Directors at NID: A Time to Reflect

Directors at NID: A Time to Reflect

Design for India: Prof. M P Ranjan

The stainless steel name boards in the picture below as seen outside the Directors office at NID were installed by Dr Darlie O Koshy just before he took premature relief from the post of Director NID in October 2008. This however does not tell the whole story of the Chief Executive positions at the National Institute of Design. The history of NID is yet to be written and the history of design in India too would be intricately intertwined with the actions and roles of the various persons who have played a leadership role at NID, particularly in the position of its CEO, which has had various nomenclatures at different points of time. With the announcement last week of the next incumbent to the post of Director NID, Prof Pradyumna Vyas, we get a chance to reflect on this particular position and to look back at the individuals who have played a role in this particular office at NID over the years.

Image 01: Stainless steel nameplates to celebrate the various persons who had occupied the position of Director NID over the years.
However the inlaid comments show that the actual nomenclature used was that of Executive Director till 2006 when it was changed during Dr Koshy’s second term to that of Director NID for which there has been no real explanation so far from anybody. The names and designations in between the plates are those of individuals who have held charge in the gap between two formally appointed Executive Directors which happened in 1972 and in 2008, both due to an unplanned transition in each case.

However, the NID did not start with its organization being headed by one Executive Director. According to the organization chart that was published in the NID Documentation1964 to 1969 (download the 24 mb pdf file here about the early history of NID) the institute was managed by a Directing Board which was later substituted by an Internal Management Board, both of which were headed by Gira Sarabhai while Gautam Sarabhai held the position of the founding Chairman of the Governing Council of NID. In 1970 they brought in Vice-Admiral Soman as the first Executive Director of NID with the intention of helping the faculty to ease the interface with the Ministry of Industries and the Government of India in order to obtain funds and to manage the general accounts and administration of the Institute. This did not work out as envisaged and there was a falling out of severe proportions and the first Executive Director, a distinguished Ex-Serviceman, was sacked by the Governing Council and all hell broke loose in the media and NID entered its first era of severe crisis of management.

Image 02: Organisation structure of NID before the induction of Vice Admiral Soman to the post of Executive Director at NID and Gira and Gautam Sarabhai with the Eames Office team at NID in 1964. The Directing Board was constituted to include the Heads of Industrial Design, Communication Design, Studios and Workshops, Architecture and the Secretary (Finance and Administration) and Chaired by Gira Sarabhai.

Prof Kumar Vyas and Dashrat Patel were both members of the Directing Board and later on the Internal Management Board, each representing the two major faculties, Industrial Design and Communication Design, respectively. I was a student at NID at that time and we too took sides in the grand battle lines that was drawn up between the ideological design teachers and students on the one side and the then NID Administration on the other trying to control and dictate how design education should be carried out. Vice Admiral Soman was a distinguished public figure but he was also quite unsuitable for the role that he took at NID and his departure from the institute and the controversy that followed left a long period of turmoil at NID after a decade of amazing developments that saw hundreds of great international designers making contributions to the shaping of a unique institution at Ahmedabad.

Image 03: Charles and Ray Eames camped at NID with the Eames Office team in 1964 to work on the Nehru Exhibition and this project was a major training ground for the first faculty at NID.

A list of these international design experts is available at the back pages of the NID Documentation 1964-69. Gautam Sarabhai produced an immaculate document that captured the spirit of NID culture and shared it with all of us students and the faculty in a series of meetings. The document, fondly called the “Structure Culture Document” has returned time and again in the hands of students and faculty whenever administrative problems came to a head at NID. Design was not understood by many and design education was an even bigger mystery for most administrators and Government babus, quite unlike the fairly comprehensible and stable systems that seemed to be present in medicine, technical and management education of the day.

Image 04: Governor of Gujarat, Sriman Narayan being hosted by Gautam Sarabhai at NID studios in 1972 and below Vice Admiral Soman guides distinguished visitors through the NID workshops.

