Raindrops and Footprints: Crafts Ecology in the Making

Raindrops and Footprints: Crafts Ecology in the Making at the IICD Jaipur

M P Ranjan

Image 1: Micro view of the poverty alleviation strategy called “Raindrops Strategy” to use crafts as a vehicle for local empowerment and occupation building with design strategies and innovation as drivers of a new economy.

IICD students and faculty would scour the country looking for pockets and clusters of crafts activities that are part of their field research and study programmes. Durning these forays into the field they would naturally come into contact with individuals and groups that are attempting to use crafts in a development situation. Some of these would be pre-existing NGO’s or crafts entrepreneurs wjhile others may be children of local craftsmen looking for life employment opportunituies for themselves going forward. This model is based on a previous post on Design for India on 2 April 2008 called “Poverty and Design Explored: Context India.”

IICD’s new incubatee programme coiuld adopt these groups and individuals for a sustained programme of contact and faciloitation in the field as well at the back end at the Institute as part of the Crafts Incubatee programme that may be funded and supported by a consortium of supporters, venture capital funds as well as Government Grants in Aid programmes. Learning from the field and giving back to the field is the proposed model for sensitive action using design sensibilities and innovation strategoies which will help build credible models for action and tested strategies for going forward with larger investments from the support basket. At each stage of this proposed ten stage model the IICD teams and their partners in the field would create intermediate products such as feasibility reports, crafts documentations, resource maps, opportunity maps and new prototypes and strategies for future action. These would be evaluated and rolled out under various schemes for support in the field as well as crafts and entrepreneurship training programmes. This programme will work in tandem with the existing Crafts Design, Technology and Management education programmes of the Institute. These individual forays are here called the “Raindrops” since the intention is to drop these into existing crafts clusters and allow these to grow as ripplies in the fertile ponds of our land.

Image 2: Macro view of the empowerment strategy that could be used by the IICD to reach its growing knowledge and the human resources called the Agents of Change to various crafts clusters across India through a strategy called “Footprints in Time” as shown in the model above.

The micro model called “Raindrops” can be replicated through an active support programme of incubation by the replication of the strategy across multiple locations and crafts clusters across India. This would be based on a growing resource that would leverage the crrent and future programmes of the institute as well as support the proposed programme for crafts incubation which would have a field front end as well as an institute based back-end programme of a specific duration. Using Web 2.0 strategies the IICD could build a community of designers, experts, partners and wellwishers with the crafts incubates to make an interactive support platform that willl grow and divesrisy over time. This process of maturation and growth is what I would call the “Feetprints in Time” model for the IICD action in the field support for the crafts incubatee. This concept has been expaned in a previous post on this blog on 3 November 2008 called “Footprints in Time: A Crafts Ecology for India" and another post on 18 October called “Mission and Vision: Crafts Ecology for IICD Jaipur”. These would set the stage to herald the arrival of the Creative Economy across the villages of India and help them face the intense influences of globalisation with the use of sustained local creative action.

M P Ranjan

Handmade in India: In book stores before Diwali 2008

Handmade in India: In book stores before Diwali 2008

M P Ranjan

Image: The book release function at Rajiv Gandhi Handicrafts Bhavan on the 21st July 2008. Shri Shankersinh Vaghela, Union Minister for Textiles, Government of India with Sanjay Agarwal, Development Commissioner of Handicrafts (extereme left) and Dr Darlie O Koshy (extreme right) at the book launch function.

I met Bipin Shah of Mapin Publishers at the farewell lunch for Dr Darlie O Koshy that was hosted by the Chairman NID ‘s Governing Council, Mr Salman Hyder on 23rd October 2008 at the Fortune Landmark Hotel in Ahmedabad. He gave me the good news that the book was received very well at the recently concluded Frankfurt Book Fair with an order for 5000 more copies which I presume will be the second print run for the book which had still not hit the stands in India. He was not able to give me any indication of when the first print of 5000 copies would be available to the public since the Development Commissioner of Handictrafts had yet to take a decision on the marketing MOU with Mapin and the first print run that was completed in August 2007 was still lying in godowns in Delhi and in Ahmedabad.

I do not know what happened overnight, since suddenly and out of the blue, the owner of the Art Book Centre in Ahmedabad, Mr N A Patel, arrived dramatically at NID on 24th October 2008 afternoon with 100 copies for sale to faculty and students of the Institute, finally breaking the silence in which the books were lying over the past one year and three months after its printing in Singapore. I hope to hear from both Mapin Publishers as well as from the Development Commissioner of Handictafts on the further availability of the book across bookstores in India, which I hope is quite soon. I tried to check out the Mapin Publishers website but it was a shame that none of the links worked and I hope that they fix that soon. I will report again on this blog when more information comes my way but I am quite relieved to see that at least some copies have found their way to the market after such a long wait. Perhaps NID should offer to carry stocks of the book in our publications department just as we had done for the Bamboo and Cane Crafts of Northeast India when the book was not available in any book store in India when it first was released in 1986.

Do look out for the book in a bookstore near you and let me know if you find them on display in your favorite store! This should be a good Diwali after all the carnage on Dalal Street these past few weeks as the Sub-Prime financial panic spreads from the Wall Street to the emerging markets and this is significant since our book is intended to help our living crafts in India and the crafts community here to negotiate this tumultuous change through globalization and pave a way forward for our craftsmen to build a live and vibrant creative economy on the foundation of accessible information which can be our future if we set our mind and policy to realize what is possible with the use of Design in India. The second and third volumes that are still in production as well as the proposed web based initiative to follow all hold the promise of making the Hand crafts of India an accessible resource for the production of goods and services across the world through a creative reinterpretation that would be made possible by direct access to information and people in the days ahead.

The previous posts on the Handmade in India are listed below:

FRIDAY, 25 JULY, 2008
Handmade in India: The team and the mission

SATURDAY, 19 JULY, 2008
Handmade in India: Book Launch in New Delhi

TUESDAY, 22 APRIL, 2008
Design inside Education: Let us start early, for our schools in India

WEDNESDAY, 19 DECEMBER, 2007
WebInnovation2007: Web 2.0 Conference at Bangalore

TUESDAY, 7 AUGUST, 2007
Handmade in India: A Handbook of the Crafts of India arrives from the publisher

Download the complete book here as a pdf file 337 mb size Handmade in India as pdf 337 mb size

M P Ranjan

Handmade in India: The team and the mission

Image: Book Launch function at the Rajiv Gandhi Handicrafts Bhavan, New Delhi presided on by Shri Shankarsinh Vaghela, the Honourable Minister of Textiles, Government of India.

This project was handled at the National Institute of Design from early 2002 when the proposal was drafted by the NID team and it went through many phases of research and design till the book was finally in print by the end of August 2007. However the book release was delayed for various reasons but we now hope that the sale and distribution copies will be available widely in India and overseas through the Mapin Publishing network as well as the Office of the Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, Government of India. The list of people involved in the various stages of work and on various aspects of its creation are listed on pages 562 and 563 of the book and this list is reproduced below for the blog post here.

