Web of Connections: Indian Design education with influences from the HfG Ulm

Web of Connections: Indian Design education with influences from the HfG Ulm

M P Ranjan

Professor– Design Chair, CEPT University, Ahmedabad

I was invited to write a reflective piece on the connections between the design pedagogy of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and that of the HfG Ulm to be included in a proposed issue of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s magazine issue that would look back at the impact of the Bauhaus and Hfg Ulm on the Tropical nations of the world long after both these German schools were shut down for different reasons. I have been researching their connections with India for many years and this invitation gave me an opportunity to continue my research a bit deeper into the connections between the schools. I interviewed four former NID faculty who had studied and worked closely with faculty from HfG Ulm in the early 60’s when the NID was being founded at Ahmedabad and used this to build my paper. Interesting new facts were revealed in these interviews and we will need to do more before we have a deeper understanding of the real influences and how these have shaped the foundation of design education in India.

My paper was not carried in the Bauhaus 5 – Tropics issue released in June 2013 but on pages 76 to 79 they carried a brief interview with me about a set of questions that their editors had set for me to respond. However, they have also provided a link to my blog “Design for India” www.designforindia.comand their own website at www.bauhaus-online.de  for extracts from my paper that is reproduced below in full text.

Image: Paramanand Dalwadi, H Kumar Vyas, Gajanan Upadhayay and Jayanti Panchal — all former Faculty of NID who had close connections with HfG Ulm in the 60’s and later.

Web of Connections: Indian Design education with influences from the HfG Ulm

M P Ranjan

Professor – Design Chair, CEPT University, Ahmedabad

Paper prepared at the invitation of the Bauhaus Dessau foundation for inclusion in "Bauhaus 5 ‑—Tropics" magazine. in June 2013

Prelude

In his 1999 article titled – The “Ulm Model” in the Periphery – Gui Bonsiepe discussed the various manifestations of the “Ulm Model” especially its reach and establishment In India in the process of bringing design education to India. He states – “HfG influences had a part in the founding of the National Institute of Design (NID) at Ahmedabad in India, where HfG faculty members gave guest courses (Hans Gugelot, Herbert Lindinger, Wolfgang Siol, Christian Staub and others). These institutions based themselves in policy, design, curriculum and teaching methods (problem based learning in design courses), on the experience of the HfG. This experience was brought to them through contacts with HfG faculty members, through Ulm alumni who came there to teach, and also through the publications of the HfG, especially the magazine Ulm.” This statement from “Ulm Design” (1999) provided the setting for me to research deeper the connections between HfG Ulm and NID in the early years as well as in contemporary times particularly in the context of the invitation from the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation who are setting up a retrospective of the exhibition that had been shown in Calcutta in 1922 that included works of the Bauhaus of which very little is known here in India in the context of the arrival of modern design and its taking roots here in India. Little is also known about the various connections between the HfG Ulm and NID and I used this occasion to try and correct these lacunae.

Image: HfG Ulm Faculty (from top left clockwise) — 1. Visiting faculty at HfG Ulm and at NID - Charles Eames. 2. Hans Gugelot with architecture students at NID in 1965, 3. Horst Rittel author of "wicked problems" and 4. Tomas Maldonado author of "Design, Nature, Revolution".

I had detailed interviews and video recorded four former NID faculty who had substantial contact with Ulm and Ulm faculty in the 60’s and 70’s and these interviews as well as other resources and information available with me I proceeded to build the final article. I interviewed Kumar Vyas who started the Product Design Programme at NID in 1966 after spending 11 months at Ulm in Gugelot's office in 1965-66, Paramanand Dalwadi who set up the NID Photography Department was a student of Christian Staub at NID in 1963-66 and Wolfgang Siol at Ulm in 1970. Gajanan Upadhayay started the Furniture Design activity at NID and worked with Hans Gugelot during his brief visit in 1965 and finally Jayanti A Panchal who also worked with Hans Gugelot in 1965 on the tangential fan project at NID and later went to Gugelot office in 1970-71 as a product-engineering designer. All of them had intense interactions with Prof Hans Gugelot when he visited NID in 1965. As we know Hans Gugelot passed away in 1965 some time after his return from India but not before he had set up the faculty training exposure programme for Kumar Vyas to undertake at Ulm over 11 months in 1965-66. I also got in touch by phone with Prof Sudha Nadkarni in Mumbai and reviewed his papers for the Ulmer Model Exhibitions in 2010 at Ahmedabad and Bangalore. Sudha Nadkarni studied at HfG Ulm from 1962 to 1966 and came back to India to work at NID 1966 to 1969 and then went on to set up the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay in 1970. Kirit Patel of CEPT University had apprenticed in Frei Otto's studio in the 80's and this interview too provided insights about the approach to design that was followed by one of the prominent guest faculty at HfG Ulm.

Herbert Lindinger in his forward to the book “Ulm Design” tells us that the HfG Ulm had been through six phases of development and before the NID teams interacted with them they had already developed a critical approach to design education and design theory that was well documented and disseminated by the Ulm magazine 1 to 21 from 1955 to 1968. He states – “The third phase, 1956-58, was dominated by the teaching of Otl Aicher, Maldonado, Gugelot and Vordemberge-Gildewart. These instructors tried to build a new and markedly closer relationship between design, science and technology. This was the first manifestation of the Ulmer Modell, the Ulm model, which has lost none of its relevance. The HfG evolved a model of training that aimed to give designers a new, and rather more modest and cautious, understanding of their own role. As design was now to concern itself with more complex things than chairs and lamps, the designer could no longer regard himself, within the industrial and aesthetic process in which he operated, as an artist, a superior being. He must now aim to work as part of a team, involving scientists, research departments, sales people, and technicians, in order to realize his own vision of a socially responsible shaping – Gestaltung – of the environment. Under Maldonado, a new Basic Course came into being, which broke away more and more clearly from Bauhaus concepts and absorbed the lessons of perceptual theory and semiotics.”