Prof. Kumar Vyas was made the Head of the Internal Executive Committee that managed the affairs of NID from 1972 and 1975 during which time the affairs of the Institute were subjected to much scrutiny by a number of committees appointed by the Government of India to address the acquisitions of the outgoing Executive Director and in this period Gautam and Gira Sarabhai withdrew from the active management of the NID affairs leaving a bit of a power vacuum at the top of the NID management structure. The Wanchoo Commission Report of 1973 and then the Thaper Committee Report of 1974 – 75 gave a clean chit to the Sarabhais while they called for the creation of systems for the management of creative educational activities at NID. Romesh Thaper was instrumental for bringing in Ashoke Chatterjee as the next Executive Director of NID and he joined the Institute in mid 1975. Prof Kumar Vyas returned to being Head of Industrial Design Faculty. In the meantime my own relationship with the Institute was strained since I had joined the Faculty in early 1973 and had signed a bond to serve the Institute for a period of five years in return for the opportunity to travel to Chile, USA and UK as part of the Nehru Exhibition team in January 1973. However in the political turmoil of the era my services were abruptly terminated in May 1974 and I had to return to Madras to work with my father in his factory making wooden toys. Prof Kumar Vyas did not have an easy time at the top due to the constant fire fighting that needed to be done internally and the public reviews that were being conducted by various committees appointed by the Government of India. I was in constant contact with him through my mails from Madras asking NID to take me back as a faculty member and my appeal was forwarded to the then Chairman of Governing Council, Pupul Jayakar. Ashoke Chatterjee eventually invited me to come back to NID in mid 1976 to rejoin the faculty since I had by then made numerous representations to the Institute for a review of my case, and for me this being banished from NID was a blessing in disguise since I had a wonderful opportunity to work full time in a small scale industry and help transform it in a couple of years and in the process build a great deal of self confidence from this deep exposure to the real world of business and design. The story of my explorations with Rockytoys in Madras between 1974 and 1976 which was my period of being away from NID has been on this blog for some time now at these links below:
Rockytoys revisited blog post
Design for Small Scale Inductry: Some Reflections

Image 05: Ashoke Chatterjee with Romesh Thaper and a number of distinguished Governing Council members meeting senior faculty at a display of NID work in the show room and Aquarium area.

Ashoke Chatterjee (AC) came to Madras to meet me soon after he had settled himself in the hot seat at NID as the second Executive Director of an Institute in crisis. My letters for justice to the Chairman Governing Council had landed on his table and this visit besides other tasks was to check out what I had been up to in the year and a half that I had been away from NID. What he saw there at my fathers’ factory and the Rockytoys shop must have comforted him since I soon received a letter from Prof Kumar Vyas offering me a position at NID as a full time faculty, which I accepted and joined back in June 1976. AC was very fair in his dealings with everyone while he was firm in all his dealings and in doing what he thought was right, a stickler for ethics and values, which many feared since it was a new dimension for them in the bazaar values that prevailed in those days. He was interested in and understood Communication Design and in my view had a bias towards this field while the Industrial Design activity languished since there was no sympathy for this fledgling activity and industry in India did not seem to understand it either, need it or want it at all, at least in the form that we were offering it at NID. As a result much investments were made in communications design and designers at NID while the ID chaps bashed on at a lower echelon in the order of things at NID. Ravi Matthai emerged as a major mentor in this period and the Jawaja project.

Image 06: Ashoke Chatterjee and young NID faculty and students welcome Charles Eames on his last visit to NID in 1978.

