Jewellery and Retail Sectors: Design as an Business Service Integrator

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

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

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

Design as Research: Path to Knowledge Creation & Critical Insights

Design as Research: Path to Knowledge Creation & Critical Insights download 36 page pdf file 1.1 mb here.
I was invited this afternoon to lecture to a batch of PhD candidates at the CEPT University and I chose to speak on the topic of “Design as Research: A path to Knowledge Creation and for Critical Insights”. Many design schools and University departments are asking their teachers to acquire PhD qualifications and almost all of the candidates are required to go outside the design discipline to make the transition to a higher qualification if they are to be promoted. However there is little appreciation of the inherent research capacities that are embedded in the design process itself and most designers are required to wander outside their core areas of competence in search of a PhD qualification to further their career as a teacher in design. The question whether the qualification would make them better teachers of design is not in the frame of reckoning and I felt that our understanding of design has in recent years moved far enough to ask for a degree of clarity on this front.

Many design thinkers, have in recent years, made available valuable insights into the role of design research and this occasion gave me the opportunity to revisit some of their writings and to put together my own arguments on the nature of design as it is seen today by some of us and what it could be in the days ahead. In my search for published resources I did not need to go far from my own room since I had been gathering a number of current resources on design thinking and design research and my office has a mini-library that is fairly up-to-date on this particular topic. It gave me the platform to connect the discussions that have been going on the few discussion lists that I am a member of with particular reference to the PhD-Design list which is a platform where over 1200 design professors have been debating these very issues over the past few years and their discourse has been a source of great inspiration and learning for me. The other list that I participate in is the AnthroDesign list, which has many designers, ethnographers and anthropologists; all discussing tools and techniques of design research and this too has been a very stimulating platform of rich learning.

Many of the current thinkers and those who have done considerable research on the topic of design research and its unfolding trajectories are here on these lists and many who may be lurking on these lists too occasionally make significant contributions through their occasional offerings that provides a rich source of intellectual stimulation. I have been encouraging my students to observe these exchanges as best they could and to draw from these current insights about the state of the art in the profession and in academia. In India the DesignIndia list too has been a platform that connects many design professionals who may otherwise be disconnected from the world of design discourse.

For my lecture I was able to cull together insights from a number of published sources and the key arguments came for one key resource, which is the book by Peter Downton, Design Research, RMIT, 2003. I appreciated Downton’s position that, I quote, “Design is a way of inquiring, a way of producing knowing and knowledge, this means it is a way of researching”.


I built my own arguments on these statements and drew additional inputs from a comparison of the positions taken by Herbert Simon, in The Sciences of the Artificial, MIT Press, 1969 and the counterpoint offered by Donald Schon, in The Reflective Practitioner, 1983. The lecture explored the relationship between knowledge production in the sciences and what is produced during the design process. At NID we have developed our own models of the design process as part of the Design Concepts and Concerns course that is offered to all our students at the graduate as well as the post graduate levels. These models gave me the context for exploring the relationship between the various stages in a systems design journey and the corresponding types of knowledge that they generated. While we now have an appreciation of this phenomenon the design profession as well as the academia is still quite uncertain about the validity of their time tested processes and seek to get support and validation from the scientific discourse which is not quite able to fathom that complexities of the design way.

Here the quote by Alain Findelli in his introductory note to the Design plus Research conference at the Politechnico di Milano in 2000 draws our attention to the critical statement by Klaus Krippendorff as he bemoans the lack of faith that designers exhibit in their own knowledge and convictions.

“Probably the most notable pathology of design discourse is its openness to colonisation by other discourses... From within designers are groping for new conceptions and uncritically adopting the perspectives of other discourses invite into their discourse paradigms that may prove disabling in the long run, and incoherences that could break a community apart and systematically erode its identity” Klaus Krippendorff.