The National Institute of Design (NID)

It was this Basic Course that Kumar Vyas understood deeply at Ulm and introduced to the new batch of Product Design students when the Postgraduate course was offered to graduate engineers in 1967. The NID documentation from 1964-69 shows examples of the Basic Design assignments as well as the early projects and the methods used in these projects that echo the Ulm paradigm as well as the muted shades of grey and colours that were a hallmark of the HfG Ulm way. According to him, while the spirit of Ulm may have directed the assignments a lot of innovations were brought into the teaching to meet local needs and challenges. I joined NID as a student in the postgraduate programme in Furniture Design in 1969 and Kumar Vyas, Sudha Nadkarni and Rolf Misol conducted the interview. While the Furniture Design projects that started from day one were formulated by Misol and his teacher and chief consultant, Arno Votler, the Basic Design assignments conducted by Kumar Vyas were the same as those done by the Product Design students. The evening discussions that we had with the Product Design students and those from Graphics and Textiles did show different threads of pedagogy that were being explored at NID by the various departments and each was informed by the specific positions of the selected consultants and visiting faculty who were involved in these programmes. While Product Design was based on Ulm the Graphic Design programme was modeled after the Swiss school at Basel and the Textile Design programme came from Cranbrook and the Scandinavian traditions of weaving. Furniture Design and Ceramic Design had German consultants to set the curriculum and to conduct the early programmes. Arno Vottler and Hans Theo Baumann developed the Furniture Design and Ceramic Design programmes respectively.

Image. H K Vyas conducting class at NID in 1967 and Exhibition at NID of basic design work done in the first Product Design programme in 1969 and GIRNAR scooter designed by H K Vyas and Sudha Nadkarni with J A Panchal in 1969.

NID too had a large number of visiting consultants and guest faculty members in the formative years and many were involved in project work where students actively participated. The first of a string of major exhibition and multidisciplinary projects was the designing of the Nehru Exhibition and in 1964 the entire team of faculty and students in the Graphic Design and Architecture programmes were involved with the team from Eames Office and this helped set up a very vibrant work culture at the new Institute located in a building that was designed by Le Corbusier where NID had access to the loft spaces which had been suitably modified to start the school of design and host its activities till the new building was made ready across the street at Paldi in Ahmedabad. Gautam and Gira Sarabhai with their vast network of contacts in the art and design community worldwide were able to attract the best talent available to Ahmedabad and with the generous grants from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations the talent pool, that they assembled reads like a who’s who of world design and the students and faculty were exposed to these ideas and work methods. This procession of international talent continued well into the late 80’s with the support of the development grants from the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). The first UNIDO- ICSID conference on Design for Development was held at NID Paldi campus and at IDC in Mumbai in 1979 and amongst the speakers were Victor Papanek and Gui Bonsiepe along with designers from Europe, Asia and Latin America. I mention this here since NID had been evolving internally as well towards development oriented design action and there was much discussion at the Institute on what would be an appropriate of design action for a country like India and these debates continued to impact the education programmes at the Institute over the years.

Hans Gugelot and Product Deign

For the formulation of the Product Design programme Kumar Vyas was asked by Gautam and Gira Sarabhai to stop by at HfG Ulm in early 1965 on his way back from the opening ceremony of the Eames designed Nehru Exhibition that opened in New York. This halt at the HfG Ulm turned out to be quite significant for the NID’s Product Design programme. Kumar Vyas met Hans Gugelot there and it was agreed that Gugelot would travel to India and help in the formulation of the new programme for the NID. Gugelot traveled to India in the summer of that year and spent a little over two weeks working with NID designers and craftsmen to develop the new pedestal model of the tangential fan with Kumar Vyas and Jayanti A Panchal and with Gajanan Upadhayay a range of furniture using wooden strips in a T section arrangement and canvas and plywood strips inserts for stiffness. The model making for the tangential fan was made by the legendary Haribhai, a Guajarati craftsman and carpenter of fine skills and an amazing ability to make models in a wide range of materials, plastics, metals and woods. The wooden furniture system was detailed and developed by Gajanan Upadhayay and he made the full set of scale models as well as the prototypes himself. Gugelot returned to Ulm but passed away before Kumar Vyas could commence his planned training programme at his office in Ulm. Kumar Vyas did however travel to Ulm and work under the guidance of Herbert Lindinger at HfG Ulm and Horst Diener at the Gugelot office where he spent the next ten months understanding the Ulm approach to design education and practice. He also met and befriended Sudha Nadkarni at HfG Ulm and this set the stage for the next level of partnership since Nadkarni joined NID as a faculty and designer and worked there from 1966 to 1969 before moving to Bombay to set up the IDC as part of IIT Bombay. Jayanti A Panchal traveled to Ulm in 1974 to work in Gugelot’s office under E Reichl and Horst Diener and during this period worked on many ongoing projects of the office as a design engineer.

Christian Staub and Wolfgang Siol – Photography at NID

Photography Department at NID was set up by Christian Staub who lived in Ahmedabad for three years and trained the early students at NID including Paramanand Dalwadi who became the main photography faculty at NID after his period of training at NID under the mentorship of Christian Staub. Dalwadi recalls that period with warmth and deep respect for his classical perfection in his work. Staub introduced Dalwadi to the finer aspects of photography, camera work as well as lab and darkroom techniques and in his own words gave him confidence to teach the subject as well as carry out complex professional tasks in studio and architectural photography using various formats that were available at NID. The assignments were all refined at HfG Ulm these formed the basis of teaching at NID as well. In 1969-70, Dalwadi was deputed for training at Ulm under Wolfgang Siol for four months and there he had complete access to the equipment in the studio although he arrived as an apprentice from India. This gave Dalwadi insights into the Ulm classic techniques of “isometric photography” that was achieved by perspective correction and appropriate camera position in relation to the subject, unwritten rules of composition learned by practice and attention to detail. He had another occasion in 1974 to return to Siol’s studio and spend one month there to be immersed in the studio practice as a refresher dose. Dalwadi had joined NID as a student in 1963 and he started teaching at NID and built his own reputation as one of India’s leading photographer and teacher.