The Rajasthan Family Welfare & Health project; the Water Mission Projects and the Agri Expo were examples of development action that AC supported and nurtured in his long tenure at NID as its ED from 1975 till 1985. Industrial design being left largely alone discovered other avenues of relevance and many of these were in the development and the crafts sectors in India and with opportunities in rural India, which was not being addressed by the communication design group. Under AC’s leadership NID conducted the remarkable UNIDO-ICSID Conference on Design for Development in 1979 and also won him the Sir Misha Black Award for excellence in Design Education at NID. In this period NID also won recognition at the ICSID-Phillips Award for excellence in Design for Development, a golden period for NID. (download the Ahmedabad Declaration as a pdf file and the Major Recommendations here). During this period NID also got massive financial support from the UNDP to upgrade equipment and send faculty for training as well as afford to invite a large number of international design consultants to review and strengthen its programmes and activities. However much of the UNDP investment went into the Communication Design areas of Video, Photography and Exhibit Design and I was a vocal critic of this imbalance particularly since there was no investment in the area of computers, which I felt was a critical new area to be explored. A huge number of Corporate Identity projects were handled by the NID faculty and students during this period.

Image 07: Vinay Jha and Prof. Yash Pal, Chairman Governing Council with Ray Eames and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya at the Eames Award Ceremony in 1988 on the NID Lawns, now called the Eames Plaza.

The strong bias towards Communication Design changed substantially, though briefly, when Vinay Jha, IAS joined NID for a brief tenure from 1985 to 1989 during which time the linkages with Indian Industry were improved through our sustained contacts with the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) and the CII-NID partnership took hold. On the international front the ICSID contacts took a fresh turn when Vinay Jha joined the Board at ICSID and forged strong linkages with a number of international schools and design professionals through his involvement on the ICSID Board. I was fortunate to be handling the NID Consultancy Division as the Chairman Design Office from 1981 to 1991, in an acting capacity in the early years and in with a full charge when Vinay Jha took office at NID. Vinay Jha brought in administrative reforms and decentralized decision-making and delegated financial authority to faculty heads and activity chairmen for the first time at NID. We made grand plans to reach design to industry and a number of road shows about design were rolled out to take NID designers and design teachers out of the campus to meet corporate leaders and this was organized through the CII connections. However the economic liberalization of the Indian economy was still in the making and much of this investment fell on deaf ears but few projects did materialize through all the legwork that was done in those days. 4000 proposals that I was personally involved in drafting on behalf of the NID faculty teams as head of consultancy led to the actual landing of about 400 professional projects, small and large, at NID and this was a huge body of experience which is still to be fully analysed and appreciated, hopefully to be documented and published some day. In all these projects the NID Executive Director had a large role in both client interface as well as in providing internal resources and supports. In 1986 Vinay Jha supported my suggestion that the book, “Bamboo & Cane Crafts of Northeast India” could be designed and printed at Bombay which we completed and launched in October that year. I had also repeated my plea that NID review its computer policy and Vinay Jha decided with the help of a Governing Council Committee to use the residual funds from the UNDP grants to set up a Mac and PC Lab at NID, which brought in computers for distributed use into NID in a substantial way for the first time.

Image 08: Vikas Satwalekar as a young faculty in 1972 and later after he stepped down as Executive Director, NID in 2003 (picture uploaded by Vikram was taken at the 2003 Convocation exhibition).