Besides these contributors listed in the Credits pages we have listed a full set of implicit contributors in the form of an Annotated Bibliography from pages 551 to 556 covering the numerous crafts documentations studies done at NID over the past 40 years that have been a foundation on which this particular structure has been built for the production of this publication. Further, pages 558 to 560 has a list of all field contributors with whom our teams had interacted and drawn support from during the elaborate field work phase that was done over the four years when the content was being compiled and verified through forays in the field. Page 561 has a list of all Museums and private collections from which images or samples were referred for filling in some of the material that has appeared in the book. The bibliography and list of useful websites are listed in pages 556 and 557. We do hope that much of the material in the book will appear as part of the proposed web portal that is planned as phase four of this very interesting project in the days ahead. This would be modeled after the emerging web 2.0 paradigm and be an interactive platform that can assist our vast crafts community to connect with the world in new and exciting ways. This would be the foundation for the growth of the creative economy of the future that is based on the enormous crafts skills of India that we hope will be strengthened as we move forward from here.

Image: Screen Capture of the Credits page from Handmade in India. The full text is listed below.

Credits

Concept and Structure :
Aditi Ranjan, M P Ranjan & Jogi Panghaal

Editors: Aditi Ranjan, M P Ranjan

Preliminary Research: M P Ranjan, Jogi Panghaal, Kuntal De, Jonak Das, Mushtak Khan, Aditi Ranjan, Navrang Panchal

Library and Archival Research: Bhavneet Kaur, Archana Vidwans, Anuradha Nambiar, Vellachi Ramanathan, Deepa Varia, Nikita Mehta, Priyanka Bhattacharya, Vinutha Mallya, Sushma Shetty Sreenath, Aratrik Devvarman, Pooja Jha, Arghya Sinha Roy, M P Ranjan, Aditi Ranjan, Sangita Shroff, Zenobia Zamindar, Poorvi Das, Shankar Natarajan, Tush Singh

Technical Glossary: P Ramakrishna Rao, M P Ranjan, Gunjan Singh, Kuntal De, Aditi Ranjan

Index & Resource Mapping: M P Ranjan, Aditi Ranjan, Pooja Jha, Arghya Sinha Roy, Sonam Tashi Gyaltsen

Annotated Bibliography: Swadha Majumdar, Mann Singh, Aditi Ranjan, Nirmala Khadpekar

Copy Editing: Anuradha Nambiar, Sushma S Shetty, Paulomi Das, Priyanka Bhattacharya, Vinutha Mallya, Archana Vidwans, Diana Romany, Sushmita De

Proof Reading: Diana Romany, Vinutha Mallya

Book Design — Zenobia Zamindar, Girish Arora
Book Design Feedback: Subrato Bhowmick, Siddhartha Ghosh, Mookesh Patel, Mahendra Patel, S M Shah, Vikas Satwalekar, Anand Naorem, Uzma Mohsin, Devashish Bhattacharya, Bipin Shah, Paulomi Shah, Rajesh Dahiya

Photography Management: Deepak John Matthew, NID Photography Department, Girish Arora, Zenobia Zamindar, Navrang Panchal, Kinjal Popat, M P Ranjan

Assistance for Book Cover: Mona Gonsai, Neelakash Singh, Aparna Ranjan

Design Assistance: Krupa Kapadia, Kinjal Popat, Navrang Panchal, Keyur Payghode, Umesh Patel, Kajal Savalia, Rajorshi Ghosh, Jhumur Roy, Mehul Ruparel, Kapil Agarwal, Aparna Ranjan, Parinita Purohit, M R Patel, Shirish Shah, Suresh Modia

Proofing Assistance: Pragathi Offset Pvt Ltd., Hyderabad, Patel Printing Press, Ahmdedabad, Repro Scan, Mumbai

Field Research
NORTH:
Chandigarh: Divya Lahoria, Bhavneet Kaur
Delhi: Anuradha Nambiar, Shaurya Kumar, Amit Jain, Jonak Das, Kuntal De, Bhavneet Kaur, P. Alexander
Haryana: Sumit Saini, Ravinder Sirohiya, Bhavneet Kaur
Himachal Pradesh: Sandeep Trichal, Malhar Dhruv,
Shaswaty Nair, Paromita Banerjee
Jammu and Kashmir: Minali Singh, Sucharita Beniwal, Sharon Vellane, V Bhaskar, Mustafa Merchant, Chinar Farooqui, Farah Deba, Sandeep Trichal, Anuradha Nambiar
Punjab: Bhavneet Kaur, Divya Lahoria
Rajasthan: Anuradha Nambiar, Swasti Singh Ghai, Amit Jain, Poorvi Das, Chinar Farooqui, Errol Pires

CENTRE:
Uttar Pradesh: Bhavneet Kaur, Biswajit Hazra, Anupama Srivastava, Shantanu Jena
Uttaranchal: Praveen Nahar, Dhriti Dhoundiyal, Manish Pillewar, Sandeep Paul, Ashish Chaudhary, Bishakha Shome

EAST:
Bihar: Amit Jain, Sandeep Trichal
Jharkhand: Shaurya Kumar, Amit Jain
Orissa: Shaurya Kumar, Kadambari Misra, Amit Jain
Sikkim: Sonam Tashi Gyaltsen, Shweta Jain,
West Bengal: Jonak Das, Anirban Dutta Gupta, Dhrujoti Prasad Bhattacharya, Vydianathan R, Ramu Aravindan

SOUTH:
Andhra Pradesh: Vellachi Ramanathan, Sandeep Sangaru, Munir Vahanvati, Satish Nagendra, Kurma Rao
Karnataka: Hema Mathew, Jogi Panghaal, Mayura Ingle, Shashikala, Accessory Design, NIFT Bangalore: Tanveer Ratti, Vivek Saurabh, Lalan Parikh, Sanskruti Thorat, Sandeep Pradhan, Sanil Dhadwal, Shwetnisha Bansal Swagata Sarkar, Bibin Phillips, Abul Quasim, Saurav Kumar, Kadhambini Majhee, Divya Sanwaiya, Shika Agarwal, Vinay Kumar
Kerala: Anuradha Nambiar, Nikita Mehta, Kritika Malhotra, Ashokan Poduval
Pondicherry: Shankar Natarajan, Vellachi Ramanathan, Subhashree Karthik
Tamil Nadu: Shankar Natarajan, Shriya Sridharan, Hema Mathew, Vellachi Ramanathan, Ambika Sambasivan, Subhashree Karthik, Akhila Krishnan

WEST:
Chhattisgarh: Nityan Unnikrishnan, Rukmini Guha Thakurta
Dadra & Nagar Haveli: Nikita Mehta, Shehzad Irani
Daman & Diu: Nikita Mehta, Shehzad Irani, Vaishnavi Murthy
Goa: Aratrik Devvarman, Minali Singh
Gujarat: Nikita Mehta, Virsingh Kawar Chhatri, Purvi Mehta, Shehzad Irani, Malhar Dhruv, Deepa Varia, Yasoda Ramesh, Jyoti Sharma, Sumita Chaudhary, Rekha Meena, Jigisha Patel, Aratrik Devvarman
Madhya Pradesh: R Umamaheshwaran, Abhinav Baluni, Yasoda Ramesh, Jyoti Sharma, Shruti Phagre
Maharashtra: Nikita Mehta, Nirmal Jain, Milind Risaldar, Komal Khankhoje, Ketna Contractor, Chandrashekhar Bhadve

