What is Design? : A lecture for school teachers

What is Design? : A lecture for school teachers

Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

Image 01: Thumbnails of slides used for the “What is Design?” lecture dealing with Dimensions, Processes and Applications.

“What is Design?”, will be a perennial topic since design is and will always be a moving target whenever we attempt a definition since it is always rooted in the present time and can only be understood and appreciated in the context of the “particular” place or location and a “general” description will need to take that into account as well. Each age will need to take stock of the definition and as we evolve so will design and hopefully our design ability. Design is one of our basic abilities, which we have used in more and more sophisticated ways as we evolved and enhanced our human sensibilities and capabilities. In the period of slow transformation through craft based processes of trial and error many of these sensibilities were refined and we could fall back on traditions to find our way forward.

Image 02: Thumbnails of the second part of the lecture dealing with design concepts and models that lead to our current definition of design as a basic human activity and this calls for a greater focus for the subject in our school education in the days ahead.

However in the post-industrial era reach and impact of our senses and abilities have been considerably enhanced by our multitude of tools and our externalized knowledge processes that we now have the capability of changing and impacting nature in dramatic ways, many of them undesirable, and our economic and social frameworks lag behind by a huge magnitude, that we are on the brink of failure as a species. Design becomes all the more important in this scenario and we will need to temper our dependence on science and art which has helped us evolve very rapidly over the past 600 years since the Renaissance if we are to face the crisis that this dependence is to be addressed.

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Podcast
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Code to embed podcast of lecture sent by Satya Murthy using MP3 file provided by me.

I had the occasion to speak to a group of school teachers as part of our programmes at NID and I prepared a lecture that was delivered to this group at NID the other day. The recording of the lecture is available here as a podcast at the link above which is of one and a half hour duration and the 2.5 MB pdf file of the slides used lecture can be downloaded from here at the links below along with an MP3 file of the lecture which too is available for download as a 45 MB file

Link to download the Podcast with images

What is Design? : Dimensions, Processes and Applications (pdf file 2.3 mb download)
What is Design? : Dimensions, Processes and Applications (MP3 voice file 43.8 mb download)
Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

Podcasts as a Strategy for expanding the reach of Design Education in India

Image: Prof Ranjan's office, with books and thought leaders Photo: Praveen Nahar, NID.

As design teachers we are constantly preparing visual presentations to share our understanding of our subjects and the tools for design education have been going through a sea change in recent years with the use of computers and some truly amazing software. We have perhaps reached a stage when we can bypass the publishing barrier which is usually the availability of financial rerources as well as the controls of a traditional publisher and reach out directly to all those who need to understand the use of design as a tool for development.

One of these emerging tools is the creation of educational podcasts. Design teachers as well as design schools can use that approach and can cover many of the critical subjects that form part of a school design curriculum. These podcasts need to be designed and if school teachers decided to use these tools on a regular basis we would end up with an enormous wealth of resources for spreading the idea of design across the country with a little support from the lathargic establishment which has all but ignored design for the past fifty years.


Sample Podcast of a lecture on Design: One of many to come. "Giving Design back to Society", a presentation based on the IDSA 2006 lecture. Music clip: from South Africa, the seat of human civilisation.

I have made a sample podcast today using an existing lecture presentation as a base from which to explore our options. The 812 kb pdf file of the IDSA 2006 lecture, "Giving Design back to Society", has now been converted into a podcast which I have uploaded on YouTube and then linked to this blog post. I propose that design schools and design teachers acrooss India collaborate as part of the National Design Policy initiative to build a substantial body of teaching resources which can be used to change mindsets across India and help grow the use of design in all the sectors of our economy, all 230 of them.

While we can wait till eternity for NCERT to introduce Design in the high school curriculum and then try and raise the resources to make the books and knowledge resources ready through Government funding, I believe we can move forward very quickly, if only we were to adopt a strategy of "make-and-share-directly", we can reach our audience across India in an affordable manner. Each participating school and teacher can make a list of subjects and courses and specific concepts that they can cover and we can then have a space where all these can be rated and shared in a dynamic manner. We need to reach our youth with the message of design and try and develop a broader understanding of the subject than that which is being portrayed in the traditional media, of glamour and style, and move it to one of substance and value creation for society and our culture. This, combined with an entrepreneurial spirit, can be truly transforming and it may be one way to beat the entrenched system in a win-win combination for all concerned. Any takers?