Vikas Satwalekar took over in 1988, first as Acting Director and was later given full charge and for the first time an NID trained designer and a faculty member was at the helm of affairs. The bias towards Communication Design however continued at NID and this time the emphasis was on Exhibition Design and many mega multi-disciplinary projects were taken up by the Institute. In other areas the activities got bogged down in many ways and while education took centre stage with a major curriculum review programme the activities with an intention of establishing quality benchmarks in design education. The areas of research and outreach did not flourish much due to an inward looking attitude and in much effort being expended in solving legacy problems with the labour union activities at NID. Ashoke Chatterjee continued to teach and conduct research at NID, first in a special capacity as Advisor during the term of Vinay Jha and later as a Senior Faculty teaching Design Management and then as a Fellow in Communication Design with a focus on Social Communication. The work done at NID was documented in a two-page poster-folder called NID Milestones in 1998 and it lists the major achievements of NID from 1961 to 1998. (download pdf file NID Milestones here as a 2.1 mb file) A major review of education was conducted during this period and I was involved on a committee that undertook this enormous task, which resulted in the production of an eleven-volume document that was placed in the NID Resource Centre. Each course was described and teachers were asked to present their course to the Curriculum Review Committee as it was called along with work examples and the intention was to articulate course objectives, methods and content as well as assignment level details of the various programmes at NID. The quality benchmarks for each course were expressed in the document so that the teachers, coordinators and students would have adequate information about the courses being offered and could be monitored through the various regulatory channels that existed, namely the Consultative Forum, Discipline Meetings, Faculty Forum and the Course Presentations, all of which were dismantled with the arrival of Dr Darlie O Koshy. With education being the focus of Vikas Satwalekar’s term in office, I too was involved in Institution building tasks that took the NID expertise to other centres of design learning and these can be seen in our contributions to the setting up of the Accessory Design Department at NIFT, New Delhi, the setting up of the Indian Institute of Crafts and Design in Jaipur and later in the setting up of the Bamboo and Cane Development Institute at Agartala which is described at this link below.
New Design Institutes for India: Blog post<>
Lecture of Intellectual History of Design: Blog post

Image 09: A quick search of Dr Koshy on Google images came up with these pictures, which are based on his much cultivated media presence over the eight years at NID.

Dr Darlie O Koshy came into NID in June 2000 and immediately went about making mega plans for the expansion of the student base as well as disciplines that were taught at the Institute. Working on a brief provided by the DIPP and NID Governing Council he started profiling the Institute in the media and called for growth in all activities especially education. Hundreds of activities were initiated in setting up NID Satellites at huge costs in as many as 25 cities each being copiously profiled in the National media and all education programmes too were scaled up and the number game was up and running and the Government seemed to love the show and money poured in from all sides. Two new campuses were hastily initiated and set up but this I believe was unfortunately at the cost of both quality and content. He moved at great speed and it can only be compared to the moves of a “Bull in a China Shop” and whatever came in the way was laid waste and new spaces sprung up where workshops and studios existed before, each with a new name and an unclear but significant promise to be delivered down the line. Huge funds were generated from Government and massive expenses were incurred and it seemed that funds were unlimited and the supply was infinite while accountability was a thing of the past. The number game was truly on and the student numbers were constantly quoted as a justification for the critique of loss of quality that faculty and students and later the alumni joined in the chorus that became a crescendo. There was huge media coverage during this period with the NID Executive Director appearing in the media on a regular basis and the message from the Institute was disseminated through the Design Plus and on the web as a continuation of the Milestones list which can be seen at this link on the NID website. However the Milestones list on the NID website is silent on the period between 1997 and 2000 which set the tone for the Corporate Communications from NID as it was renamed like so many other NID activities, disciplines and departments under the new Executive Director in 2000 onwards. History was being rewritten at NID. The Executive Director was given a second extended term of office in 2005 but soon afterwards the designation was suddenly changed to that of Director NID. The final critique came to a head when the new Gandhinagar Campus started creating numerous logistics crises and the last straw was the problems with the buildings and facilities that made both students and faculty react strongly leading to a review of all plans for the immediate use of the new campus. Dr Darlie O Koshy took premature relief and moved to a new assignment in New Delhi. Akhil Succenna was given temporary charge of Officiating as Director in October 2008 and the Governing Council set up a Search Committee to find a new Director for NID. The process took several months and after a process put up three names to the Government for its final decision.

Image 10: Pradyumna Vyas being welcomed by faculty, students and staff of NID in the presence of Salman Haider, Chairman Governing Council of NID and Mahesh Korvvidi, COO of Design Business Incubator at NID at a community function of samosa and tea on the NID lawns.