NORTHEAST:
Arunachal Pradesh: Ramu Aravindan, Mriganka Madhukaillya
Assam: Ramu Aravindan, Mriganka Madhukaillya, Sukanya Sanyal
Manipur: Mriganka Madhukaillya, Sukumar Haobam,
Ramu Aravindan
Meghalaya: Mehul Vadher, Shalini Sahoo
Mizoram: Deborah Zama, Priya Dhar, Rupali Rudra
Nagaland: Ramu Aravindan, Mriganka Madhukaillya
Tripura: M P Ranjan, Sandeep Sangaru, Dimple Soni, Shimolee Nahar, Nibha Jain, Aratrik Devvarman

Photography Credits
NORTH:
Delhi: Shailen Parker, Sudeep Chaudhury, Amit Jain, M F Jadliwala
Haryana: Ravinder Sirohiya
Himachal Pradesh: Malhar Dhruv, Shaswaty Nair, Paromita Banerjee
Jammu and Kashmir: Malhar Dhruv, Chinar Farooqui, Farah Deba, Minali Singh, V Bhaskar, Sharon Vellane, Sucharita Beniwal, Sundeep Sangaru
Punjab: Divya Lahoria
Rajasthan: Amit Jain, Bhagawan Das, Ashok Kumar Suthar, Sohan Lal, Rani Dan Joshi, Sunil Rakecha, Errol Pires, M F Jadliwala, Poorvi Das, Girish Arora, Sandeep Sangaru

CENTRE:
Uttar Pradesh: Biswajit Hajra
Uttranchal: Praveen Nahar, Manish Pillewar, Dhriti Dhaundiyal, Sandeep Paul, Ashish Chaudhary

EAST:
Bihar: Amit Jain, Anil Sinha
Jharkhand: Amit Jain
Orissa: Amit Jain, Kadmabari Misra, Ramu Aravindan
Sikkim: Sonam Tashi Gyaltsen, Shweta Jain, Karma Sonam
West Bengal: Ramu Aravindan, Anirban Dutta Gupta, Jonak Das, Jitendra Arora

SOUTH:
Andhra Pradesh: Ramu Aravindan, Munir Vahanvati, Sandeep Sangaru, Satish Nagendra
Karnataka: Ramu Aravindan, Hema Mathew, Mayura Ingle, M P Ranjan, Jogi Panghaal, Divya Sanwaya, Vinay Kumar, Lalan Parikh, Sandeep Pradhan, Shwetnisha Bansal, Bibin Philips, Saurav Kumar
Kerala: Kritika Malhotra, Ramu Aravindan, Ashokan Poduval, Sushanth C S
Pondicherry: Shankar Natarajan, Subhashree Karthik, Krishna Priya
Tamil Nadu: Ramu Aravindan, Shankar Natarajan, Hema Mathew, S Jayachandran, N Prassana Kumar, Krishna Priya, Akhila Krishnan, Subhashree Karthik, Ambika Sambasivan

WEST:
Chhattisgarh: Rukmini Guja Thakurta, Mushtak Khan, Jogi Panghaal, Rajni Srivastava, Shaila Kunhu
Dadra & Nagar Haveli: Shehzad Irani
Daman & Diu: Shehzad Irani, Vaishnavi Murthy
Goa: Minali Singh
Gujarat: Deepak John Matthew, Shehzad Irani, Malhar Dhruv, Munir Vahanvati, Purvi Mehta, Jigisha Patel, Rekha Meena, Aratrik Devvarman, Shankar Natarajan, Zenobia Zamindar
Madhya Pradesh: Abhinav Baluni, Jyoti Sharma, Yasoda
Ramesh, Mushtak Khan, Pooja Jha
Maharashtra: Chandrashekhar Bhadve, Ketna Contractor, Nirmal Jain, Poorvi Das, Navleen Singh

NORTHEAST:
Arunachal Pradesh: Ramu Aravindan
Assam: Ramu Aravindan, M P Ranjan, Saleem Bhatri, Amogh Chaugule, Deven Jamsandhekar, Kiran Katbamna
Manipur: Ramu Aravindan, Rupali Rudra, Aratrik Dev Varman
Meghalaya: Mehul Vadher, Shalini Sahoo, M P Ranjan
Mizoram: Deborah Zama
Nagaland: Ramu Aravindan
Tripura: M P Ranjan, Sandeep Sangaru, Dimple Soni, Aratrik Devvarman, Shimolee Nahar, Nibha Jain

NID Archives

Photographers
Deepak John Mathew: Architecture, Landscape
Jogi Panghaal: Kantha Textiles
Suranjana Satwalekar: Crafts, Textiles, Varanasi, Arunachal, Cherrapunji, Pithora Painting
Subrato Bhowmick: Prayer Rugs, Nirmal Toys
Nilam Iyer, M P Ranjan, Ghanshyam Pandya: Bamboo and Cane Crafts of Northeast India
P M Dalwadi: Manipur Pavilion
Rajesh Vora: Stucco Work, Madurai
S Balaram and Anuj Sharma: Palm Leaf Craft, Chennai
Padmini Balaram: Kalamkari
Swasti Singh: Meghwal Embroidery

Photographs from student Craft Documentations
Scanning
Bharat Suthar, Rajendra Patel, Umesh Patel, Dhawal Gajjar
Assistance
T S Rajendran, Chirantan Raval, Himanshu Mistry, Jayesh Leuva, Praveen Varia, Jayesh Parmar, Suresh Modia, Cromwel Parmar, Reena Narendran, Gopalan Nambiar, Divya Nair
Knowledge Management Centre:
S D Bodiwala, Swadha Majumdar, Himmat Singh, Anil Patel, Sangeeta Vyas and Staff

NID Project Administration and Financial Management
Darlie O Koshy, Executive Director, NID
Akhil Succena, Chairman Outreach (Former)
Shashank Mehta, Chairman Outreach
Aditi Ranjan, Project Head
Brahmanand Pani, Controller of Accounts
K K Bhaskaran, Project Manager
NID Delhi Centre: N V K Murthy, P Alexander, V A Anthony
NID Bangalore Centre: Shashikala Satyamoorthy, T S Nagarajan and Shaktivel, Hyderabad

Client Project Administration and Financial Management
S B Mohapatra, IAS, Secretary, Ministry of Textiles
Tinoo Joshi, IAS, Development Commissioner (Handicrafts)
V P Thakur, Executive Director, Council of Handicrafts Development Corporation (COHANDS)
Susheel Kumar, IAS, Additional Development Commissioner (Handicrafts)
Sandeep Srivastava, IAS, Additional Development Commissioner (Handicrafts)
Mushtak Khan, Deputy Director, Crafts Museum, Delhi
Durgesh Shankar, Chairman and Managing Director, CCIC, New Delhi

Credit acknowledgement is also due to the unnamed students and faculty members at the National Institute of Design who have helped in putting this book together through their lively interactions and occasional contributions.