Guest Teachers at HfG Ulm and at NID

Herbert Lindinger tells us – “The HfG was planned as a place for experiment, an institution open to new hypotheses, theories, and development, in itself the enormous preponderance of guest instructors (around 200) as opposed to permanent faculty members (20) led to a sustained dynamic, a constant state of mental unrest. The list of those guest instructors, then still young and largely unknown, now looks like a Who’s Who of science, literature and art.” Lindinger visited NID in 1970 to review the new curriculum for the undergraduate programme that was started then.

Klaus Krippendorff whom I met at the IDSA conference in 2006 writes about his experiences at Ulm where the visiting lecturers and faculty included Charles and Ray Eames (1955 and 1958), Buckminister Fuller, Bruce Archer and Horst Rittel, his favorite teachers. Krippendorff’s paper of 2008 states – “The school seemed to look for students who connected intellectual, cultural, political and technological conceptions and willing to act.” He also has a comment on the politics of the HfG Ulm and he states – “Perhaps the lack of appreciation of the virtues of higher education by the design faculty explains at least part of its shortsighted politics.” This seems to be true of NID as well as other design schools in India where a lack of scholarship and publication is sometimes seen as a virtue.

In later years both NID and IDC managed to obtain UNDP funding and faculty from both schools revisited contacts from HfG Ulm as pert of their training programmes and guest faculty from HfG Ulm also came to India as UNDP consultants to bring a renewed level of exchange between these organisations. Detailing these will need additional research that I hope will be done in the near future by Indian as well as German scholars. These experts include Kohei Suguira from Tokyo, Herbert Ohl, Herbert Lindinger, and Gui Bonsiepe. I also had a conversation with my colleague, Kirit Patel at CEPT University to explore his contacts with Frei Otto and his team at IL, Stuttgart. Frei Otto was an active guest faculty

The Ulm Journals at NID Library

Tomas Maldonado and Gui Bonsiepe provided intellectual leadership to several generations of Indian students as well as faculty at both NID as well as IDC through their sustained efforts to publish the HfG Ulm Journals and books in later years that were followed with awe and respect. NID Library had a bound volume of these and many of the assignments documented here were also followed explicitly at NID as well as at IDC over the years. For instance in Ulm Journal 10-11, Maldonado and Bonsiepe argue for a unique position for design and design thinking in a world dominated by science. This is a position that we are still to resolve and in my view an important debate that will continue to attract research attention for years to come. I met Bonsiepe on his several visits to India and also Maldonado when I made a visit to Milan in 2010 and I interviewed him on a number of research questions that I had in mind that stemmed from his perceptive writings.

Image. Look Back Look Forward workshops were conducted at Bangalore and Kolkatta in 2010 to accompany the traveling exhibition of the HfG Ulm work and design pedagogy. These workshops looked at the impact of HfG Ulm on design pedagogy in India and at basic design education in particular. Prof M P Ranjan (sitting on the Ulmer Stool) chaired the two conferences along with Suchitra Balasubramanian, Prof Sudha Nadkarni and Prof Kumar Vyas (seen above) were keynote speakers at the Bangalore event while Prof Kirti Trivedi delivered the keynote at Kolkatta.

In 1994 Kirti Trivedi of IDC approached me at NID to obtain Xerox copies of Ulm Journals in the NID Library. He used these as a backdrop for the conference at IDC, “Ulm and After” and selected papers were reproduced in a book for the benefit of Indian teachers for the first time. In 2010, NID in collaboration with the Ulm Archives and the Max Muller Bhavan hosted the traveling exhibit at Ahmedabad and later at Bangalore and Kolkatta. I organized the conferences titled Look Back Look Forward: HfG Ulm and Design Education in India at Bangalore and another on Basic Design at Kolkatta and we released a digital set of the Ulm Journals for Indian academics for the first time and since then these have been available for a wider audience. The impact of these Ulm Journals on design education is still unfolding and they will be in active use for many years to come I am sure.

Further Research Questions

Science and Design article raises many research questions about the nature of design and science that are still active in our debates on various online discussion lists to this day. HfG Ulm had raised these in their corridors and these questions still reverberate in our minds. The HfG Ulm is a rare case of design thought and action that was both intense and comprehensive and the various threads that started there may need to be followed up by current day researchers to build a body of scholarship that will help put design at a new level of acceptance in India and elsewhere. One wonders what discussion Eames had the HfG in 1955 and 1958 and what impact if any it had on the Eames Report of 1958.

I also wonder what roles Guest Faculty could play in Design schools of the future, particularly in the transmission of knowledge and cross fertilization of ideology and techniques that seems to get lost in the implementation of narrow curriculum that is being attempted here in India in an effort to expand the reach of design education without adequate research. I believe that the seeds of these questions and their answers lie in the archives and memories of Ulmers, NIDians, IDCians and others and this need to be researched urgently. I traveled to Ulm in 2005 at the invitation of Rene Spitz to be part of the round table organized there. I followed this with another visit in 2008 when I had a memorable experience of staying at the HfG Ulm campus in a faculty studio thanks to the hospitality of Nick Roerich and the Ulm Archives and I hope more researchers will explore this rich space to appreciate design and shape the education of the designer of the future. The Max Bill building of 1953 is still in pristine condition and the Ulm Archives has now moved back to the campus and this bodes well for future research on the people and activities at HfG Ulm that has had such a huge impact on the world of design education.