This gave me the occasion to discuss the recent books by leading design thinkers around the globe, all of whom have dealt with the changing nature of our design understanding as well as provided some very significant insights about the nature of the design activity as well as its role for humanity in the near and distant future. Research in design and about design are themes that are explored and the findings are helping shape a new identity for design as a field of research.
1. Tomas Maldonado, Design, Nature, Revolution, Harper & Row, 1972
2. Silvia Pizzocaro et al, Design plus Research, Politechnico di Milano, 2000
3. Peter Downton, Design Research, RMIT Press, 2003
4. Nigel Cross, Designerly Ways of Knowing, Springer, 2006
5. Bryan Lawson, What Designers Know, Elsevier, 2004
6. Klaus Krippendorff, The Semantic Turn: A new foundation for design, Taylor & Francis, 2006
7. John Thackara, Wouldn’t it be great if…we could live sustainably – by design?, Design Council, 2007

Design and Design Research needs to discover their core offerings that cannot be substituted by any other form of scientific or academic research and then build a framework of confidence and conviction to offer their own discourse that can make the dream of building sustainable futures as a desirable direction for all of us as John Thackara has been demonstrating through his initiatives with the Design Council, UK as well as through his Doors of Perception initiatives in Europe as well as in India. Designers need to embrace design and the design journey with conviction and we will be able to then convince countries and governments to use this discipline to address the complex issues that confront all of us in our daily lives. Many of these cannot be solved or addressed by our known science methods and design must take centre stage if some of these truly wicked problems are to be solved at all. The paper and model of the design journey as well as the styles of thinking in the design process can be downloaded from this link as a pdf file 271 kb size.

My presentation to the CEPT University PhD class can be downloaded as a pdf file 1.1 mb size from this link: “Design as Research: Path to Knowledge Creation & Critical Insights”.

Last year my lecture to the CEPT PhD candidates was about the Ethics of Design Research. The visual presentation of that lecture can be downloaded from this link as a pdf file of 58 kb size.

GINGER: The Design of a “Smart” Hotel Chain in India

Lessons for the use of design in the arena of public utilities and facilities in India Image: GINGER Reception at Agartala
How do you think of a new hotel chain is created when none exists in the specific category or with the business model that you think will be a good offering in the world today? Of course you would have to Design it from scratch. That is you will need to have a dream and then explore all its dimensions and details and then refine the offering through an iterative process that blends imagination with action in the real world. All this is done before you can build a first prototype and figure out whether the concept that excited you in the first place actually works in the real world. This iteration continues as you build the other elements of the chain with each learning being fed back into the next hotel and then the next till you have a fine tuned chain with a brand and a compelling reputation. So what is proposed is not a one time rational activity, that of building specifications and then using a “cookie cutter approach” as Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize winning scientist would have us believe, problem first and the solution later. However here we see an example of a caring, feeling and iterative process that consolidates all learning and then adjusts the offering in a sensitive manner to changes in the market and the environment in the real world. This process is best described by the word “Design”.

Image: GINGER hotel in Kejur Baghaan in Agartala. Note the Kejur (Date Palm) trees in the background. This is exactly how GINGER, a new hotel chain set up by the Taj Group of Hotels came into being some four years ago in India. All, hotel chains are built the same way, but this one is special for me because it is designed by a team that is headed by one of my students who had studied product design at the National Institute of Design and interestingly the product is endorsed by the management guru C K Prahalad who by the way never uses the word “Design” in any of his speeches or for that matter his books, but that is another story. This raises another question for us as design educators in India and that is how do we educate our designers who would have the flexibility and the ability sets to be able to offer future requirements in an extremely complex context of the Indian market and this has always excited me as a design teacher. We had at NID chosen in the late 80’s, if not earlier in an implicit manner, to adopt the systems model at the heart of our education offering and this and other such stories are perhaps a vindication of the success of those moves in re-designing design education. This approach is explained in two papers that I have prepared in 2003 (Avalanche Effect…pdf file 55kb) and in 2005 (Creating the Unknowable…pdf file 50kb) and the models and design theory that evolved can be seen at this link to my website. Another important question for me is, how do we make design at this level visible to managers and Governments across the world?