We would like to acknowledge the offices of DC(H) across India, who supported and facilitated the field research. Further Regional Directors and Assistant Directors of Marketing & Extension Centres (named below) and their respective colleagues (too numerous to be listed here) helped put together a comprehensive check list of resources in and around their respective centers in a collective effort called Panorama Series, 2002, which was used as a base document for field work.

Regional Directors & Assistant Directors of Marketing & Extension Centres:
S Bhattacharya, Kolkata
B C Mohapatra, Gangtok, Siliguri
P Sasany, Sambalpur & Bhubaneshwar
R S Yadav, Deogarh
A K Saran, Madhubani
S P Moitra, Ranchi
A K Handoo, Lucknow
S C Bhardwaj, Agra
Amar Chand, Saharanpur
C B Singh, Barabanki
Mangala Singh, Varanasi
S S Gwal, Almora
S K Sinha, Mumbai
S V Deshpande, Indore
V Baskaran, Surat
A T Meshram, Nagpur
I G Kawre, Jagdalpur
T R Gajbhai, Kolhapur
S Z Hussain, Aurangabad
Kali Ram, Gwalior
A C Gangal, Panaji
P Sundramurty, Chennai
S C Deveramani, Mangalore, Mysore
Abdul Kader, Port Blair
G R Thampi, Nagercoil
R Chandran, Salem
S Gurumurty, Pondicherry
I H P Rao, Tirupati, Vijaywada
V Bhaskaran, Trichur
G George, Thiruvananthapuram
S A Razzack, Hyderabad
A K Handoo, New Delhi
V K Mahajan, Hoshiarpur
S L Dangayach, Jaipur
B L Meena, Jodhpur
Jagdish Prasad, Rewari
S K Tikoo, Kullu
Tajumal Hussain, Srinagar & Baramulla
M K Kaw, Leh
T K Kaul, Udhampur & Jammu
A R Chaudhary, Guwahati
S R Masram, Agartala
P C Dutta, Aizawl & Gauripur
S B Singh, Jorhat
S Z Hussain, Imphal
S B Singh, Kohima
S Dkhar, Shillong

Handmade in India: Book Launch in New Delhi

Handmade in India
Edited by Aditi Ranjan and M.P. Ranjan
Book design by Ms. Zenobia Zamindar and Girish Arora.
576 pages, 3500 colour photographs and 140 maps, 9.5 x 13.5” (240 x 340 mm)
End matter includes a Technical Glossary, Annotated Bibliography, Craft Categories, an Index and also a detailed Acknowledgement and Credits.
Co-published in association with COHANDS and Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, Government of India, the book is produced by Mapin.

Image: Front and back cover of the new book and one sample page from the Rajasthan section dealing with the Ajmer metacluster. The book is to be released for the public on the 21st of July 2008 at a brief function at the Rajiv Gandhi Handicrafts Bhavan on Baba Kharakh Singh Marg, New Delhi by , Shri Shankarsinh Vaghela, Honorable Minister of Textiles, Government of India. The book is distributed by Mapin and will be widely available in bookstores in India and overseas.

Handmade in India, An encyclopedia of the crafts of India is a tribute to the Indian craftsperson and is organized by the geographical distribution of the crafts across all states and regions of the country. The Indian craftsperson has demonstrated an uncanny understanding of materials which is combined with a mastery of the tools, techniques and processes that have evolved over the centuries through social and cultural interactions, a tribute to the creative design abilities of the village society. The Eames India Report talks about a search for the values that is uniquely Indian and it is here that the study of Indian crafts will help inform current and future actions in the continuous evolution of the economy and the form that it takes in shaping the culture of the land. Today this craft continuum constitutes an enormous resource that can be harnessed for the future development of our society, particularly as the backbone of a creative economy that is enabled by the embedded knowledge in the traditional wisdom of the sector as well as the digital technologies that help connect this ancient skill to new and future opportunities for the craftspersons across India. We will need to make this enormous knowledge base accessible to planners, business and the rural and urban craftsmen as well as connect these to new local and global opportunities for these skills and resources to be reinterpreted in imaginative ways.

Image: Sample pages from the Rajasthan section. Each section has a master State page which is followed by the Meta-cluster pages and in each of these are the Crafts pages. Shown above are the State double page spread (top left), the Jaipur meta-cluster spread and the Blue Pottery craft (top right), the Ajmer metacluster spread with the crafts of Phad painting and Miniature painting on wood (bottom left) and finally the double spread that includes the crafts of Mojari making, handmade paper, felt products and the Bahi – the clothbound book crafts of Rajasthan.

These examples, we believe are some of the foundations of the creative economy of the future in a web enabled world and easy access in both directions which promises to link the craftsmen to new markets across the world. For this scenario to happen there are several steps involved and the book will be the first in offering insights and data on this vast resource as well as be a vehicle that can provide a platform and a structure to enhance this knowledge. Using the new digital networks and tools of access and interaction that it provides, this knowledge can be put to good use provided the required investments are made in infrastructure and training to realize this inherent potential. It is our intention that the information as well as the framework of situated keywords provided in this book will help all concerned with the promotion, development and use of the crafts of India and that they would be empowered to build a sustainable network of live information. This we believe will help our craftsmen re-connect with world markets, just as they had been doing for centuries in their own village and in their trade route networks of the past, and now the world can be their new village economy, if they are enabled and empowered to change, to meet these new circumstances with access to information that is both live and relevant.

Image: Two models that were prepared in the early 90’s to capture the scope and intentions for the promotion of the crafts sector in Rajasthan and across the rest of India which led to the setting up of the IICD, Jaipur. We were asked to imagine and envision the format and scope of the new Institute for Crafts in Jaipur and today this is an active centre for the creation of change agents hwo are capable of working in the transformation of the crafts sector in India. We will need more such initiatives in the future in India.

“Handmade in India”, is the first of three books, in the series Crafts of India, that are planned. It provides a geographic organization of craft distributed across the length and breadth of the country and shows how craft permeates even the remotest corner of India. It is a confirmation of more that 40 years of effort by faculty and students of the National Institute of Design who have sustained their interest in the crafts of India as a design and development resource for the country when few other organizations showed real interest in what was seen as a glory of the past. That it is a living resource as well as a resource for the future is something that we would strongly advocate and call for sustained investments from both government and industry to ensure its continuity. The realization that it can steer the creative economy for the benefit of an estimated six million crafts persons is a real possibility. These craftspersons have kept this knowledge alive in a tacit living form through their actions and traditional methods of transmission which we are now trying to capture in an explicit format between the covers of a book.

Image: A small collection of colourful toys from a variety of materials by Indian craftsmen from many locations that are featured in the book.