References

01. Charles and Ray Eames, The India Report, Government of India, New Delhi, 1958, reprint, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, 1958, 1997

02. Thomas Maldonado, Gui Bonsiepe, Renate Kietzmann et al., eds, “Ulm (1 to 21): Journal of the Hoschule fur Gestaltung”, Hoschule fur Gestaltung, Ulm, 1958 to 1968

03. Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimer, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1969

04. Tomas Maldonado, Design, Nature, and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology, Harper & Row, New York, 1972

05. Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World, Thames & Hudson Ltd., London, 1972

06. Stafford Beer, Platform for Change, John Wiley & Sons, London, 1975

07. Frei Otto, IL20 TASKS, Institute for Lightweight Structures, Stutgart, 1975

08. R Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, St. Martin's Griffin; 2nd edition, New York, 1982

09. Gui Bonsiepe, Estrutura e Estetica do Produto, Centro de Aperfeicoamento de Docentes de Desenho Industrial, Brasilia, 1986

10. Herbert Lindinger, Hoschule fur Gestaltung - Ulm, Die Moral der Gegenstande, Berlin, 1987

11. Kirti Trivedi ed., Readings from Ulm, Industrial Design Centre, Bombay, 1989

12. Otl Aicher, the world as design, Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, 1991

13. Otl Aicher, Analogous and Digital, Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, 1994

14. Gui Bonsiepe, Interface: An approach to Design, Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, 1999

15. Herbert Lindinger, Eds., Ulm Design: The Morality of Objects, Hoschule fur Gestaltung – 1953 – 1968, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999.

16. Rene Spitz, HfG Ulm: The View Behind the Foreground  – The Political History of the Ulm School of Design –1953-1968, Edition Axel Menges, Stuttgart/London, 2002

17. Martin Krampen & Gunther Hormann, The Ulm School of Design – Beginnings of a Project of Unyielding Modernity, Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, 2003

18. Klaus Krippendorff, The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design, Taylor & Francis CRC, New York, 2006

19. M P Ranjan, Lessons from Bauhaus, Ulm and NID: Role of Basic Design in PG Education, in proceedings of DETM Conference, NID, Ahmedabad, 2006

20. M P Ranjan. Design for India blog, http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.in/. Ahmedabad, (2007 – 2013)

21. Klaus Krippendorff, Designing in Ulm and Off Ulm, University of Pennsylvania, 2008

About the Author

M P Ranjan

Professor – Design Chair, CEPT University

Design Thinker & Author of blog Design for India

Ahmedabad

Prof M P Ranjan is a design thinker with 40 years of experience in design education and practice in association with the National Institute of Design. He helped visualize and set up two new design schools in India, one for the crafts sector, the IICD Jaipur and the other for the bamboo sector, the BCDI Agartala. His book Handmade in India is a comprehensive resource on the hand crafts sector of India and was created as a platform for the building of a vibrant creative economy based on the crafts skills and resources identified therein.

His book on bamboo opened up new frontiers for design exploration in India. He has explored bamboo as a designer material for social transformation. Bamboo has been positioned as a sustainable material of the future through his work spread over three decades. His work in design education covered many subjects including Design Thinking, Data Visualisation, Interaction Design and Systems Design

His blog “Designfor India” has become a major platform for Indian design discourse. http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com

He is on the Governing Council of the IICD, Jaipur and advises other design schools in India and abroad. He lives and works from Ahmedabad in India. He has been acknowledged by peers as one of the international thought leaders in Design Thinking today

~

Gajanan Upadhayay: A new monograph and exhibition of furniture designs

Gajanan Upadhayay: Documentation and Peer Critique

Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

The creative professionals of Ahmedabad have bestowed an honor on the former NID Faculty member and designer Gajanan Upadhayay through a week long exhibition that opened at the Herwitz Gallery on 19th June 2009. The exhibit curated by the HPC Design & Project Management Pvt. Ltd headed by architect Bimal Patel and the TDW Furniture Pvt. Ltd. Headed by Ismet Khambatta and is accompanied by a Monograph titled “Gajanan Upadhyaya: Furniture Designer” which was released by NID Director Pradyumna Vyas at a simple function in front of a very distinguished audience of architects, designers, teachers and students of the Ahmedabad’s creative fraternity.

Image01: Inaugural session at the Herwitz Gallery with the monograph launch by Pradyumna Vyas and the brief lecture by Prof M P Ranjan about Gajanan Upadhayay and his design achievements.

The distinguished audience included architects B V Doshi and Hasmukh Patel, Bimal Patel and Ismet Khambatta and a number of designers and faculty from NID, CEPT and students from these schools.
I was requested to speak at the function to introduce the creator and to provide a backdrop that could place the furniture creations in their proper context, a real tall order, when we look at the prolific contributions of Gajanan Upadhayay over a career that spans five decades and his professional experience coincides with the history of design in India and that of NID. I took a few minutes to ponder the question in the morning before the talk and jotted down a few key thoughts that could guide my comments about my colleague of more than 40 years at NID. Yes, we do go a long way together, in the same department and teaching some courses together and working on many joint projects, but still keeping our own separate identities and in some cases, points of view that differed in many ways. Whichever way I look at GU, as we have fondly called him, both his students and faculty deeply respect him for his work and it was no easy task to summarise a lifetime of work that stands tall in my view comparable with the worlds best in the field of furniture design. This small documentation of GU’s work is I believe the first in a long series of future publications that will unravel the mysteries of the man and his work that is as yet unknown to design circles outside a small band students, faculty and associates at NID and other associated designers and friends from Ahmedabad and other parts of India.

Image02: Inside the Herwitz Gallery a view of furniture designed by Gajanan Upadhayay over his career spanning from the early 60’s till date.

