Bangalore wins Vote: The Design City of the Future

Bangalore wins Vote: The Design City of the Future

Prof M P Ranjan’s Papers

Image: Denis Cherdentsev from Russia and Prof M P Ranjan from NID Ahmedabad at the Design Museum terrace garden facing the Themes River with a view of the Tower Bridge and Norman Fosters famous Gerkin in the background view.

The British Council and the Design Museum in London had an exhibition to promote at their establishment located on the banks of the Themes River in London. They invited four designers and design thinkers from the BRIC nations to come all the way to London to a debate and each was asked to make a pitch about one selected city from each of their countries that had the most likely chance of becoming the next design city of the world. The Design & Architecture team at the British Council had proposed this event to the Design Museum and it was through the support from the British Council in London and India that I managed to travel to London to participate in this exciting event.

Deyan Sudjik, the curator of the Design Cities exhibition at the Design Museum and it current Director had made a selection of eight points in time when the world was changed in some significant way through the use of design. These eight events happened in seven different cities around the world and in his argument it started in London with the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851 and returned to London in 2008 and in the intervening period shifted from Vienna 1908, Dessau 1928, Paris 1931, Los Angeles 1949, Milan 1957, Tokyo 1987 and then back to London in 2008. The exhibition has an impressive collection of designed objects from each city and from the era that they represented and these were supported by pictures of the designers and some other related prints and texts. I am however surprised that Scandinavia of the 1960’s has been overlooked especially the work of the furniture masters at the Copenhagen school. Another point that crossed my mind is that the exhibition was almost completely object centric and the processes that formed the intangible parts of the visible offering did not form part of the debate in its favour. I am sure Deyan Sudjik has his own logic for the choices made from the vast array of possibilities that could be argued, for and against a particular city or an era when design made significant contributions to the world.

The people recognized by the curator in his catalogue are as follows:
William Morris and Christopher Dresser (London)
Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann (Vienna)
Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe (Dessau)
Le Corbusier and Eileen Grey (Paris)
Charles and Ray Eames (Los Angles)
Gio Ponti and Joe Colombo (Milan)
Akio Morita and Tadao Ando (Tokyo)
Norman Foster and Paul Smith (London)
The exhibits included works of several other designers who were living and working in the specific contexts listed above and the return to London in 2008 included many contemporary designers who have made a mark in the artistic and commercial circles with their design offerings.

The four architect/designers/journalist from the BRIC nations were asked to make a ten minute presentation each, back to back, followed by a rapid fire questions from the chair and the audience before the matter was placed before the whole audience to cast their vote to select the city of their choice based on their own reading of the four presentations. Ruy Ohtake represented Brazil and pitched for Sao Paolo as the next potential Design City. Denis Cherdantsev chose Moscow for Russia and Ou Ning offered Beijing as the choice from China while Prof M P Ranjan pitched for Bangalore, nay, Bengaluru as the next Design City from India.

The audience trooped in at 7.00 pm on the 15th December 2008 and the debate began with the first presentation about Sao Paolo followed Moscow, Bengaluru and Beijing. This was followed by questions from the chair and the audience and the when the matter was put to vote at 8.30 pm, Bengaluru was the clear winner by a decisive margin followed by Sao Paolo, Beijing and then Moscow. Systems models from Nature and people’s participation in a local Democracy were the highlights of the Bengaluru offering. The champions of the Bengaluru success are Poonam Bir Kasturi with her Daily Dump that promises to clean up the city through individual action motivated by the community and design scheme and this in turn promises to clean up the world when the design offering from Bengaluru is cloned in all the cities around the world just as the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) from Bogota in Colombia is now being cloned in New Delhi and Ahmedabad and soon will reach Hyderabad and Bengaluru as well. The other example from Bengaluru was the Industree success story as well as the scaling up achieved by Ray + Kesavan and IDIOM through merger and acqusition processes with big business involvement and the small and big design studios that have been set up by our designers as models for others to follow. The full presentation made by Prof M P Ranjan has been linked for download on the previous post on this blog.