We have had thinkers from the past comparing the crafts of India with the oceans of the world, vast and impossible to put into a bottle of any kind. We are very aware that it is only the whole earth and its gravity that can act as an adequate container for the oceans and water bodies of our planet’s ecology. Our crafts traditions and practices can be compared to this vast ocean and it is only the tips of the ice-berg that are visible in the book and we hope that the web and the digital networks that are built in the subsequent phases can support and play the role of making the rest of the hidden volume visible and accessible in the days ahead. It is a pleasure to see the realization of a dream and the fructification of the efforts of several generations of NID designers as well as a large team of contributors who have made this book possible. With sustained support from our sponsors The Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, Government of India, the COHANDS, and the expertise of Mapin Publishers as well the members of our Institute, the National Institute of Design this product is a reality today. They have provided us the opportunity of producing this work and we look forward to an active period of cooperation in taking this forward to the next stages through books two, three and beyond on the web as a major portal for the Handicrafts of India.

Aditi Ranjan & M P Ranjan
Editors: Handmade in India
National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India
19 July 2008

For further information contact:

The Council of Handicraft Development Corporations (COHANDS), New Delhi.
Email: cohands4 (at) vsnl.net

The Office of the Development Commissioner (Handicrafts), Government of India, Ministry of Textiles, R K Puram, New Delhi
Email: dchejs (at) nic.in

National Institute of Design, Paldi, Ahmedabad 380007, Gujarat
Email: outreach (at) nid.edu

Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd, Usmanpura, Ahmedabad 380014
Email: mapin (at) mapinpub.com

Indian Institute of Crafts and Design: IICD, Jaipur: Looking back in 2008

IICD, Jaipur: Reflectiions on its inception and establishment as a sector focused design institute, perhaps a model for the 230 other sectors that need design in India today.

1: What is Craft: A model from the IICD Feasibility Report of 1993

The Rajasthan Government exhibited an unusual degree of imagination and vision when they commissioned the National Institute of Design in March 1991 to conduct a research project leading to the creation of a feasibility report for a new School of Crafts, as it was called then. The then Chief Secretary, Mr M L Mehta and the Commissioner of Industries Mr R S Sisodia were the high level team that spearheaded the Governments’ initiative and at the operational level it was the management of the RAJSICO and the Office of the Director of Industries that was given the responsibility of steering and managing the project as it went through the research, evaluation and proposal phase over the next two years. The feasibility report submitted by the NID team of J A Panchal and M P Ranjan was approved in April 1993 by the State Government and under the direct control of the RAJSICO it was decided to set up an instuitute at Jaipur as proposed in our report, the draft of which had been discussed at a well attended round-table and workshop that was held in February 1992. The feasibility report itself was based on a set of nine models that captured the contours of the domain that was to be influenced and led on to the products and by-products of the proposed institute. These models defined the term crafts as an economic development activity that was located in the cusp of core areas of employment in the rural sector that drew their opportunities from the major agricultural sector on the one side and the social and cultural activities on the other while the central focus had the crafts as an industry that employed the largest number of people after the agri-sector in India. Other models spelt out the linkages and constituents and the profile of programmes and activities. The schedule of education programmes as well as that of spaces led to an organizational structure that was developed with the assistance of faculty from the IRMA, Anand and the IIMA, Ahmedabad. These also envisaged the stages of creation of the institute and the ideal location for its establishment and the impact that it could have on the crafts sector as a whole. The last model enlisted the proposed outcomes. These nine models helped make visible the core ideas that were included in the text of the document and these were particularly significant since many of the stake-holders were not expected to read the full text of the document but could still get a birds-eye-view of the substantive proposals that were included in the report. From our experience this was a very effective strategy since most people had a clear understanding of the intentions of the institute if not the methods and means to realise the stated objectives.

2: Schedule of Programmes for the IICD from the Feasibility Report

The institute was commissioned in early 1994 and a Governing Council was constituted which included representatives from the Rajasthan Government under the Chairmanship of the Chief Secretary. The external members included the Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, the Directors off NIFT and NID as well as some prominent master-crafts-persons and this composition demonstrated the seriousness with which the Government viewed the role of the institute at the very inception. The stated mission of the institute, which was accepted by the State Government, was to make an institute of national importance that would focus on the creation of knowledge and human resources for the benefit of the crafts sector using design as the prime driving principle. This was a visionary step at a time when all the resources that were being invested into the crafts sector were entirely in the nature of grants and aid that supported the training of craftsmen as well as support for crafts promotion activities such as market meets, museums and retail stores for the handicrafts sector. While doing our research we found that there was not a single institute or university department anywhere in the country that was mandated to develop knowledge resources for the crafts sector although NID and NIFT as well as some design programmes at the IIT’s had taken up this task on the basis of faculty interest at these institutes. It was therefore decided to make the creation of knowledge in design, technology and marketing as an area of focus and the creation of educated and capable “agents of change” as the mission for the proposed institute. This was easier said than done. While the mission was understood in its abstract statement the translation of these intentions into action was quite another ball game particularly since most people who had previously been involved in the crafts sector were steeped in their concern for the craftsmen and their present condition and the need for innovation and a shift of focus to these “agents of change” was often seen as another elitist endeavor that took the attention away from the plight of the craftsmen in the field. This mindset was perhaps the biggest stumbling block in the early years of setting up of the institute. The need for a new institute was not disputed and it was agreed that, I quote from the feasibility report – “ There is an urgent need for the creation of an institution of excellence that is charged with the mission of developing the crafts sector in an integrated manner. Design, as defined in the broadest possible sense, shall be the discipline used and nurtured by this institute to affect the envisaged development mission and to realize its objectives. The range of tasks and challenges, which such an institution would need to undertake, implies the use of information and knowledge-rich approach over and above the usually accepted component of skills. Only an institution operating at a level of excellence will be able to command the respect of and attract the best people from various fields to participate as faculty and staff in furthering and realizing its mission and objectives”. – Unquote.

3: Proposed Education Programmes for the IICD from the Feasibility Report

The State Government made a valiant effort to set up the institute and get it running while plans were afoot to find a location for its proposed building to commence the education programmes. A core faculty team was appointed in 1995 and the basic activities of curriculum building commenced soon thereafter. The institute was formally registered and a committee of teachers from NID and NIFT were given the task of developing the curriculum for the first Craft Design programme in the country. This task was completed in April 1997, which set the stage for the commencement of the first batch of design students at the Post Graduate level. In the intervening years the institute conducted several craft specific training programmes of three and six months duration as well as commissioned and undertook a number of craft documentation and design projects that were handled by the faculty as well as other resource persons from NIFT and NID on a sponsored project basis. This helped the institute commence a number of activities that could be handled in a collaborative mode even when its own staff and faculty strength were still at a nascent stage. The next year the faculty strength was stabilized with the induction of fresh members and the PG programmes were commenced from rented premises in Jaipur city. The first batch of students gave the faculty a realistic platform to develop a design curriculum that could address the needs of the crafts community across many material and technique categories as well as the huge number of locations in India where an enormous variety has been catalogued and studied. The challenges of the programme and the fledgling institute were many. However the spirit was one of exploration and discovery in which all members took great pride in participation and the journey was quite exciting for all participants. I was involved directly for two years as an acting director in the years leading up to the first programme at the request of the Government and NID made this possible by offering my services on a part time basis in a project format that was handled under the Outreach Programmes of NID. However this arrangement was not continued and the NID involvement got disconnected due to political uneasiness that seemed to emerge from the two roles played by an NID faculty, one as a director of a new institute while continuing to teach and work at NID.