I divided GU’s career into four distinct stages. His first stint at NID as a young designer and architect trainee in 1962 to 1965 when he interacted with Gira and Gautam Sarabhai being introduced to the idea of design that was flowing into NID through the regular movement of great designers from Europe and America in those days. GU worked with some of these designers and drew inspiration from their work to make the first tentative explorations into fine furniture design. Even these pieces were exquisite and he was selected by NID to do a stint of formal training at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the Furniture Design department, perhaps the best place in the world in those days for the deep study of furniture design. At NID he had the opportunity to work and be exposed to the concepts of great world designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nakashima, Louis I Kahn and Hans Gugelot from Hfg Ulm which resulted in two very remarkable ranges of furniture that were prototyped and modeled in those days but never saw production like many NID offerings since Indian Industry was blind to the possibility of design being cocooned in the days of “License Permit Raj” where there was no scope for competition through design but industry survived either through ministerial and bureaucratic patronage or just plain corruption. However, the NID documentation of the days credited the works to the visiting consultants and the young Indian designer was denied the credit due to him, but this has been corrected in the new monograph. I admired the “Round Stick Furniture” inspired by Louis I Kahn and the the “24/42 Furniture” inspired by Hans Gugelot when I came to NID as a student and nobody could tell us more about the people and circumstances under which these items were designed although Gajanan Upadhayay was spoken of in whispered tones and he was already a bit of a legend in those days since he had jumped ship and stayed on at the Danish Academy and not returned to NID as he was expected to.

Image03: A fleeting glimpse of the pages of the monograph showing the range of work done by Gajanan Upadhayay shown here as six groups of four pictures each from top left to bottom right: 1. Early work at NID and Denmark, 2. NID Classics from the early 80’s, 3. Library stackable chairs for NID, 4. Metal range for canteen and Board Rooms and Hostels, 5. New range for TWD in the 2000’s, and 6. Institutional furniture for schools, management school and the High Court at Ahmedabad.

He did return briefly to Ahmedabad in 1968-69 before he returned to Denmark to continue to work as a teacher and designer in close proximity with the great Danish Furniture designers of all time for a long stint of eight years before returning to Ahmedabad to settle down if you can even describe him as settled at any time or place. This was his second important phase of work, which is the Danish phase from 1966 to 1974. Working at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen closely with some and influenced greatly by the Danish greats of Poul Koerholm, Hans Wagner, Borge Mogensen and Nils Fagerholt besides others and he imbibed the finest traditions of Danish furniture design and construction and he also worked on drawing and making the design expressions of these designers professionally while working with them in school and in their studios while absorbing the values of the structural logic and design principles that are deeply ingrained in his own work ever since. On his return to India in 1974 he soon realized there was little scope for design as a professional occupation those days since nobody was willing to pay for design, not industry. He joined NID as a faculty in 1976 and I too had returned from Madras in the same time to rejoin NID and we seemed to have many interests in common. We criticized the existing Foundation course of Geometry and were immediately asked to reformulate it and conduct it for the 1976 batch of the NID Foundation programme. This course is still being conducted in the manner that we had planned and evolved keeping all the assignments of drawings, paper models and geometric concepts in much the same way as it was offered then. Geometry and structural logic are the striking features of GU’s furniture design work and this is what he tries to instill in his students as they interact with him.

Image04: Canteen chairs used for a poster at NID in the late 90’s to showcase the Furniture Design Discipline at NID shown alongside thumbnails of the pictures that I had captured towards making of the poster seen on the right.

This period from 1976 to his retirement from formal teaching at National Institute of Design (NID) at the age of 60 in 1994 would be for me the third phase of his prolific design career during which he created the wooden classics that are all over the NID campus and the hostels since they were produced in the NID workshops in the first round and in another round in later years the metal range that includes the canteen range, the board room furniture and the metal classroom range were produced here. In the early 80’s we offered the wooden furniture range to the Indian industry through an exhibition at the Trade Fair in New Delhi and Mini Boga took up the license to produce a number of these items through her Taaru factory and shop in New Delhi. In 1986 I traveled with GU to Agartala to make the presentation of the Tripura Bamboo Collection that we had jointly produced and on this visit we went to Katlamara to see the bamboo plantations of pole vault pole bamboos, as we called it in those days. We traveled by local bus, me inside and GU on top of the bus, all the way to Katlamara and we were excited by the possibilities of the material that we saw but we had to wait many years till 2003 when we managed to get limited funding to go again to do a workshop at the BCDI together. The monograph does not however cover all his offerings since it is a very small selection from his vast range of offerings but it is a great beginning and I am sure more will come as a result of this opening.

Image05: Gajanan Upadhayay stands behing four distinct versions of the Canteen Chair. Left to right: Fixed frame and non-stackable, Non-folding but stackable, Folding and stackable model (NID Canteen), Stainless steel frame and stackable.

Among the last projects that he handled at NID was the design of furniture for the Gujarat High Court that brought him into close contact with Bimal Patel of HCPDPM and Ismet Khambatta of TDW Furniture and soon thereafter he started working as a consultant with Bimal in his office and offering new design ranges to the TDW production and these started appearing in their showrooms as well. This is the fourth phase of GU’s design career and I am sure Design historians will study the impact of Gajanan Upadhayay on Indian design for many years to come and also on his influence on the young Indian furniture design industry which has been impacted by many students from NID setting up their own production facilities, first as small scale ventures which have by now grown into fairly substantial and sought after production houses in Bangalore, Jaipur, New Delhi and other cities in India. All of them have been strongly influenced by the Upadhayay design logic of modernist expression and fine craftsmanship. At the inaugural lecture for the GU furniture exhibit I spoke about the great furniture designers of the world such as Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe of the Bauhaus, Alvar Alto of the Finnish design tradition, and Jean Prouve of France, and Hans Gugelot and Gerd Lange of Germany and I do believe that Gajanan Upadhayay too will be one day compared to some of these international masters when the documentation of his work is done in the same depth and with the critical appreciation that it deserves.

