What is Design? : A lecture for school teachers

What is Design? : A lecture for school teachers

Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to download the Podcast with images

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

Design inside Education: Let us start early, for our schools in India

Image: School children visiting NID seen at the Gautam-Gira Square holding hands around the Big Tree at my suggestion.

Design inside Education: Let us start early, in all our schools in India
Yesterday we had a group of very young visitors, all from one school in Ahmedabad, The St Mary’s School, one of the better known schools of Ahmedabad. I saw all the students walking in single file, hands tucked firmly at the back lest they got into some kind of trouble, and being proper young school kids, while taking a tour of the National Institute of Design at our Paldi campus. I met them near my office and was struck by the strict discipline and wondered about the state of education in India. What would it be like to put design inside this education?

I recalled a lecture that I had delivered a few years ago at the conference titled Indian Crafts: The Future in a Globalising World, held at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India on 25th and 26th November 2005. The paper was based on the one I had penned for publication in the much delayed Volume Two of the Handmade in India. Volume One is printed and lying in a godown at the Office of the Development Commissioner of Handicrafts for the past 8 months, but that is another story. My paper was titled “Craftsmanship in Education: Towards a Creative India in the Knowledge Economy“ (161 kb word file) the full text version can be downloaded from this link here.

The issues that I had raised are captured in the three tables that I had presented at the conference and these represent my analysis of the education situation in India and we see that the Planning Commission and the Ministry of Education are bending over backwards to spread this kind of education to all our rural areas which have so far been spared the deleterious effects of such a formal education in our country. However the long arms of the planned education system are reaching out and they promise to snuff out the traditional systems of learning that has existed in our countryside for many centuries of active involvement of children and adolescents in the crafts and agricultural trades, now called child labour, and therefore looked down upon.

Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

The NCERT ( The National Centre for Education Research and Training, New Delhi) has recently set up a National level committee to look at the introduction of Crafts as a subject of study in the school curriculum and the work has been progressing towards the implementation of their suggestions in the coming years in schools across India. When will design attract such attention and be brought into the school curriculum? We have the National Design Policy in place since the beginning of 2007 but there is no mention of school education in that agenda and that situation needs to change quickly. I wonder, when and how.

Image: Slide from the IDSA lecture on education the Design Way.

In my lecture at the IDSA 2006 in Austin, Texas I had stressed on the need to review education in the light of new findings about human motor skills and their association with learning as captured by the Homunculus as offered to us by Dr Wilder Penfield in the image above. We do need to find the Design Way and bring it into school education, sooner the better. The text summary paper (42 kb word file) and visual presentation (pdf 812 kb) titled “Giving Design back to the People: Towards a Post-mining Economy,”can be downloaded from here.

Image: Models created by a student group looking at the theme of Design inside Education in the DCC course.

While keeping these needs in mind, last year I had assigned the theme of “Putting Design Inside Education” as part of our Design Concepts and Concerns course for the Foundation students and for the Post Graduate students we had the theme of “Creative Industries of the Future”, both of which impinged upon sustained changes in the school level curriculum to include design learning and action at the very core of the educational processes in our schools across India. We need to make that happen, sooner than later, if we are to create leadership in a globalised economy and I do hope we are able to move towards a more design and innovation informed educational system across India, particularly for our rural children who I believe will be hugely disadvantaged by the current form of education if it is taken to the villages without some thought and revisions.

Rockytoys Again: Teaching Aids and Educational Resources

Rockytoys Again: Teaching Aids and Educational Resources
Image 01: Big Wheeler Jeep that was an instant success with both schools and homes.
After the instant success of the Big Wheeler series I got to look at the full range of educational toys that addressed the school market in South India. March and April were the period for the annual pilgrimage that school teachers from a great number of schools came to our retail shop as well as our factory to select items for their annual procurement programme. Some came with big budgets and in their school bus and after an afternoon of selection and billing took back the items that were in ready stock on their bus and thereby saved on packing transportation costs. Others came with long wish lists and placed orders that would be passed on to the factory for implementation. March to May of 1975 was as exciting as it comes since we had so many new items and a whole fresh new colour scheme that surprised the teachers who were veterans when it came to visiting our shop, since the quality had improved substantially and so had the prices, but they did not seem to mind at all. One lesson from this experience is that customers know when they are getting a good deal and they then do not mind paying a premium for quality.

