have contributed to the NextD Journal make a literal who's who of design thinking and they come from many disciplines that have engaged with design and therefore have much to offer by way of insights about design that are unique as well as interesting. I have recommended the NextD Journal to all my students as a catch-up on the latest in design thinking that is both concise as well as insightful, take a look for yourself.

NextD website link
KaosPilot website link
NID website link

KaosPilot: A business school that teaches design? Are there lessons in this for India?

The most exciting business school that teaches management using design principles – KaosPilot – has established itself over the past 14 years and it is now expanding to other locations in Scandinavia and the rest of the World. The first school was located in Aarhus Denmark, founded by the visionary and tireless Uffe Elbaek, and it has now been expanded to new programmes in Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands and plans are afoot to set up ‘outposts” in San Francisco and Durban, South Africa. What are the principles of their success and what are the lessons for India?

Traditional business schools teach using the “Case Method”
KaosPilot teaches using the “Immersive Method”.
see the KaosPilot Homepage KaosPilot Website

The products from the school, its students – the KaosPilots – are Creative, Self aware and Disciplined and are ready to address the needs and challenges of the “Social Entrepreneurship Sector” in the words of the founder, which is the fourth sector that is achieving prominence when compared to the other three sectors namely the government supported public sector, the corporate and private sector and the not-for profit voluntary sectors, all of which aim to do good for their respective stake-holders, but have come in for intense criticism from a number of sources in recent times. The KaosPilot story is now well documented in the book available in English titled “KaosPilot A – Z” which can be obtained from their website as well as from Amazon. Further the KaosPilot website itself is full of information and insights from the project work done by the students over the years, all documented in the “Flight Navigator” a Journal produced regularly by the school available from this link below.

Uffe Elbaek and the KaosPilots have discovered that design works best when used to address the needs of the ‘fourth sector’ – a new space where the boundaries between the Public sector (district, state and national), the Private sector (companies and corporations) and the Voluntary sector (the not-for-profit organizations) have blurred and become less distinct – and can now be dubbed the “new social arena” and the “for-benefit” sector, all in the public interest but managed in a professional and accountable manner by individuals, organizations, institutions and companies using the “triple bottom-line approach” to judge their performance. Organisations that are characterized by being self-financing as well as being social, ethical and environmental in their sense of responsibility and actions.

The KaosPilot curriculum is therefore derived from the need to be entrepreneurial in orientation; located in an arena that lies between the disciplines of arts, culture and business; using the approaches of being playful, real-worldly and street-wise with risk-taking that is balanced and compassionate; all of which sets the aims and goals that are larger that the self – in a three year programme that is divided into basics, specialization and innovation years. Real situations and challenges are addressed by students working in teams and in live contact with stake-holders to develop empathy and reality contact that are rooted in the personal mastery of the unique competency model that is the hallmark of the KaosPilot programme. The five fold competency model includes Professional, Social, Change, Action and Sense-making competencies all integrated into their creative project and business design assignments. Yes, business design. They are in the field of designing new businesses and not just in managing business as the MBA’s do in their traditional programmes around the world. This is where design principles get integrated into the process of creating great managers, young entrepreneurs capable of building great new businesses that are located squarely in the ‘fourth sector ideology’ for a rapidly changing and increasingly transparent world order.


Model of the Emerging Designer

Does India need this kind of shift – from managing to designing – looking at design opportunities rather than at problems and problem-solving, kindling a new mind-set and a new capability to bring imagination into our actions across the various sectors and regions? I am convinced that it does. Somehow for me the efforts of the KaosPilots in distant Denmark echoes the ethos and values that NID has been advocating and applying inside our own curriculum and project based education programmes over the past forty years. The value systems that have been cherished and the work culture that had been instilled in our NID undergraduate programmes during the past four decades too need to be examined and discussed in detail in the manner in which the KaosPilot story has been articulated in the Kaospilot A-Z book. We may need to move as a nation from – specification following tendering process – with the why-reinvent-the-wheel-attitude of our administration, to an innovation-driven and opportunity-seeking government action in the enormous area of social and public design action that could be supported by the huge investments taking place in the 230 sectors of our economy today that are in desperately in need of design. All this can be facilitated by our new National Design Policy and be made into a reality for our people. This is perhaps what we can take away from the KaosPilot story, how it can perhaps be done by trained “design managers” and not just by designers alone. What do you think? Are our management schools listening?