We now have a new Director in place with the appointment of Prof Pradyumna Vyas as the second in the new series as Director at NID and eighth in the line of all Heads of Institute if we include all Executive Directors, Acting Directors and the Directors who have presided over the affairs of the Institute at Ahmedabad over the years and this excludes Gira Sarabhai who was the defacto Head of NID in her capacity as Chairman of the Internal Management Board in the early years of NID. There is now a new hope amongst students and faculty and they have been vocal in expressing their hope in looking forward to a period when design will once again be given the importance that is due both within the Institute as well as across India in the 230 sectors in which it is needed today. Prof Pradyumna Vyas had a session with the faculty where he talked about consolidation and the need to put together a comprehensive history of NID to make visible the 50 years of efforts at the Institute and I do hope that this will be something that the country can be proud about. We need our alumni and our former faculty to participate in this effort and if we can use this initiative to also map out the contributions of our alumni and graduates it would provide a platform from which design can be brought to the focused attention of Government and Indian Industry in order to bring it on par with science, technology and management after having languished on the back burner for 50 years since the Eames Report. 50 years on it is a good time to reflect and build the seeds for the future of Design for India.

Notes:
Chairman of Governing Councils at NID
1. Gautam Sarabhai - Oct 1961 to Feb 1974
2. Pupul Jayakar – March 1974 to June 1978
3. B G Verghese – July 1978 to June 1981
4. Shrenik K Lalbhai – July 1981 to June 1984
5. Prof. Yash Pal – July 1984 to June 1990
6. H Y Sharada Prasad – July 1991 to July 1994
7. Hasmukh Shah – August 1994 to June 2005
8. Ajai Dua (IAS) – January 2006 to February 2007
9. Salman Haider – March 2007 to date

References:
1. Charles and Ray Eames, The India Report, Government of India, 1958 (download pdf 359 kb)
2. Gautam Sarabhai, “National Institute of Design: Internal Organisation, Structure and Culture, NID, 1972 (download pdf 357 kb)
3. National Institute of Design, “National Institute of Design Documentation 1964-69, NID, 1970 (download pdf 25 MB)
3. Romesh Thapar, “Report of the Review Committee on the National Institute of Design” NID, February 1974
4. National Institute of Design, “Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development: Major Recommendations for Promotion of Industrial Design for Developemnt”, UNIDO-ICSID INDIA 79, NID, 1979 (download pdf file 11.1 mb)
5. National Institute of Design, “25 Years of Design Service: 1961 to 1986 – The Trainers” A poster of 43 faculty profiles from NID, NID, 1986 (download pdf 490 kb)
6. Kamla Choudhury, Report of the Review Committee on Future Directions and Forward Planning for National Institute of Design, August 30, 1989, NID, 1989
7. Ashoke Chatterjee, R K Bannerjee and Neera Seth, “40 Years of NID” (an unpublished draft manuscript), NID Publications, 1998.
8. National Institute of Design, “NID Milestones: 1961 to 1997”, NID, 1998 (download pdf file 2.1mb)
Design for India: Prof. M P Ranjan
9. Milestones on the NID website ; 1961-1970 ; 1971-1980 ; 1981-1990 ; 1991-1997; 2000-2001 ; 2002-2003 ; 2004-2005; 2006-2007 ; Integrated Design Services 2001-2005 Note these links to NID website are now disfunctional since NID has changed the links or dropped the items from their website.

Interior Design in India: SID Research Conferences

…Design for India…

School of Interior Design: Interior Design Traditions in India and their Publications Programme

Image: SID Conference on “Interior Design Traditions” in progress at the Ravi Matthai Auditorium at the IIMA. It was good to see my auditorium chair design in use almost ten years after they were designed and to see that the canvas fabric has aged gracefully, just like a well-worn pair of jeans.