Amit Gulati, an NID graduate in Product Design and founder partner of INCUBIS Pvt Ltd, a New Delhi based design and architecture firm, was asked by the Taj Group to pitch a concept for the proposed budget hotel to be set up in Bangalore. They were successful in their bid which is as yet unpublished or celebrated, but that particular bid led to the creation of the first prototype hotel aimed at the youthful traveling software professionals in Whitefield area in the IT hub of the city. It was named The "Indi-One" and it was a runaway success from the word go and the offering was later re-branded with market expertise from the Landor Group, UK, when the name GINGER was proposed for the expanding chain of budget hotels in India. INCUBIS was contracted on an exclusive design service and supervision basis to help create all the other hotels in the chain and now we have 10 such offerings, in as many cities, with Pondicherry joining the chain as the newest offering which opens to the public later today. Bangalore, Bhubaneswar, Durgapur, Haridwar, Mysore, Pune and Trivandrum are the other links in the chain and the strategy to address latent needs in the tier-two cities in India has created an exciting growth model for the company.

Image: BCDI as it was in January 2002 when we commenced the programmes for the local bamboo craftsmenI am writing this post from the GINGER in Agartala where I have come to sign a “Statement of Intent” between the Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID (CFBI-NID) (which I happen to Head at the NID) with the Tripura Bamboo Mission (TMB) and ironically the hotel is located across the street from the BCDI in Kejur Baghaan where we used to have our tea breaks amidst a number of Kejur (Date palm) trees when NID was given the responsibility of creating a new curriculum and in managing the BCDI as part of a contracted project arrangement with the Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, Government of India. Here we were designing a new educational system for training young professional craftspersons for the bamboo sector and our involvement continued from January 2002 to June 2004 before we were rudely evicteded from our base in Tripura by administrative indifference and perhaps a complete lack of understanding at what we were trying to do there.

What actually has been designed at GINGER? Everything is designed – from the business model of the self-help systems to the liquid soap dispenser in each toilet in the hotel. These include all the tangible and visible signs, products and spaces as well as the intangible look and feel of the service as well as the details and location of all features that have been included in the offering. The slogan “Please help yourselves,” explains it all. Arriving at the smart arrival port at a smart looking building that has all the semantics of a hotel, there was no liveried bellhops at the door but a row of baggage carts with a help-yourself sign that was tastefully placed in the hotel’s chosen type-style and colour scheme. The door is automatic and opens across as the cart is rolled in, notice no moustached door keeper in the good Indian palace tradition. ATM style self check in are I am told available at other centres but in Agartala it was a smart young receptionist who handed over my swipe-card that would let me into my room number 106 and the clear black and white plastic stickers with a red border tell me that the card goes into the card slot near the door which sets of the lights, air-conditioner and the TV all part of the energy saving design strategy. Other labels in self-sticking plastic signs tell me that tea and coffee made in the room using the auto-stop electric kettle are compliments of the management and the mineral water in the small refrigerator too comes free but refills are available on each floor in the Guest Pantry where one can iron your clothes as well. Another sign on the telephone socket tells me that I can connect the lead to access the internet but in Agartala this is not yet a reality. A booklet in the room tells me that I can help myself to all the services, the pantry, the vending machines and the gymnasium as well as have access to a cybercafe, breakfast, lunch and dinner buffets, all at a reasonable charge. Interestingly the room tariff and service charges change with each city, keeping in mind the cost of living index and fortunately for me the Agartala offering comes at the lowest price of them all. I have stayed in most major hotels in Agartala over the past many years and it is clear that GINGER will give them all a run for their money. Design being a reflexive activity I am now interested in seeing how these competitors will respond to this new offering.

The rooms and lobby are spotlessly clean and so are the smart bathroom and the linen in the room. A comfortable in one corner with a conveniently located plug point for my laptop tells me that the designers intended to facilitate my use of my laptop and this is close to the telephone socket and all the other switches that I need to manage my room. The flat panel TV occupies no space on the wall and it is located at a convenient height across the bed and next to the full-length mirror. The wardrobe, refrigerator and luggage rack are all rolled into one integrated offering which also provides a platform for the kettle and the complimentary tea bags satchel. The rubber wood trimmed furniture are all fixed to the walls and clear off the ground with stainless steel legs for the table and ceramic tile faced platform for the bed that shows a clear concern for the cleaning crew which is small but effective to keep costs down to the bare minimum without compromising on quality and hygiene. Energy efficient lamps in very smart steel trimmed fittings are strategically located in the access corridor as well as the room and a wall mounted lamp assists reading in bed and at the adjacent table, very well located indeed, or should I say designed?