4: Expected Products from the IICD as expressed in the Feasibility Report

The State Government appointed a full time director with administrative authority and the institute expanded its programmes and activities over the next few years. However it was felt that the massive role that was set for the institute could only be achieved if the organization had the autonomy and the requisite funds without being burdened by the Governmental mode of functioning although in the intervening years a new campus had been established and a number of batches had graduated successfully. Last year the State Government decided to transform the management style of the institute by inducting an industry partner to fund and manage that activities in a flexible and effective manner while the ownership of the instutute remained with the Government. A call for partners culminated in the selection of the Ambuja Education Foundation being co-opted as the private sector partner with Suresh Neotia as the Chairman of a new Governing Council which was established with five nominees each from – the Government, the partner and from a pool of independent expert members. This Governing Council has now taken charge and a new director, Prof Sangita Shroff a graduate of NID and a former faculty of NIFT, has been appointed to lead the institute on a planned programme of growth and experimentation as envisaged in the feasibility report.

5: Handmade in India – Evidence of a living tradition that can support the Creative Economy of India

Read more about the Handmade in India book here
The crafts of India is indeed an ocean of opportunity and with the anticipated evolution of the creative economy we see a new role for the crafts based producers in becoming a vibrant entrepreneurial pool of resources that can help transform the rural and urban employment settings by creating value added opportunities that can help create wealth and sustainable livelihoods for a huge population of skilled people in the country. The institute will need to scale up and expand its activities in research and knowledge creation tasks so that the needs of this creative economy can be supported by the products of the institute which would be both in the form of trained human resources as well as design, technology and market strategies that would be innovated as part of the research driven agenda in the years ahead.

Download Feasibility Report as pdf file 386 kb
Link to the IICD website here

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.

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.

Rockytoys Revisited: Design Strategies for a Small Scale Industry

Image 01: A Systems Collection of Big and Small Wheeler Toys that I designed in 1974 for my father's factory in Madras.
When I got back to Madras in May 1974 after five years at NID I found that my father had reinvented his business to have a lower dependence on the wooden toy section and a greater share of his turnover (and margins) coming from the flush doors and furniture manufacturing business. I had returned to my home and our factory after having completed my PG Course in Furniture Design at NID (1969 – 1972) and having served on the Faculty there for two years (1972 -1974) during which time I had a fair amount of experience in both teaching and in professional projects through the NID’s Design Office. The wooden toy section was much depleted in number of workers and many items were being made solely for the retail shop in the city and some still popular items were being made in larger numbers for the school market as well as for supply to trade dealers across the South. I was in a pretty depressed state when I got back home since my departure from NID was not of my choice and I had hung around in Ahmedabad for a couple of months till my money had run out and I was compelled to return to Madras as a confused young man. I did hang around the factory to try and capture the earlier enthusiasm but now no one there would listen to the new fangled ideas that this young designer had and offered through which he promised he would help change the face of the industry. No one had heard about design and the message was lost in the din of the machines and the need to complete the pending orders on hand.

After a couple of months of trying I decided to try my luck elsewhere and started hanging out with a school friend who now worked as an accounts manager in a local advertising agency and spent a good deal of time in tea stalls, restaurants, cinemas and in the bus or train while commuting from home to city and back. I was however given the responsibility of reaching our shop in the evening and returning home with the sales proceeds of the day after closing the accounts and tallying all the bills, very boring indeed, but great education in business discipline. Late in the evenings and far into the night, I started sketching and building concepts of how the toy section could be revitalized at our factory. I had access to data of sales records for the past few years from the retail shop and also the costing data from the factory about each of the items that I thought could be redesigned or improved. The advertising agency however started giving me contract tasks to design logo’s, brochures and then an exhibition for some of their clients in the pharmaceutical and surgical instruments industry which helped start a fairly healthy cash flow and I worked out of my bedroom at night while continuing my lazy and serendipitous wanderings through the city by day. I read many books and visited bookstores and libraries regularly, which was the most visible activity as far as my family was concerned. My father, M V Gopalan, was indeed quite concerned at the state of his “unemployed” vagabond son – who sported a black beard and argued at the drop of a hat – since he did not know much about my activities during the day or late at night when the midnight lamp stayed lit in my room while I read or sketched, according to my mood.

Image 02: Big Wheeler Jeep Toy and Full Body Truck made up of modular components that are interchangable to facilitate inventory control in production.
We had a heart to heart talk some three months into my enforced stay at Madras and he offered to let me build some prototypes of my new sketches for toys, not because he had changed his business strategy to expand the toy activity which was then being cross subsidized by the furniture and doors business, but to get me back to what he could relate to as productive work. I had chosen to first work on the wheeled toy range since the factory had a list of almost 40 different wheeled wooden toys on offer and they were quite popular with the boys who visited our shop and the school buyers in particular always had a few on their purchase wish list. However when I looked at the production data I found that each of these had evolved at different times without any effort to coordinate the components and there were bins and bins of different size wheels stuffed into large metal drums that were used to store the components near the wood turning centre in the factory. When the turners ran out of work more wheels were made and stuffed into more drums, the right hand did not know what the left was doing. The same was true of the other components that were made on the jig-saw and the cross-cut saw centre, each managed and operated by a specialist craftsman who had to be kept busy by the factory manager. The documentation for these toys was in the form of plywood templates, sets of which were hung with a metal wire from the roof in the toy assembly section near the paint shop. These templates were dusted and brought down each time a new batch of toys were to be made and the quantities were decided by the manager, usually in divisions or multiples of dozens, depending on past performance in the market.

Image 03: Existing Big Jeep made of 25 pieces of wood, plywood and metal parts and the new design Jeep Toy in simplified construction and better finish from the factory album of 1974.
I started with the existing Jeep car, my favorite as a child, which was offered in two sizes, big and small. Each Jeep was made up from over 25 pieces of wood and plywood pieces that were cut according to the template and then assembled with glue and nails before being painted and decorated with lines and trims. The quality of construction and finish were fairly crude and the pricing was unsustainably low. However, I found that barely 10 pieces were sold in the previous year; hence it was not a significant loss. The sale price of the big Jeep toy was Rs 17.50 in 1974 and according to my calculation the cost of production was Rs. 25 at least. I decided that my design strategy would be to reduce complexity of assembly, rationalize wheels across a number of toys, use the machine cut precision to improve quality and use spray painted components to make quality improvement in finish and avoid multiple colours and lines on a single component to de-skill the finishing stage and the use of a metal bush bearing for the wheel assembly to make the product durable for rough play as the existing one had weak wheels that made the product less attractive and to avoid nails for the assembly of components. These strategies came out of my conviction from having played with these toys as well as from information about user complaints particularly from schools about the wheels, which is the key functional component in this toy.