Image 02: Educational items, Child’s Furniture and Classroom accessories.
In anticipation of the deluge of visitors from the schools we had already geared up our production with a special focus on the needs of the sector and the stocks in our shop and godown at the back were substantial. The range of products that had a new look included the rocking horses and the school furniture range for the primary school level. I had simplified the form and structure of the child’s chair and table as part of one large order from a local school in Madras. The first batch of 100 sets were made in the existing design while I had a grandstand view while observing the various stages of production which lasted all of one month. When the next school order for 400 sets came in soon thereafter I decided to redesign the table and chair by rationalizing the members and in simplifying the shape of the components so that these could be made easily using the machines and in the process I eliminated the complex shaping of the chair which used to be done by making the back legs by cutting these to shape on a jig-saw cutter. The shape of the seat was further changed from a trapezoidal one to a square with rounded corners and these two design decisions saved a huge amount in labour and the order was completed in record time while providing a better finish and structural quality. These new design offerings had the same effect as the changes effected in the wheeled toy range. There was a dramatic improvement in quality as well as a very strong growth in price perception although there were very good savings in the cost of labour and production. These new tables and chairs were in continuous production for many years till our factory was finally closed down in the mid 90’s.

Image 03: Modular Building Blocks offered in various market modules
Another product for the school market got a boost just by rationalizing the marketing module and by offering an existing product in smaller sized packaging, something that the MNC’s are trying to do to reach the “Bottom of the Pyramid” market in India particularly in the cosmetics and FMCG products. The product in question here was a great set of building blocks that was primarily intended for the school market and it was offered in a huge set of several hundred pieces containing many modular sized painted blocks, all packed into a big strong play box made of wood. This was also offered in an unpainted version but few schools showed interest in these although in my view these were superior in finish and quality. When I studied the sales data for these building block sets I found that an average of six to ten sets were sold each year to the school market since the whole set was quite expensive and would represent a large part of any schools annual budget. I designed a built a range of boxes that could hold a limited number of blocks and I selected these blocks based on the possibilities that each set offered a child to make meaningful structural configurations. For instance even the smallest set had two diagonally cut squares which could be used to make the sloping roofs and one arch shaped block so that the child’s imagination could convert these into semantic structures that would bring in the fantasy that play with these blocks entailed. Besides providing the child with manual dexterity while arranging and balancing the blocks one on top of the other it also supported imaginative play with flexibility and helped creative exploration just as the Lego blocks now provide our kids at home. However these large sized blocks could be used to build child scale houses in team play and this was an advantage that the school teachers saw and cherished. My new offering in small sets suddenly made the blocks attractive and affordable for the home market as well and by the end of the year an equivalent of a hundred large sets was sold to both the school and the home market, once again showing that design works at many levels, if only we tried.

Image 04: Educational kits and Classroom accessories for schools.
During this period I started participating in conferences and meetings organized by the toy industry as well as by voluntary groups of educators and industry members and this was a great source of learning and exposure about the changing ideas in education at the primary and pre-school levels. I met some very interesting people who were committed to the idea of education and the role that teaching aids played in this process. This exposure also led me to innovate my own offerings and many new items were introduced in our own list of offerings that drew on the learning from these interactions in the field.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Design inside education: A strategy for India

Yesterday I was invited to speak to a group of school teachers at the Riverside School in Ahmedabad about the need for placing design inside education if we are to bring change and effectiveness to the way our children are groomed to face personal and professional challenges as they pass through the education processes in the days ahead. Riverside School
The pdf file of my presentation to the teachers can be downloaded from my website link here.