Links and References for download:
KaosPilot Homepage
KaosPilot Homepage
The fourth sector pdf file 222kb
The fourth sector
KaosPilot Publications link
Internal and external links for downloads about KaosPilot

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

KaosPilot: A business school that teaches design? Are there lessons in this for India?

The most exciting business school that teaches management using design principles – KaosPilot – has established itself over the past 14 years and it is now expanding to other locations in Scandinavia and the rest of the World. The first school was located in Aarhus Denmark, founded by the visionary Uffe Elbaek, and it has now been expanded to new programmes in Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands and plans are afoot to set up ‘outposts” in San Francisco and Durban, South Africa. What are the principles of their success and what are the lessons for India?

Traditional business schools teach using the “Case Method”
KaosPilot teaches using the “Immersive Method”.

The products from the school, its students – the KaosPilots – are Creative, Self aware and Disciplined and are ready to address the needs and challenges of the “Social Entrepreneurship Sector” in the words of the founder, which is the fourth sector that is achieving prominence when compared to the other three sectors namely the government supported public sector, the corporate and private sector and the not-for profit voluntary sectors, all of which aim to do good for their respective stake-holders, but have come in for intense criticism from a number of sources in recent times. The KaosPilot story is now well documented in the book available in English titled “KaosPilot A – Z” which can be obtained from their website as well as from Amazon. Further the KaosPilot website itself is full of information and insights from the project work done by the students over the years, all documented in the “Flight Navigator” a Journal produced regularly by the school available from this link below.

Uffe Elbaek and the KaosPilots have discovered that design works best when used to address the needs of the ‘fourth sector’ – a new space where the boundaries between the Public sector (district, state and national), the Private sector (companies and corporations) and the Voluntary sector (the not-for-profit organizations) have blurred and become less distinct – and can now be dubbed the “new social arena” and the “for-benefit” sector, all in the public interest but managed in a professional and accountable manner by individuals, organizations, institutions and companies using the “triple bottom-line approach” to judge their performance. Organisations that are characterized by being self-financing as well as being social, ethical and environmental in their sense of responsibility and actions.

The KaosPilot curriculum is therefore derived from the need to be entrepreneurial in orientation; located in an arena that lies between the disciplines of arts, culture and business; using the approaches of being playful, real-worldly and street-wise with risk taking that is balanced and compassionate; al of which sets the aims and goals that are larger that the self – in a three year programme that is divided into basics, specialization and innovation years. Real situations and challenges are addressed by students working in teams to develop empathy and reality contact that are rooted in the personal mastery of the unique competency model that is the hallmark of the KaosPilot programme. The five fold competency model includes Professional, Social, Change, Action and Sense-making competencies all integrated into their creative project and business design assignments. Yes, business design. They are in the field of designing new businesses and not just in managing business as the MBA’s do in their traditional programmes around the world. This is where design principles get integrated into the process of creating great managers, young entrepreneurs capable of building great new businesses that are located squarely in the ‘fourth sector ideology’ for a rapidly changing and increasingly transparent world order.


Model of the Emerging Designer.

Does India need this kind of shift – from managing to designing – looking at design opportunities rather than at problems, kindling a new mind-set and a new capability to bring imagination into our actions across the various sectors and regions? I am convinced that it does. Somehow for me the efforts of the KaosPilots in distant Denmark echoes the ethos and values that NID has been advocating and applying inside our own curriculum and project based education programmes over the past forty years. The value systems that have been cherished and the work culture that had been instilled in our NID undergraduate programmes during the past four decades too need to be examined and discussed in detail in the manner in which the KaosPilot story has been articulated in the Kaospilot A-Z book. We may need to move as a nation from – specification following tendering process – with the why-reinvent-the-wheel-attitude of our administration, to an innovation-driven and opportunity-seeking government action in the enormous area of social and public design action that could be supported by the huge investments taking place in the 230 sectors of our economy today that are in desperately in need of design. All this can be facilitated by our new National Design Policy and be made into a reality for our people. This is perhaps what we can take away from the KaosPilot story, how it can perhaps be done by trained “design managers” and not just by designers alone. What do you think? Are our management schools listening?

Links and References for download:

KaosPilot Homepage
KaosPilot Website Contents

The fourth sector pdf file 222kb
The fourth sector

Other Publications from KaosPilot
Other Publications from KaosPilot

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