I am happy that the audience gave the thumbs up signal to the Design City proposal from India in the form of Bengaluru and I do hope that this message will sweep back to India where design policy and design action is languishing due to government and industry apathy over the years. We do need to get local politics to take charge of design in the local context and move the action from the objects of desire in the consumer industry space to the much needed public facilities and shared facilities that are so critical for the city to become a place with “The Quality without a name” which had been explained by Christopher Alexander in his book “The Timeless Way of Building”, a quality that can be sensed and not necessarily be seen. Bengaluru has all the ingredients to make this work and show the world that the next design city will celebrate a new kind of design that transcends the material and deal with the intangibles that make a difference in the world and in the minds and hearts to the people.

The morning session on the 15th December began with an interview at the BBC at Bush House London the seat of BBC Radio that I used to listen to in my childhood days at Madras. Deyan Sudjik, Ou Ning and Prof M P Ranjan were interviewed by the BBC Radio team and the breadcast is expected later in the week and the schedules will be posted on the BBC World Service website. The next day in the morning a breakfast interview with the DesignWeek concluded our involvement in the series of Design City related events in London and their report is expected to be posted on the website here as well as in the print version of the magazine soon.

Prof M P Ranjan’s Papers

Designers can build innovative companies: Emerging options in India

Image: Projects from Korjan Design Studio: Set up by Dinesh and Rashmi Korjan, who have been role models for many young product designers in India since they stayed focused on their core area of product design when everyone else did a bit of interiors and graphics when the going was tough in the early days of establishing the profession in India.

A number of young designers are on the lookout for exciting and challenging work that is both cutting edge as well as adequately remunerative. Existing and established companies in the manufacturing and service sectors would usually make them work their way up the organization as this is seen as the most productive route for learning on the job for most professions. However, in design, the most value is added usually at the strategic level (see levels of design model, Ranjan 1998) while young recruits are kept at the bottom of the value chain – at the tactical level or even the elaborative level – in some back office operation which does not challenge their imagination and conceptual skill sets that they have developed as a part of their education and training exposures in school as well as outside. Several designers turn to entrepreneurial ventures that offer design services to a variety of businesses and industries and this has been a well tested path for a large number of young designers since the entry barriers in the profession are indeed quite low as far as capital and infrastructure investments are concerned. These young designers would no doubt have to acquire new skill sets in management and people skills to be able to succeed to scale from small beginnings to support a large team and this is something that they learn on the job as they go forward in setting up their ventures and making a go of the whole effort. A number of our designer graduates have indeed taken this route with a good deal of success. Both the Government as well as several leading national institutions of technology, management and design is now encouraging entrepreneurship and incubation of new initiatives in India. The IIT’s, IIM’s and NID have all set up incubators to encourage both students and faculty in realizing their innovative dreams through these nascent incubation initiatives. Besides the Government initiated schools of higher education in India several private sector schools and universities have their active incubation initiatives such as the one in Nirma Institute of Technology in Ahmedabad and the Welingkar Institute of Management in Mumbai and now at a new campus in Bangalore.

Image: Daily Dump: A new venture incubated at Srishti, Bangalore by Poonam Bir Kasturi and now it has grown to be a social design movement with clones in many parts of India and across the world. This particular model offers huge potential of using design to address pressing needs in the social space for quality products, services and attitude change that is critical if we are to offset the effects of global warming in the days ahead.

Links to the Daily Dump are here below:
Daily Dump Home page.
Global warming and concerns in India
Daily Dump on Helsinki Design Lab post
Daily Dump on the Index Award site

Globalisation has brought other international formats of innovation and incubation support to Indian shores and many new finance and venture capital support systems have been created to encourage and support real passion and expertise particularly when the proof of concept is established by early stage prototypes or even market trials carried out by the designers and their colleagues in the case of new products and services offered by the incumbents own initiatives. This kind of build, operate and deliver model is fairly common in the software industry where small teams build exciting new products but vest part of their holding to the market or to a financier or venture capital support team after a period of development of the technical aspects of the product in order to rapidly scale up and compete with the existing players in the marketplace. Market launch and competition with existing large players is avoided in some cases and the field left to established players through a buy–in by the larger partner if the promoters are not able to scale the offering or able to garner the financial supports needed to make the shift. In some cases the company is brought to market through an Initial Public Offering (IPO) when the company is taken public and the promoters liquidate or reduce their holding at an appropriate value through a regulated process for such offerings. In India we have seen this kind of public issues based on product and service innovations in the areas of software, pharmaceuticals and in retail in recent years. Many of our design graduates who had established their own initiatives over the past ten years or more are finding new opportunities to bring in much needed capital to expand and scale up their business offering that has been proven in the market over time and by demonstration in the marketplace.