References:

1. HCPDPM & TSW, “Gajanan Upadhayay: Furniture Designer”, Ahmedabad, 2009
Monograph available from HCPDPM, Ahmedabad. Pages 88 plus Cover and Dust Jacket.

HCPDPM
http://www.hcp.co.in
email: hcpahd (at) hcp.co.in
Price: Rs.250/=

TDW
http://www.3-dworkshop.com
email: info (at) 3-dworkshop.com

2. Exhibition of Furniture at the Herwitz Gallery with inaguration on 19 June 2009 and exhibit showing from 20 to 25 June 2009 from 4.00 pm to 8.00 pm daily.

Contact Info:

Gajanan Upadhayay’s furniture is available from TDW at their Ahmedabad showroom

T D W Furniture Pvt. Ltd.
Near Iscon Plaza, Satellite Road,
Ahmedabad 380 015 Gujarat India

email: info (at) 3-dworkshop.com

Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

Bamboo Boards & Beyond: Multimedia CD ROM on design explorations for India

Interactive CD ROM authored in linked PDF modules with Quicktime movies and pictures of a product design and development initiative at the National Institute of Design in 2000-01. Download 550 MB zip file here.

“Bamboo Boards & Beyond” : Bamboo, the sustainable, eco-friendly industrial material of the future.

M P Ranjan

Image 00: CD ROM Graphics and first interface screen with six major sections that include Inroduction, Index of Papers, Presentations, Pictures and Sketches, a section about NID including the Eames Report and a interactive walk-through NID building in QiickTime VR.

In November 1998 through February 2001 the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Asian and Pacific Centre for Transfer of Technology (APCTT), New Delhi, had supported field research on laminated bamboo, a concept development workshop on the creation of new applications with laminated bamboo boards through a research and development initiative by India’s premier design Institute, the National Institute of Design. This workshop aimed to position bamboo as a sustainable eco-friendly industrial material of the future.

The workshop at the NID campus involved professional designers and architects working with students from NID and other design, technical and architectural schools. They created numerous design concepts using the new material, bamboo boards, currently being sourced from China and India. A product development lab at NID created refined prototypes that are on display.

Image 01: Interface screens from the interactive CD ROM showing the arriving screens at the index level that each lead to the specific resources listed therein. These include numerous papers on bamboo and design, 300 pictures from an album of selected pictures with captions from the workshop and its resources and outcomes.

This exploration and product development workshop was preceded by a number of field visits conducted by Prof M P Ranjan and his team in the field in India and China that started as part of a consulting project at NID for the UNDP in India. These visits produced a number of reports and the insights that were gleaned from these studies went on to inform the further developments in the National Bamboo Mission initiatives that followed with financial support from the UNDP to the Government of India.

This particular workshop and the product development lab were supported and endorsed by the following agencies:

Supported by:
UNDP United Nations Developemnt Programme
New Delhi, India

APCTT Asian and Pacific Centre for Transfer of Technology,
New Delhi, India

Endorsed by:
INBAR International Network for Bamboo and Rattan
Beijing, Peoples’ Republic of China

ICSID International Council of Societies of Industrial Design
Helsinki, Finland

Conducted by:
National Institute of Design,
Paldi, Ahmedabad 380 007 India

Image 02: Thumbnail images that are links to particular sections of images as listed in the Image Index.

This CD-ROM provides background information on the emerging status of bamboo through papers and pictures from ongoing research at NID. The complete CD ROM was reproduced and distributed in over 4000 copies as a free service from the Centre over the past six years and it is now available for free download here as a single zip file that is 580 MB in size that unzips into a folder which contains all the necessary files and hyper links to afford interactive viewing from the individual desktop for offline viewing. The files are in hyperlinked pdf and Quicktime format for easy viewing across platforms on Windows Mac or Linux computers using free software available on the web.

Image 03: Sample screens from the major presentation slide shows that are included in the CD ROM as pdf files that can be seen in an interactive manner. The little Red square goes to the next page while the little Green square takes one back to the main index above.

“Bamboo Boards & Beyond” was a large team based project with the following participants

Project head and Chief Consultant:
Prof. M P Ranjan, National Institute of Design, Ahmedanad, India

Project consultants:
Prof. Yrjo Weiherheimo
UIAH, Helsinki, Finland

Prof. Yanta H T Lam
Hongkong Polytechnic, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Long

Mr. Haruhiko Ito
President of AT Design, Nagoya, Japan

Prof. G Upadhayaya
National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India

Project Participants:
Faculty & students from leading design schools in India and Finland, architects and professional designers from all over India as well as experts from technical and development institutes dealing with forest products and engineering applications in wood and related materials.

Image 04: Sample pages from one multipage presentation offered in pdf format shown as thumbnail images.

This CD ROM was authored in PDF format so that they would be easily available for students and researchers interested in bamboo applications and design even if they are located in remote areas away from web access.

Image 05: The QuickTime VR presentation shown as popup windows in the upper row and other prresentations as thumbnails in the lower row.

The numerous QuickTime movies available on this CD ROM run within the pdf files to which they are connected in order to supplement the content that is being discussed in each file or visual presentation. The QuickTime VR provides a walkthrough of the NID campus as it was organized in 2000 and much has changed on campus since then but the walkthrough will be a nostalgic reminder of the old NID for our students and faculty who have known NID in the Ninties and earlier. The elaborate wood and metal workshops that were planned by international consultants when the NID was founded can be seen in this walkthrough.

Image 06: Thumbnail images of photo album that contains 300 selected images from the workshop and from the background research that led up to the workshop at NID.

The research and the workshops generated a lot of creative energy from all the participants and this digital picture gallery captures this energy to show the flow of design action when exploring and developing applications using a new material such as bamboo boards for exciting future applications.