A three-day conference on “Interior Design Traditions” ran its course at the Ravi Matthai Auditorium of the IIMA from the 31st August 2008 to the 2nd September 2008. Theory of design, Reflections on design practice and Case studies and Retrospectives from distinguished practitioners from the field of Interiors and Architecture dotted the proceedings. Some of these presentations were by the first generation of graduates from the School of Interior Design coming back to share their experiences for the first time with their Alma Mater and with students and faculty from a large number of schools of design assembled in this third conference in the series.

Image: A large contingent of students from Pune in blazers and in a group photo outside the hall. Faculty and students interact during the tea break.

The visible group of participants was the large contingent from the B.N. College of Architecture since all the students came in uniform, wearing the school blazer, and sitting in a group giving the conference a very corporate look. The other big group was of course from the School of Interior Design itself and being the organizers they were all active as both organizers as well as participants with a high degree of motivation. The next vocal group of students was from the Indian Institute of Crafts and Design from Jaipur who asked questions in most of the sessions and generally played an active participant role during the event. The auditorium was quite full and the three days saw a high level of participation both inside as well as outside the hall.

Image: A panoramic view of the IIMA Auditorium interior from a display photograph in the corridor and views to the left and right of the main entrance lobby showing the administrative block and the main building of the IIMA in the distance.

Three days and ten sessions in all was quite a handful, not all of it was interesting but some presentations made the conference really worthwhile. Presentations by Aman Nath and Ratan Batliboi were particularly stimulating since they drew from their life experience and shared insights and achievements that were substantial contributions to their field. Nath shared the Neemrana Hotels story with the underlying philosophy of heritage conservation that goes back over twenty years when the first hotel was established by the conservation and reuse of the dilapidated old fort, the Neemrana Fort and since then the same methodology has been repeated over thirteen times at various heritage locations across India, all done through the private initiatives of Nath and his colleague working as concerned and motivated entrepreneurs. Nath called it passion to conserve. Ratan Batliboi shared the work of his office, starting from humble beginnings from a small studio; the office is one of the leading architecture and design houses in India. The work, which started with small domestic buildings, have grown to include hi-tech networking centres to over 35 railway stations in New Mumbai and New Delhi for the Dwarka – Delhi metro system. The insights from these journeys were inspiring and do give the young student participant a sense of confidence in their own ability to change the world, if they so wished to take this path. The other interesting presentations included those by Prof Uday Athavankar on the Crisis in the Indian Identity which dwelt on the theory and insights from his product semantics research in India, and another by Jacob Mathew from IDIOM spoke on the Changing Face of Retail based on his considerable experience of working with Kishore Biyani and his Pantaloon and Big Baazaar group of companies. Two other presentations that held my interest were made by SID alumni Vishal Wadwani who has done interesting work on modular light weight structures and the other by Vaibhav Kale who has now set up a company to explore bamboo architectural structures in the area of low cost housing.

Image: Sale of books and research publications from the School of Interior Design at CEPT University, Ahmedabad. This exhibit drew as many enthusiasts as the main conference. On the right are the cover pages of the two conference proceedings from 2006 and 2007 and at the bottom are the major thematic research publications from the SID Research Cell.

While many more presentations went on in the hall as the conference progressed the SID research and publications counter drew my attention. Located outside the conference hall, this counter offered another kind of excitement. The SID had on display some of their student works dealing with Indian Traditions, which is the theme of the three conferences over the past three years. However the real excitement was in their publications that were on sale all through the three days at their sale counter facing the display of Ravi Matthai’s photographs in the entrance lobby of the IIMA auditorium. For me it was particularly stimulating to see these research publications since I have been actively championing the production of such publications at NID and calling for such an active programme from other design schools in India. It seems that the SID in Ahmedabad has taken a huge lead over all their counterparts when we look at the quality and content of the research publications that they have on offer and with more in the pipeline. In India, we now have as many as 25 design schools (if not more), 150 + schools of architecture and as many as 900 + schools of engineering and technology, but few of them can boast of a publications programme that can match the results shown by the SID in Ahmedabad. I do hope that some of the schools will take a leaf out of the SID agenda and get their own faculty and students to publish more effectively in the days ahead.