My new Jeep toy was made of 15 pieces of solid wood planks, no plywood was used since it tended to fray in use, and the whole assembly was spray painted before assembly to get a great finish and precise joints lines. The breakthrough in the wheels assembly came from our doors business since the bearings were made of the redundant aluminum extrusion sections from tower bolts that were left over items when the flush doors were supplied with the upper stopper removed for use with holes drilled in the door frame. This was available in plenty and could be purchased by weight and therefore cost effective as well. A matching metal shaft was used and these were anchored firmly into the wooden wheels through squared ends that were forged by heating on a hot coal fire before being used for the wheel assembly. The extruded bush bearing had pre drilled holes for receiving screws top be mounted on the chassis that was a long wooden plate that extended from the front to the back of the vehicle. All wooden components were made of uniform thickness and these are cut in modular sizes affording reuse in other vehicle types in the series thereby reducing component level variety. The cost of the finished Jeep with a canopy that could be sat on by a child was Rs. 20 and we priced the toy at Rs 45 for retail. The other products in this range were the three types of Trucks – Platform, Half-body and Full-body – each priced at Rs 35, Rs. 45 and Rs. 60 respectively.

Image 04: Small Wheeler Truck System seen in the three colour schemes that I standardised for the range of toys.
The range was offered in three colour variants of Orange-Red, Yellow-Green and Blue-Green combinations all standardized to the available enamel paint range of a reputed brand so that the earlier lack of colour standards could be avoided during manufacture. All these steps ensured that the quality of the end product was sharply better and the market lapped up these products that day the first batch was taken to the shop for sale. It made a record that day. It was an amazing experience for me to be at the Rockytoys shop when my mother and I started arranging the show window and sales of the product started immediately. They literally flew off the shelf and the first batch of 12 Jeeps and 18 Trucks were sold out on day one at unheard of prices, and this represented over two years sales of the existing range. Design had made a huge difference at this small-scale industry and this market success continued for many years thereafter. Several hundred toy Jeeps and Trucks rolled out of the factory and the shop and I remember when it was launched at Bangalore, the toyshop on Brigade Road had stacked up their shop window with this range during the Christmas season in 1975. For me it was a truly wonderful sight to see my products on sale in Bangalore as well as to get positive feedback from schools such as The School in Madras who had used my products. I wonder if some of the kids who had then played with my toys will get in touch through the new connectivity provided by the web, only time will tell.

Image 05: Range of new colour schemes applied to existing toys and this was extended top all products made by the factory.
My status at the factory changed dramatically overnight and the shop floor workers and managers looked at me with a new interest but could not yet understand how this drama actually worked. Design was like some magic, and the designer, the wielder of the magic wand was much respected and consulted for all kinds of problems and many products could be changed in quick succession and several opportunities were explored in the two years that I spent at Madras before I finally returned to NID and rejoined the Faculty in June of 1976. I will share some of these experiences as well as the insights about design and its use for small industry in the days ahead. Design is a very gratifying occupation and I do wish more young people in India would enter this profession and that many more industries would use the discipline to help build quality products, particularly in the small-scale sector. My father no longer had his earlier concerns about me but he agreed with me when time came for me to return to NID as a faculty member at a fraction of the salary that I had been earning at Madras from my freelance design consultant work as well as from my contract work at the advertising agency that continued alongside my work for my father’s factory, which was by the way unpaid labour, if I do not count the food and lodging that I had from my home, and the access to the free telephone which was critical for my design business in those days.

Rockytoy story: Reflections on the building of a micro-enterprise with design in India

Image: My father, M V Gopalan is standing in the middle dressed in white as always and my brother M P Manohar is the one on the right sporting a beard standing with colleagues at the factory with some of the wooden toys on display. This picture was taken sometime in the early 80's when I had returned to NID as a faculty.
Having written about the Lego story in my last post below, I felt that it would be appropriate to continue the toy-story thread with some reflections on my own life and my personal interface with toys and toy making. By the way, I was born in 1950 on the 9th November and on that same eventful day, according to Rene Spitz in his book “hfg ulm: The View behind the Foreground”, the Ulm School of Design got its name, a significant moment for design, the naming of the great school in Germany, not my birth. I was born in the humble house of a carpenter, nay a young engineering teacher turned carpenter-entrepreneur by choice and I am told on that same day the house and the factory attached to our house got connected to the electric power grid for the first time. It was also an auspicious day for all Hindus’ since Deepavali (Diwali – the festival of lights) happened to fall on that day in that particular year, which was the 9th of November 1950, I am told. My full name is M P Ranjan, where Ranjan is my first name and "M P" stands for my family name when expanded, but this is never used except on my passport document. "M P" stands for Mundon Pandan. My students call me "Ranjan", my first name and in most formal situations I am Prof. Ranjan or Mr. M P Ranjan. This is a very personal story.

Image: Rocking horses in wood documented in 1975 after I had changed the colour schemes and added polka dots to make them contemporary for the market
By the way, the toy factory was called "Modern Agencies" and was set up by my father, M V Gopalan, in 1942 in Madras in South India (now called Chennai) with a capital investment of Rs 350/- after he chose to “retire” young from his engineering college teaching job to become an micro-scale entrepreneur. I have not written about my toy experiences much before but I think that it is now time to add this dimension to my website and the blog. The toy factory made wooden toys and playground equipment and included toys for home use as well as many educational products and furniture for the local school markets, over 400 products were on the price list and as the factory grew it became the biggest toy company in South India with supplies going to all major cities of South India by 1964. At this time it employed over 400 full time workers and many others on contract labour who worked from their home and this community may have numbered over 1000 individuals who worked from home to carry out these contract tasks. The product line included papier mache dancing dolls, wooden toys, educational aids, school furniture, office and domestic furniture as well as flush doors and specialized industrial wooden products of many descriptions.

Image: M P Ranjan as a child and one of my favorite toys that was made in my father's factory and one that I got to redesign in 1974 when I returned from NID.
The product range, which started with Rocking Horses, in wood, were the most popular product line in the fifties and the early sixties, The other items included school counting frames using wooden beads, outsourced from the town of Channapatna in Karnataka State. The next most popular item that I remember is the Papier Mache Dancing Dolls that sold in the hundreds of thousands at local exhibitions and they literally flew off the shelf and these were all made by the contract craftsmen families living in the city of Madras, near Saidapet, Velecheri (near our factory located in Guindy) and some as far away as Royapettah and Perembur across the city and quite far away to the North of the city. My father was quite proud of the fact that he had managed to provide stable employment for so many people when getting an honest days wage was an uphill task in most Indian cities. In the late fifties he had set up a toy retail shop under the brand name of "Rockytoys" after the popular rocking horses that he had innovated and produced from 1942 onwards. He had designed his own jig-saw "machine" in 1942 that used a bullock-cart wheel that was used to power the cutting machine, which was operated by a person who turned the fly-wheel using a hand-crank, and a stout rope then transferred this power through a system of pulleys to work the simple “machine”. He developed a similar sand-papering machine and with these two creations set about the making of his single product, in those days, the hugely popular wooden rocking horse. The rocking horses that were made in the early days were sold in the city of Madras directly by my father who used to take the finished product on the back of bicycles and later in larger numbers on hand carts when the production and sale grew in response to demand and these were first sold directly off the streets and later in stores that kept regular stocks as the market expanded for these products.