What is not visible is the CCTV surveillance system in the foyer and the lobby and all floors have a view of the reception through and the back end systems of housekeeping and online bookings all designed with care and concern for the user. A tie-up with Café Coffee Day has a pay and use walk in facility on the ground floor garden and lobby level all day coffee shop for the guests and vending machines for fast food and toiletries. What have they missed? Not much, but no room service and at Agartala no STD phone access to the room but that I am told is a temporary problem from the telecom supplier. An empty room at the entrance proclaims a sign “ATM Room” perhaps a money exchange for the international traveler and a promise of “Smart Basics” a trademarked offering from the Roots Corporation Ltd, the owners of the chain which is in turn a fully owned subsidiary of the listed company Indian Hotels limited (IHCL) which in turn is a part of the TATA Group in India. The booklet in the room proclaims that the concept was developed in association with C K Prahalad but there is no mention of the design minions who have done the fine detailing and translated the offering in the real world with sensitivity and good practical wisdom of an experienced designer. INCUBIS was and is still involved with all the new hotels in the chain and this ensures that each is contemporized to the changing market and the aspirations of the guests and this ahs given us a great but still invisible quality offering from the design in India stable and we hope to see more of these in the days ahead.

Image: A tree in Agartala on the way from the airport which I used as a title screen for a short movie that I had made in 2002 on the BCDI visit.
Can this be a lesson for the creation of new public facilities across the country? Be it public signage or toilets and affordable housing for the poor and facilities for the elderly in our fast moving cities there are a huge range of opportunities for action waiting to be realized as well designed and managed offerings. The National Policy discussions that will take place in Bangalore on the 11th December 2007 needs to garner the wisdom of the design community as Rashmi Korjan, another NID Graduate also from Product Design, has stated in her recent post on the DesignIndia list a few days ago. Yes, we do need to move the focus of the policy from being solely industry driven to get the Government to invest in design for the public facilities as well as design for society where few industries and business would like to tread, even if they have an active Corporate Social Responsibility programme in place. The KaosPilot, about which I have written about earlier has proposed the need for a “Fourth Sector” ..(download pdf file here) approach with the Government, Business and the Not-for-Profit (NGO) sectors forming the first three sectors that are not quite able to deal with the needs of society and the public in an effective manner today. Can we learn from their experiences and bring these lessons to the ground into India. By the way 35 KaosPilot students are planning to spend 3 months in Mumbai starting February 2007 and perhaps students from Indian design and management schools can collaborate with them in a mutually beneficial relationship. There are other ways in which we can act directly if we apply our collective imagination and track all the design opportunities out there and find the partners in the field to make it happen just like the GINGER story that has unfolded over the past three years with the use of Design at the heart of the offering. Yes, GINGER is a truly design driven offering from the house of the TATA’s. Great going, and keep going, and we are all watching and cheering from the ranks.

Design Concepts & Concerns Blog: An interactive platform for the DCC course at NID, India

Image: The Process of Design – The NID Way: As introduced in the Design Concepts & Concerns course

We have set up a new blog called "Design Concepts & Concerns" named after the course that I teach at NID, Ahmedabad over the past two decades now. This course was earlier called Design Methods and later Design Process but sometime in 1997-98 I changed the name to "Design Concepts & Concerns" (DCC as the students call it now) since I realised that designing is not just about techniques and about beating the competition with great market success, but that it is about human intentions that lead to thoughts and actions that create value – great value for all stakeholders – if the intentions are clear and these are followed by creative thoughts and committed actions. Setting goals has therefor become a part of this course and it is no longer about taking a client brief and getting on with the job, whatever the job may entail. There is an element of questioning and of taking positions and this makes the act and practice of design quite political and the design students would need to be equipped to assess the varied situations that they would face in the future, in most cases very difficult choices about an unknowable future, no matter how much experience the client or the designer may have had in the past.

As part of this course I have set up a multi author blog that includes several teachers who have been working with me as well as colleagues from near and far since they have volunteered to be accessible to students as well as contribute to the explorations taht would be part of each course as we move forward with it this semester at NID. Such an educational blog gives us the opportunity of maintaining a living document of the course as it unfolds each time and this is perhaps close to what Prof Bruce Archer had meant when he told us at NID that we would and should strive to maintain a contemporaneous documentation of design work if we are to build a body of knowledge about design which is otherwise very hard to come by. You may have noticed that designers are notorious for not publishing their insights and processes but most design journalism usually covers the outcomes of a design journey but rarely the process with all its warts and blemishes, which are many, and designers do not want to be seen as making mistakes since most administrators think that making mistakes is a sign of lack of expertise. However we now know that this is far from the truth, and IDEO, one the most successful design companies in recent times has as their slogan – “ to fail often to succeed sooner”, very insightful statement that is central to their design process.