The SID books can be obtained from the SID Research Cell and they can be contacted by email at the following address:
research.sid (at) gmail.com

or through the CEPT website at this link below
CEPT University Website:

…Design for India…

IIMA Auditorium Chair: A tale of three chairs for India

Design for India

Image: Thumbnail images of the auditorium and the chairs designed by me for the Ravi J Matthai Auditorium at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and these were taken in December 1999 during an event organized by Sam Pitroda, soon after the auditorium was commissioned.

The School of Interior Design, CEPT University, Ahmedabad (SID) has announced its third conference in the “Interior Design Traditions in India” series to be held in the Ravi J Matthai Auditorium (RJM) at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA). This gives me an opportunity to reflect on the auditorium chair design for the RJM Auditorium since I was personally involved in the design of the tandem seating system that is used at this venue. I am quoting below the call for the conference and the participants will get to use my chairs during the conference and it gives me the opportunity to get feedback from our peers. Last year I was invited to speak at the SID conference that explored the Post-Independence Era in India and my presentation titled “Bamboo and Design: NID Initiatives” can be downloaded in three parts from these links here as pdf files:
SID2007_Bamboo_Design_01 (size 10.1 mb)
SID2007_Bamboo_Design_02 (size 8.1 mb)
SID2007_Bamboo_Design_03 (size 15.5 mb)

Now back to the Ravi J Matthai Chair, sorry :-), the Auditorium Chair for the RJM Auditorium at the IIMA, The story goes a long way back since in 1978 I had designed the NID Auditorium Chair to be used for the UNIDO-ICSID Conference on Design for Development. This was a real crash assignment and a crisis management effort due to the very limited time that we had to carry it out. The organisers of the conference at NID had somehow forgotten to design a chair although a new Auditorium was already under construction in late 1978 when I was brought into the picture with barely a month remaining. I was already involved in the conference efforts in another capacity in the background research and the case studies that were being assembled from the NID faculty and student experiences.

In the last week of November 1978 Prof Kumar Vyas and Prof. Dashrat Patel summoned me to the venue on the NID Second Floor and asked me if I would take up the assignment of designing a new chair for the NID Auditorium to be ready for the UNIDO-ICSID conference on the 14th January 1979! We had just 45 days to conceive, design, refine, build and deliver 200 plus chairs for the NID event. I used the NID Old Auditorium Chair as a model for my own offering and the base of the chairs are made in the same manner while the upper structure is new and uses canvas for the seat and the back. This project was being offered to me because I had completed another very time critical assignment in the late 80’s for the International Airport Authority of India (IAAI) when we had designed and then fabricated 400 tandem seating system chairs which is another long story. Here the metal tube based base structure was designed by me while the FRP chair shell used was that of Charles Eames and was being offered by a firm in Madras at a very good quality and price.

Gajanan Upadhaya, a faculty colleague and an ace furniture designer at NID who was designing the new staircase that would lead up to the auditorium wisely refused the assignment and it came down to me for my consideration and sleepless action. I took up the assignment under duress and on 14th January 1979 the conference opened in that auditorium and the rest is history. The chairs designed then are still in use at the NID. Dhimant Panchal who was then a student in Product Design assisted me on the task and J A Panchal was the Head of NID Workshops and he had the task of fabricating the chairs in time for the opening. The key contributor in the fabrication was the master craftsman Chaturbhai who was the then supervisor of the NID Metal Workshop and he played a major role in the jigs and fixtures that were developed to fabricate the chairs at NID as well as in the shop floor coordination and quality control in the fabrication processes. I will get back to the story of the NID Auditorium Chair in a later post but this project had laid the seeds for the IIMA assignment.

Image: The Ravi J Matthai auditorium at IIMA from the outside and the inside during an event in 1999.