Riverside School is setting new standards for primary and secondary education in the city and it is being noticed for the change that their efforts and style of functioning is bringing to the behavior and confidence of their very young students. They seem to be doing something right. Founded in Ahmedabad by Kiran Bir Sethi – an NID design graduate – a graphic designer turned educationist, it is now showing clear demonstration of the results that can come from using design principles and sensibilities at all levels of the school’s functioning. The infrastructure, the curriculum, the style of teaching and the content and delivery are all child friendly and not parent or government dictated as most other schools in our region tend to be. Being a designer herself and an educator by experience and choice, she has been able to create a unique framework of relationships and models of action that are a test-bed for a innovative new school experience for both child and parent as well as for the teachers who choose to work with Riverside, and now more schools from far and near want to learn the methods and have signed up for teacher training and curriculum sharing arrangements and the influence is growing rapidly. Kiran has now launched a campaign to make Ahmedabad a child friendly city by a design strategy called “Aproch” which can be seen at this site below. The Riverside School with design inside now promises to make the city child friendly – and next the country? APROCH

So what is this “Design” that Kiran and her team are managing to put inside education at Riverside and is this something that can be extended to more levels of education across India. Last year I asked this question along with my teaching colleagues at NID when we set the theme of the “Design Concepts and Concerns” (DCC) course for the Foundation programme students at NID. The course that is now called DCC was previously labeled Design Process (DP), Design Methods or Design Methodology (DM) in the past having been borrowed from international traditions of Bauhaus and Hfg Ulm as well as the RCA driven movement in the UK in the 60’s but I changed the name after teaching it for many years when we realised at NID that design was not just about concepts and skills and techniques but it was also about feeling and values which were at the heart of all the thought and action, irrespective of the discipline and the field of enquiry. In this DCC2007 we chose the theme of “Design inside Education” and assigned five batches of students areas of focus that included “Pre-school education in India”, “Primary education in India in the Rural and Urban sectors” respectively and the other two groups looked at issues and perspectives that would influence the “Education of youth in India”, all based on their own fairly recent immersion in the Indian school system from their personal journey through it.

Students were taken through a series of assignments that I have outlined in my paper titled “The Avalanche Effect”, which can be downloaded from my website and these assignments took them through the DCC course from articulating and visualizing their personal experiences, their collective experiences by brainstorming, followed by model building to understand the structure and content of the educational system as it applied to each of the focus areas that were assigned to each of the five groups. The first assignment had them sharing with us their school experiences which revealed both the pleasures and the traumas of school systems in India as scenario visualizations, some elevating and others shocking by the expressions that were shared in the class. During the class we all made a trip to Riverside last year and our design foundation students were both surprised and excited by the fluency with which the little kids from Riverside took them through the school and explained its working methods and teaching content and style, all with a great deal of confidence and pride.


Model showing: Issues of Pre-Primary Education

The DCC class of 2007 that set about exploring, researching and imagining alternate scenarios that could help them build models and identify design opportunities across each of the school educations sectors that had been assigned. The models suggested deep understanding and empathy and these led to each group exploring numerous design scenarios that could transform the education sectors in India by addressing imaginative and innovative alternatives for infrastructure, products, procedures, services and communications opportunities in each of their groups assigned projects.


Model using a tree metaphor: Issues of Rural Primary Education

This five week assignment was for the student a journey through the design landscape from the macro and the micro perspectives which is in keeping with our design philosophy of macro-micro design action from policy to the very minute details, all of which have to be in perfect fit and balance if the design is to be truly successful as a whole and not to be seen as fragmented parts.


Model using "Nataraja" and Creeper metaphor: Issues of Youth Education and Renewal of existing systems

Education is just one of the 230 sectors in which design can be used at the macro-micro levels of action and I do hope that we see it being used more in India in then days ahead. Other themes in the past for this DCC course have been macro issues such as “Impact of Globalisation” (2004), “Khadi as an Ideology for Design” (2003), Retail as an Emegring Experience (2001), pictures of which can be seen at my website from this link below. Others which are not yet on the site include “Creative Industries of the Future” (2004), “Six Design Institutes for Six Regions of India” (2005), “Response to the National Design Policy for India” (2006), “Design inside Education for India” (2007) – each year we took a new theme and this went back many years, but are still to be documented, hopefully soon on this blog. For instance “Home Office and New Services” was the topic for the 1996 batch of foundation students which was particularly memorable, but others will also be reflected upon and discussed in the days ahead.

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