This link to the "Design Concepts & Concerns" blog will take you there and show you the assignments and the details of the course as it unfolds this semester at NID. I am offering this course to many disciplines at NID this semester and the current course is at Gandhinagar campus for the Digital Design relaterd disciplines at the new campus that include New Media (NMD), Software and User Interface Design (SUID) and Information and Digital Design (IDD). This is a course of two weeks each and the next modules are offered at the Paldi campus (twice) and also at the Bangalore campus in October 2007 for the new discipline of Design for Retail Experience (DRE) that has started there from June this year.

This course has been documented, at least partly, at my website and two modules conducted in 2003 and 2004 can be seen at these links below. Each year we choose a theme for all the modules that are offered to the students and this year the theme is "The Design Opportunities for the Creative Economy in India" and in the course at Gandhinagar we are focussing on Digital Design Opportunities for design entrepreneurs in India across the 230 sectors of our economy.
Theme : Globalistaion and Impact on Indian economy – Link: Documentation of the course in 2004
Theme : Khadi as a way of life for India and the World – Link: Documentation of the course in 2003

I have published papers on this course as well as presented the work done by the students at a number of conferences. These papers and presentations can be downloaded from these links below:

Cactus Flowers Bloom in the Desert: National Design Summit 2001 Link: Paper 123 kb Link: Presentation part-1 (3.6 MB pdf) Link: Presentation part-2 (4.6 MB pdf)
The Avalanche Effect: on PhD-Design list in 2003 Link: Paper 55 kb pdf
Creating the Unknowable: EAD06 conference Bremen 2005 Link: Paper 50 kb pdf
EAD06 Bremen, Show. Link: Presentation 4.1 MB pdf

More about the ongoing course and its contemporaneous documentation at the link to the blog "Design Concepts & Concerns"

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

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

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

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

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

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


Model of the Emerging Designer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Model of the Emerging Designer.

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

Links and References for download:

KaosPilot Homepage
KaosPilot Website Contents

The fourth sector pdf file 222kb
The fourth sector

Other Publications from KaosPilot
Other Publications from KaosPilot

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

230 Sectors of Economy for Design Action in India

We have been giving an assignment to our students in the "Design Concepts and Concerns" course since 1999 at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad that requires them to brainstorm and build a model of the Indian economy from the point of view of design opportunities that are embedded therein. The very fact that they address these broad perspectives in their foundation programme we feel that it would influence their career choices as the go forward in their education at NID and in their professional lives. These sectors are a mixed bag of industry types and service sectors where design is being used in India and these fall under several ministries of the Government of India.

Our list is actually longer than 230 in number but the figure is not an absolute one, give or take a few. However when we had built models of the sectors in the classroom, one of the groups had a logic for the number “230” by virtue of their categorisation effort and this figure has stuck in all my references ever since. These are shown in the diagrams shown here in low resolution in order to appreciate how we did this exercise and arrived at the list of categories for Design action in the Indian economy. I had included this description in an invited paper that was prepared for the Design Issues Journal (the special issue on India that has been released last year) but unfortunately my paper was turned down for lack of space. My paper was titled "Avalanche Effect.." (October 2002) and it was based on my course at NID and I had immediately released it on the PhD-Design list and one can search for "Avalanche Effect" there.
or download the paper from my website here.


The illustrations shown above include the Sectors of the Economy models by our students and I think the logic was as follows: two kinds of outputs - Products and Services: multiplied by five types - hardware, software, infrastructure, organisation and policy, procedures and business models – all applied across 23 broad sectors or ministries gives us 230 classes of sectors that could use design for development. (matrix of 5 broad fields x 2 types x 23 sectors = 230)

(5 fields: Nature, Society, Work, Life & Play)
(2 types: Products & Services)
(23 sectors or ministries – agriculture, health, industry, mining, ……)
see post below


This image is a map of the sectors using a city as a metaphor and the streets represent the ministries and sectors while the title is a call for a Ministry of Design, how insightful.