Image: Prof M P Ranjan at the CNBC TV 18 studio in Mumbai

This raises the big question of what is innovation and how can we unfold the value of the innovative process in the emerging era of the creative economy that is being discussed by many forward looking business thinkers. I had the opportunity to interact with the CNBC TV 18 team in analyzing several innovations that have emerged in the country through a broadcast programme called “Innovations at Work” that is anchored by Menaka Doshi and Cyrus and myself acted as expert guests on the panel. The CNBC TV18 team did all the background work on the seven selected innovations that are discussed in the programme while the expert guests brought their experience to bear on commenting on these from their own perspectives, mine from that of a design teacher at NID and Cyrus Driver spoke from the perspective of a venture capital expert with direct experience in building start-up companies. I have commented in an earlier post on the variety of businesses that had been started by NID graduates in the past and these I believe are the role models available today for young design students who are currently enrolled in our design schools across India. The facilities to spawn a vast network of such start-ups in India is still very limited but if we recognize the potential and provide the framework to nurture these initiatives as well as use the educational support networks and curriculum design that can enable such ventures we will be able to create the mind-sets that are required to make such ventures happen, and grow to become great value creators of our times. While most education programmes in design are aimed at creating employees for industry, I do believe there is scope for special institutions that can aim their programmes at seeding entrepreneurs across many areas of opportunity and such schools and programmes are the need of the day. I will explore the shape and contours of such a possibility in some future posts and such a format would need to be multi-disciplinary and bring together players and abilities that can enhance the process of incubation at the end of a period of nurture and capacity building. The KaosPilot in Scandinavia has shown that young individuals can be empowered and enabled to learn and build the necessary skills and confidence to set up new ventures in unconventional areas on business opportunity. If we were to explore the areas of need in India we can see enormous untapped possibilities in as many as 230 sectors of our economy for the use of design and design related services. Our design schools will need to strengthen their business process skills if the young designers are to be empowered to take on these real opportunities as well as be able to participate directly in such transformation processes at hand. Design schools also have the opportunity to attract a variety of skilled professionals into their fold so that domain expertise can be honed with a layer of design thinking and action skills that would be at the heart of any new enterprise building experiment.

Tonight I have just returned from the inaugural session of the Helsinki Design Lab 2008 at the Wanha Satma in Helsinki and here we witnessed the formation of a major new Innovation University, which will merge together three existing Universities of Art & Design, Management and Technology to form a powerful new entity that is looking far into the future.

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.

Global Warming and Design Concerns in India

While reflecting on a question, by Shimolee Nahar a young graduate product designer from NID and a member on the designIndia list, I made these suggestions for research and action in India. One question that came to my mind was – What are Indian designers doing today which is interesting and useful for the long term happiness of our planet? It would be good to have these documented and brought into sharp focus in all our design schools and also to see it percolating into the consciousness of all our professionals as a viable and exciting entrepreneurial option to a lucrative desk job within industry.

Global warming is now a popular fad. I had seen the Time magazine cover story on Global Warming as well as "What can we do about it" story that was included in that issue. You can see the story now online at the following links.
Time Magazine cover story
An interactive slide show and a link to the Time Magazine
“What you can do" story at their website.

Also recommended is Al Gore's documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth", on Global Warming and the YouTube commentaries that follow it in a lighter vein.