Image 07: Graphics for the set of three CD ROMs that were released by the Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID in 2001, 2003 and 2004 respectively. The first CD ROM is available for download as a 550 MB zip file from this link below. The other CD ROMS will be made available at a future post on this blog in a week or two from now.

“Bamboo Boards & Beyond” : Bamboo, the sustainable, eco-friendly industrial material of the future.

M P Ranjan

Eames Demitrios at NID : Eames Photo Exhibit and Reflections on 50 Years after the Eames Report

Revisiting the Eames Legacy and Design Education in India and at NID

Prof M P Ranjan’s papers

Image 1: Eames Demitrios at the opening of the Eames Photo Exhibit at NID, the book of 100 Eames Quotes and his personal inscription on my copy. The 100 quotes are presented in the following languages: English, Complex Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Brazilian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Eames Demertios visited NID to launch the Eames 100 Photo Exhibition, which he had contributed to select on behalf of the Herman Miller Inc. and the exhibit has traveled across many nations before coming to NID to coincide with the celebration of Eames India Report (download PDF 360 kb) reaching the 50-year landmark. This gives us an opportunity to reflect on the impact of the Eames legacy in India and the impact of the National Institute of Design on the design needs of India, which is still very large and complex. However the larger series of events that I had proposed for the Eames Report Silver Jubilee celebration was unfortunately truncated due to lack of official fervor to back the event, which were however announced over one year ago. However, for this particular event I was away at a lecture meeting in Pune organized by the Interior Designers Association of India which was also planned to coincide with the Eames India Report celebrations and this meant that I missed being at the NID event since the dates clashed. I was however able to see the student and faculty excitement before the event and later hear about the opening ceremony when I came back to NID a couple of days later. I missed meeting Eames Demetrios this time but I was able to visit the photo exhibit several times and ponder on the Eames vision of India as shown through the pictures that only he could compose and capture with his inimitable sense of vision and purpose. Eames Demetrios was kind enough to leave an inscribed copy of the Eames 100 Quotes book for me as shown above. Charles and Ray Eames had much to say about the world and about design and this book is a handy guide for students from across the world.

Image 2: Eames Demetrios at NID with students and faculty on the occasion of the Eames Photo exhibit opening ceremonies at NID Gallary, an event that I unfortunately missed.

NID has been a Mecca for great world designers and in the 60’s and 70’s we had some of the most distinguished international designers, over a 100 of them, visiting NID in the aftermath of the 1958 Eames India Report, based on which the NID was set up in 1961 by the Government of India. Having his grandson visit NID in 2008, exactly 50 years after that writing of the report was indeed a significant line of continuity for the shaping of design for the Indian cause. The documentation of NID’s contribution is however very sketchy due to some deep seated apathy to documentation and publication from the official and faculty sources at NID which unfortunately continues to this day. The last comprehensive publication of the NID’s professional and education work was prepared by Gira Sarabhai (one of the founders of the NID and the Calico Museum in Ahmedabad) in 1970 titled “NID : Documentation 1964 to 69” which is now fortunately available as a PDF file for download from this link below. (NID Document PDF File 25 MB). Aditi and I started the Young Designers series of publications that documented the work of Diploma Projects of our students from 1989 and this has fortunately been maintained by the Institute as an unbroken tradition since then with one book being produced each year and last year onwards the student diploma work has been showcased on the website at these links below. Young Designers 2007 and Young Designers 2008. However this still leaves out several major areas of work done by students and faculty through education, research and outreach activities and the full range of professional work done be the faculty of the Institute. The tradition at NID has been that faculty have not been permitted to do any personal practice and all the work had to be done through the Institutes professional practice wing or outreach wing. The Institute does have some research publications such as my book on “Bamboo & Cane Crafts of Northeast India” (download PDF 36 MB) and more recently the “Handmade in India” which I have reported about on this blog at these links here. There have been a handful of other publications by faculty colleagues but these however do not cover the vast contributions made by the NID faculty and this represents a huge research opportunity for some young design historian to follow up on in the days ahead.

Image 3: NID students and faculty from the Furniture design discipline in hands-on mode planning the setting up of the Eames Photo Exhibit at NID Gallery. Anuya Naik, Rama Krishna Rao and L C Ujawane in discussion with Furniture Design students on how to mount the Eames Photo Exhibit in the NID Gallary.

Eames, both Charles and Ray, visited NID several times together at first and individually in later years, 1978 and 1988, and they contributed to the building of a work ethic at the institute which thankfully continues to date. This photo exhibit was another such opportunity for NID faculty and students to get together once again in a typically Eames style "hands-on mode" to help set up the exhibit on campus for a wider audience to participate in. This tradition of working together has however been eroded somewhat in recent years but we need to remind ourselves of this great Eames tradition of hands-on design that was practiced in the Eames Office and at NID ever since the great Eames’ Nehru Exhibition was designed and executed at the Institute in the mid 60’s as a project commissioned by the Government of India and this tradition continued for many years through major exhibition projects done by the institute where students and faculty worked together and built a shared understanding of great design action. I have a paper, which I had prepared about exhibition design at NID in 1986, which may give some insights into the learning process that was truly the NID way in those days. (download paper here - PDF 36 kb)

Image 4: NID students and faculty in active mode of setting up the Eames Photo Exhibit and being inspired by the Images of India from an early visit by Eames.