Image: The old and new jeep toy as seen in the old Rockytoys photo album in my mother's house. The new jeep was a redesign done by me in 1974 and I will detail the design strategy and more about it in my next post.
From these humble beginnings his factory grew and prospered and the product range was diversified further into furniture and school equipment. Many new machines came in and the production then included the making of wooden components for railway coaches for the fledgling coach factory in Avadi, Madras and the manufacture of plywood flush doors using a new lamination technology that he learned from an Italian engineer, Bottichelli (pronounced Butty Jelley in those days). With the help of his expertise the company took up the fascinating task of building 14 plywood houses for the faculty and an auditorium for the experimental dance school of Rukmini Devi Arundale at the Kalakshetra Foundation in Madras. I was fortunate to watch these developments at close quarters as a child and to visit the construction sites with a sense of wonder at all this adventure in small-scale manufacture and entrepreneurship. This is a long story of entrepreneurship that has been repeated many times in India and it is a true rag to riches story that I will try to tell later in some detail when time permits. I did not know it then, but it was design and innovation that was the driver for my fathers efforts and when I look back I realize how fortunate I was to experience these events and I wish that many more of our young students in India would have such exposure which their schools just cannot or do not provide today.

From the perspective of my real world education the story gets interesting here, In 1964 to 1967 my father’s factory and his network of suppliers faced their first major labour unrest. The city of Madras and the whole of South India discovered Red flags and Communism in a big way and due to the associated trade union action and the factory was closed down for over a year and then in smaller sessions due to the labour strikes and follow-up court action. Needless to say my father lost all his money. I was 14 years old then and old enough to understand first-hand what he was going through in his moment of crisis. Some production however continued through the network of outsourced contract labour and his business survived (another long story waiting to be told) and as a result I decided in 1968 not to join either the local Engineering College or the School of Architecture, where I had obtained admission after completing my one year Pre-University course from the prestigious Madras Christian College at Tambaram. My childhood education was the best that money could buy in Madras in those days. I went to Church Park, Presentation Convent at Thousand Lights in Madras for my junior nursery to fifth standard classes (seven years of Convent education by Irish Nuns - my language competence came from here, I am sure) and then to high school at the Madras Christian College High School as Chetput in Madras where I did engineering as my major subject. However, I now realise that I had lived a double life, one with great schooling and academic rigor and the second with a terrific grounding in real world skills at our factory and our business on toy design and manufacture and marketing. In 1969 I applied to NID’s Post Graduate programme in Furniture Design as an "Experienced Cabinet Maker" after working full time with my father in his business for one year, although I had been involved in his business already from 1964, if I look back and my childhood experiences.

Image: A collection of toys made during the "Bamboo Boards and Beyond" project at NID in 2000 as part of the range that I designed based on my Rockytoys experience.
At NID most of the products that I designed as a student were for children, I made a stackable fibreglass chair and table and prototyped it in 1970, a Tier-bed for children in metal tubes and wood which was knockdown and many toy ideas that were sketched and built as concept models. In 1972 I was inducted on to the faculty at NID and I decided to follow my growing interest in research and education and my disillusion with Indian business climate as a whole from my early experiences in the field. I hit a road-block in 1974 when I was asked to leave NID abruptly, in my view unfairly, but I had no option but to go back to Madras while I continued to argue my case with the then NID management for redress. At Madras, I realised later, that this was a blessing in disguise, a trial by fire if you will, and I set up my own design practice from my bedroom and using my fathers phone, I took on all sorts of design assignments on the basis of my very broad education and exposure at NID, interiors, Graphic print brochures and symbol design for a local advertising agency and exhibition design which resulted in a very healthy cash flow, far in excess of my NID salary. In the nights I worked on design of a new range of wooden toys for my fathers factory to pay back for the lunches, dinners and for the roof over my head. In two years at Madras I had designed more that a hundred new toys (some redesigned or with new colour-schemes) and this transformed the profit profile of our company and our sales from the Rockytoys Showroom sky-rocketed in those days, thanks to the design inputs which became visible and appreciated due to the real demonstration that was taking place. But I was however restless and continued to follow up the NID dream. I was finally re-inducted at NID on the faculty in 1976 and among the first project that I took up independently was the Chennapatna Toys collection for the crafts community there with sponsorship from the All India Handicrafts Board (now called the Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, Government of India). The toys that I designed then are still in production at many centres across India since they are made using wood turning and are easy to make and sell with very little capital to start a new company. In the bamboo range we have designed many toys and children’s furniture, which are now being promoted as poverty busters that can help Rural India survive the globalisation pressures. I now realize that I had intuitively embedded certain qualities into the products that could support start-up entrepreneurship and this is perhaps the reason why these products are made and produced at so many locations around India by small producers who like my farther have tried to find their feet and survive in a situation of poverty and absence of capital.

My brother, M P Manohar took over our factory and businesses after my father passed away in 1988, since he was already helping him for many years in the business at Madras. However the manufacture of wooden toys was coming under serious competition from plastics and the labour situation was not easy either nor did our family have the capital to grow the factory to the next level of sustainability with the introduction of automation and new quality standards that markets demanded and it was therefore closed down and eventually sold out in the mid 90’s. My brother continues to live and work in Madras (Chennai) and is now with the Dakshin Chitra Foundation to help build a Toy Museum at the Foundation's exhibition site outside Chennai. My brother too had studied with me through all the schools, just one year behind me in a junior class, and then he too joined NID as a student of Graphic design in 1973 although he too was a skilled craftsman having made over 100 or so Aero models, ships and many many other things together through our very rich childhood experiences together, including plastic scale models of architectural projects and buildings which my father had started as a side business to the toy factory. Life was tough but we can now look back and cherish the finer points of the rich experience, no regrets whatsoever. My mother too had joined the family business when the going got very tough in 1964 and stayed on with the shop in the city till my father passed away in 1988. She now lives in Bangalore in her own home near that of my sister (M P Meera - Meera Nandanan) who also lives there, having moved back from Kolkatta to Madras and then to Bangalore after our business was closed down in the mid 90's. She too contributed and managed the Rockytoys showroom during her stay at Madras from the early 80's. So in all it was a true family saga that needs to be told in some detail, hopefully sometime soon, with pictures.

This is a short version of our Toy story and I think that it is now time to blog my experience on toys and to share my experiences. By the way, since I got passionately involved in each of my activities as they unfolded I used to be called "Dr.Toy" by my friends and acquaintances in the early 80's before I moved on to acquire new skills to become "Dr. Geometry" and "Dr.Computers" "Dr. Publications" and now-a-days "Dr. Bamboo" and "Dr. Design Theory"....... By the way, I have never completed any degree qualification in my entire career but I have managed to attract these taunts, nevertheless.