I do intent to take this further and make a full paper (when time permits) with a projection of the kinds of institutions that we will need to build in order to service this enormous task in India (and elsewhere) in the years ahead. I have already been involved in the design and establishment of three “schools of design" that address different sectors of the economy and this way we can find funding from different ministries and industry groups to make this happen as we go forward. The IICD, Jaipur is a school for the crafts sector in India, the BCDI, Agartala is a school for the bamboo sector in India and the Accessory Design Department at NIFT, New Delhi – for which I was an advisor – is a school for the jewelry, lifestyle & clothing accessory sector in India, we need many more such design initiatives. We still need to find the core of design capabilities that need to be at the centre of all these plans. We have reports on these initiatives that were prepared over the past ten years or more and these can directly download from my personal website link here.

We would explore this further as we go forward and in my view design still needs to be understood in the context of all this complexity in that days ahead. As you will see, this is not a fully developed theory as yet but it is something that we can work with towards a better understanding of design and to see its impact at the macro-economic level. I have placed a new model using my Hyderabad keynote to the HCI-USID 2007 conference last month on my post below and one can download this model of design opportunities and the brief list of design disciplines, design sensibilities and design knowledge which need to be part of any new school of design in the years ahead. I believe that besides designers we will need to open the field to managers and other specialists to use the discipline of design and this will be the general challenge in the days ahead. Bruce Nussbaum talks about the need to get CEO’s to adopt design thinking as a way of life in his recent blog post on BusinessWeek Online which is very heartening to hear from a management perspective. He is echoing the views of people like Roger Martin of Rotmans in Toronto and Uffe Ulbaek of the Kaos Pilot, Denmark as well as other thinkers such as G K Van Patter of NextD, New York who is advocating the shift to Design 2.0, a new collaborative space that addresses complex problems rather than specialization bound frames of thought and work.

I am currently interacting with a team of international experts on developing this list further and Dr. Ken Friedman, Denmark, Dr. Terence Love, Lancaster, UK, and Filippo A. Salustri, Toronto, Canada are cooperating online through the PhD-Design list as a team who are trying to take this forward as a well developed framework over the next few months of online collaboration. We will share the outcomes in public as soon as we are ready with our conceptual structure.

See also ...What is Design?

Fields of Design and Opportunities for India

Design opportunities need to be mapped across all 230 sectors of our economy and in a recent lecture at Hyderabad (see below) I had used a five fold opportunity matrix to set out one possible view of this indicative set. These included, at the macro level five terms that helped capture the field of possibilities in an easily comprehendible model that went from the marco to the micro levels of human activities on the planet and this would be useful for India at the policy level as well.

1. Nature: which would include opportunities dealing with earth, space & environment,
2. Society: opportunities dealing with culture, community, education and communication
3. Work: opportunities dealing with occupations, productivity and employment
4. Life: design activities leading to innovations in food production and processing, health and fitness
5. Play: those dealing with leisure, entertainment, media, sports and games


Model: Fields of Design and Opportunities for India

These design opportunities would need the designer to be empowered with knowledge sets from across a variety of fields as well as imbued with capabilities and sensibilities that can be used at the various stages of the design process, from goal setting and opportunity seeking, exploration and concept formation, scenario building and evaluation, business models and prototyping followed by detailed development, engineering and market delivery, all of which are critical and important if the innovation is to succeed in the particular context that it is to be developed in, particularly for India. These design sensibilities can be transmitted through good education models that can be adopted to reach across many disciplines and fields of expertise and these could be offered in multi-disciplinary frames at the university level as well at the school level so that design thinking and action become a natural capability of our society and not just be left in the hands of specialised designers who are today being trained in several selected specialisations within design schools. This would be a valuable way forward to build a creative society which can support a future economy that competes on innovation and knowledge applied in new and interesting ways that are both sustainable and exciting to generate great value in the near future.

Note: Model was created with Cmap tools developed by IHMC - A University Affiliated Research Institute, USA. More information about Cmap tools can be found from this link

Find out more....: What are Design Opportunities?