The furniture design programme at NID was inspired by the work of Eames although the formal education programme started in 1969 with design teachers from Germany, the early beginnings of the Eames influence came from the full set of furniture and products that were donated from the Museum of Modern Art’s classic design collection which included many items of Eames furniture in wire, plywood, fibre glass and cast aluminium range besides original products by Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and others too numerous to be named here. These originals in our prototype collection were a source of inspiration and all students of furniture design got an opportunity to study these in detail as part of their education at NID. Further the NID’s wood and metal workshops were constantly producing a number of furniture designs by international masters like George Nakashima and our own present day master, Gajanan Upadhayay, and this production continued till recent times as a live reminder of high quality of workmanship as a living tradition inside the NID workshops. It is not surprising that the students and faculty from that era had a deep understanding of materials and process and a very refined range of furniture did get designed and made at NID till the end of the 90’s. The turn of the century was a bit of a disaster since after the bamboo boards & beyond workshop of 2000 the wood workshop was rudely dismantled to make way for the digital Design Vision Centre (DVC), which all but destroyed the hands-on tradition that had taken deep roots at NID. Somewhere we seemed to loose our way and slogans of “Mind to Market” took on the place of real “Hands-on” action that was the true NID way in the spirit of Eames.

Image 5: Anuya Naik with NID students setting up the Eames Photo Exhibit and the 100 images poster that captures the whole exhibit at a glance.

I am indeed happy to see the return of faculty and student involvement in hands-on activities of exhibition design and fabrication and I do hope that this will be continued to other such opportunities in the days ahead. The students who pass through these experiences develop a deep sense of collaborative spirit and are less prone to ego trips when deciding the form and quality of their design offerings. Design is indeed changing but we do not need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and we will need to deeply examine the role of the digital in our design processes and preserve those values that are durable from the hands-on tradition which may indeed turn out to be the very heart of design thinking and action in the days ahead. The furniture design activity at NID has retained the deep respect for prototype building and learning by doing is alive and well in this discipline while a body of theory has also been introduced into the programme along with a considerable amount of exposure to digital tools and processes in information processing, drawing, image management and presentation documentation etc.

Image 6: An article in an Interiors magazine featuring great Indian product designers. It is gratifying to see that all six designers were NID graduates and all of them have been my students at different times. Sandeep Mukherjee, Reboni Saha, Vibhor Sogani, Neil Foley, Mukul Goyel, and Alex Davis: clockwise from top left.

Last year, in late November, as the Eames Exhibit was being assembled at NID we came across this article in a national Interior Design magazine that celebrated the work of some of the finest product designers of India. It is not surprising that all the designers featured here were products of the NID workshops “hands-on” tradition and these were the same people who found value in pottering in our workshops with materials and concepts that has now been recognized as valuable contributions by that design media in India. There is value in the hands-on approach and we must cherish this as a way forward even in the digital era. There are many other design groups who have set up entrepreneurial ventures across India in the areas of textiles, furniture and ceramic design and these enterprises have grown over the years to be recognized as a design led industry from India. However the designers in India have failed to organize themselves into associations at a professional level and due to this their influence on National policy is still rather limited. The SIDI (Society of Industrial Designers of India) that flourished during the 70’s to 90’s became defunct due to apathy from members and the self-interest of the office bearers. Some recent initiatives in the form of the AIDI (Association of Industrial Designers of India) started by the Bangalore designers and the informal online efforts of the DesignIndia group are some fledgling initiatives in the making. The Pune Design Foundation is yet another recent initiative and we hope these shape up and take root to lead the design movement in India in the days ahead.

Image 07: Exhibition of Furniture made from Bamboo Boards at the UNDP Lawns on 17 February 2001, which made a huge impact in New Delhi, and on National Policy that led to the creation of the National Bamboo Mission, which is still in progress. I got my 5 minutes of fame since I was invited to the NDTV studio that night to be interviewed live on the 9 o’clock news just after Dr Anil Agarwal of Down to Earth fame had completed his interview on the subject of environment. Awareness about global warming was still a long way off in the minds of people at large.

In the late 90’s and early years of this century we have had a growing interest in bamboo as a furniture design material and NID and its Centre for Bamboo Initiatives has been at the heart of this development. As many a 40 students from furniture and product design and over a dozen faculty colleagues were involved with me to explore this material and as a result we have a well documented body of work that is perhaps a significant contribution to world knowledge of building with bamboo and this is well acknowledged as a result of the publication of our, books, CD ROMs and web based publications that can be seen at these links here on this blog as well as on my website at this link below. (web link to Bamboo Initiatives) (links to other blog posts).

Image 08: Sandeep Mukherjee and Sarita Fernandez set up Quetzel in Bangalore, which makes fine furniture in the Eames tradition of design and build.

In my presentation last month at the Design Cities Debate at the Design Museum in London I shared several case studies from design groups in Bangalore. Quetzel and Dovetail are two such cases of innovative companies set up by NID graduates who set out to make furniture of their own design and these have now grown into substantial business groups in their own right.

Image 09: S Sunder and John Mathews have set up Dovetail which also designs and produces fine furniture which is made available through their retail as well as direct supply to large clients.

In the Bangalore presentation at the Design Cities Debate it was clear to me that design would need to scale from being a play of materials and aesthetics to be able to move up the growing vortex of design concerns to include social, ecological and ethical levels of exchange and contribute at that level. Dovetail. IDIOM, Trapeeze, Ray + Kesavan and all the other design initiatives including the IT sector that is growing to cope with the higher offerings of knowledge economy and raising to the level of offering products would all be part of the next design revolution in the making, I hope.

Bangalore had all the ingredients in place to move up the political ladder and to try and influence decision makers about the role of design in our evolving society and through this find a place for it which was I believe envisaged in the Eames India Report of 50 years ago. We need to re-read the Eames Report as well as his 100 Quotes and find our own way forward in this complex milieu if the next 50 years is to bring design closer to the hearts and minds of people who need to be served by this wonderful resource but they may not yet know that they do. The Jaanagraha’s feeble attempt to influence the participation of people (see my blog post below) in the local and national democracy is a good sign and designers need to back these initiatives and join them to make them work for all of us in the days ahead.

Prof M P Ranjan’s papers