India Today magazine, which is delivered to my home every week, too followed up with a me-too story in the weeks that followed, but unfortunately their website is a subscriber only site, they still seem to be living in a Web 1.0 mindset with a closed access regime, I wonder when they will change.!! and adopt a Web 2.0 mindset.....of open access, interactive and user driven content....I hope soon.
India Today
You can access the full story if you have a subscriber number from the cover of their mailing envelope.

Yes, each of us needs to ask the question, "What can we do?" and as a group of designers the topic is of great relevance. The world is changing and the – DesignIndia forum – and platforms like this one can be used to share what we are doing in our individual and professional capacities and it may be good to have this all documented and shared with the policy makers in India as well as with each other. This will bring a mind-set change which we do need if we are to succeed in our efforts in the days ahead.

For instance Dinesh Sharma, an industrial design graduate from NID, is working as design consultant to an enterprise called “Furaat Rainwater Conservation” and he has created his patented design and technology for offering both new as well as retrofitted rainwater harvesting systems for homes and organisations in Ahmedabad which not many people that I met are aware of just now. Calls are already coming in for this application from Tamilnadu and Karnataka which are currently battling over the Cauvery water sharing dispute and I am sure that more will follow as the value that it provides seeps into our collective consciousness. You can see the work of Furaat at their website link on the left hand panel here.
Furaat Rainwater Conservation

There is the wonderfully insightful and significant initiative from Poonam Bir Kasturi in Bangalore and it is now expanding to Chennai through her "Daily Dump" domestic organic waste management system which can be seen at this link here.

You too can act now and get the – Daily Dump – installed in your own home as a demonstration and test proving site.

Nominated for the Index Award in 2007 it is already a wonderful achievement but we will await the results and progress of its adoption with great interest in the days ahead. The – Index website story – says, I Quote:
“Daily Dump – compost at home (India) Designed by Poonam Bir Kasturi.
Challenge: 70% of waste generated in urban homes in India is wet organic waste, which before was collected and composted. However, after having discovered that public-sector waste disposal service does not sort the waste, citizens have lost confidence in using it.
Solution: With the home composting product Daily Dump, organic waste can be managed at source. In addition, the design drawings, methods and processes will be available on the Internet, enabling local micro-enterprises to flourish and families to recycle their organic waste.”
Unquote

We do look forward to this design contribution from India getting global recognition that it deserves, great going Poonam.
Daily Dump on Index Awards
See also this World Changing link here.

I too have been working on these issues spread over the years along with a large team of design students and faculty colleagues at NID on bamboo as a sustainable material for the future as well as using bamboo as an avenue for equitable employment opportunities in rural India through our work at the Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID. You can see some of the work documented at my website under the following links:
• Beyond Grassroots: BCDI links
• Katlamara Chalo links
• Bamboo Initiatives links
• Bamboo Boards & Beyond links
all accessible from my website link on the panel on the left: Prof Ranjan’s Homepage

The initiative that Mala and Pradeep Sinha have taken to experiment, design and build a sustainable water and energy conservation system at their high quality textile hand print and dye facility and design studio in Baroda comes to my mind, unfortunately, they do not have a full website link that I can share with you just now. However their studio, Bodhi can be seen at this link below:
Bodhi, Baroda

There are many many more that we do not know about since the design media is unfortunately only interested in glamour and glitz, it seems. We need to change that.

On these forums (DesignIndia list, Design with India, and Design for India, and others) we can help document all such initiatives and these could be showcased at the forthcoming CII-NID Design Summit 2007 so that some awareness and follow-up action can be catalysed in India using the design thinking that has gone into each of these cases. What do you think? Anyone who knows of any interesting and significant action in India or even small local initiatives of the use of design for such development and conservation intentions do send them in and I offer to collate all these into a collected research and share it with the interested people in the weeks ahead. If these are papers and web links that need to be explored these too can sent to me directly.

It is indeed time that we collaborate as a design community on this task and make a joint submission to government and industry so that the funds required for sustained research and exploration in such social and ecological sectors can be initiated and sustained. Others interested can join us in this effort. What do you think? This is just one of the 230 sectors in which much work needs to be done, and the time is now, particularly at a time when the Government has come forward and set up a National Design Policy and we must help in giving shape to the actions and value that can unfold from this progressive move.