In 1998 or thereabouts, Prof Pradeep Khandwalla, the then Director of the IIMA came to NID to meet Vikas Satwalekar the then Executive Director of NID and asked to see me since he was interested in getting a similar chair for the IIMA auditorium that was being designed by architect Anant Raje keeping in mind the fine traditions of the Louis I Kahn buildings on the IIMA campus. The NID had been appointed the architectural consultants to the IIMA way back in 1962 and it was NID who brought in the architect Louis I Kahn to provide the conceptual leadership for the project. I was fortunate to meet Khan personally on his last visit to Ahmedabad and listen to his lecture at NID in 1969. The IIMA buildings were icons that all of us looked up to and the opportunity of designing a chair for the extension auditorium on the campus was a real privilege for any designer.

I accepted the assignment and with a student assistant, Shambhavi Kaul from the Furniture Design faculty, worked on the refinements on the earlier NID chair to solve several problems of mounting canvas seats that would ease maintenance issues that we faced at NID. We developed a threaded tensioning detail that was the basis of the IIMA chair and a modified mounting detail that could connect the tandem seats to the concrete floors and steps at the Anant Raje designed auditorium. Master craftsman Chaturbhai who had by then retired from service at NID and started working with a metal furniture fabricator in Ahmedabad made the prototypes. However their company did not get the final contract since it was given to a lower bid from Anukool Furniture Pvt Ltd who completed the task under our supervision.

Now that I have started writing about the chairs and the processes that contributed to its making hundreds of facts and insights rush back to my mind and the text seems to keep growing too long. I will save the details for later and await feedback from the visitors to the RJM auditorium for the SID conference later this month. Details of the conference are quoted below. Unfortunately they do not have a website so the full quote is given below:

Seminar series on INTERIOR DESIGN TRADITIONS in INDIA

Theme and Intent
Interior environments are a direct reflection of life and time. Today’s fast changing and globalising world has brought in extensive exposure to thoughts, ideas and objects of consumption. India holds a unique position of being in the dual worlds of tradition and modernity and the cultural mooring of its people demands very context specific responses that take care of both. To resist from being swept away by such extensive inputs and to find an appropriate direction to education and practice of interior design within the Indian context, it becomes necessary to understand how this change has occurred and is occurring.

Bringing together educators, scholars, subject specialists, practitioners and students, the seminar series allows to purview at one time many different perspectives and concerns related to the field of interior design, its evolution and possible future.

With the first two seminars focussing on the interior design traditions in India from pre-independence to pre-liberalisation period, the seminar series has already been successful in initiating the process of increasing the awareness in the country of interior design in India from a historic perspective leading up to the contemporary times. It has also helped create a platform to bring together the divergent experiences of the professional through presentations, documentation and exhibition and promote lively discussions.

The third and the last seminar in this series will focus on interior design in the period post liberalisation and in conjunction with the earlier two seminars, would position us suitably to identify the constants and variables in the development of interior design in India across time, ascertain the anchor that holds it all together and make visible that connecting thread which weaves through the exciting tradition of interior design in India.

INTERIOR DESIGN • POST LIBERALISATION
The time from 1991 onwards has been undoubtedly one of the most important for India . The liberalisation of the Indian economy paved the way for India to participate in the globalisation process in-turn allowing globalisation to influence all aspects and spheres of life directly and indirectly. Interior Design too has been much influenced by this shift with the effects of on-going liberalisation constantly changing the way lives are lived and the spaces created for it.

The seminar will attempt to understand the impact that new thoughts, functions, products, technology and materials made and are still making in design thinking and the creation of interior spaces for people amidst shifting identities, cultures, values, design sensibilities, economic parities, social systems, geographies and demography.

Through this seminar, the issues we hope to discuss include
• Prime concerns, influences and inspirations in profession and how they have changed over the last 17 years
• Relevance and impact of interior spaces created in this period
• Interior design for the new functions that emerged and sectors that gained importance in the liberated economy including hospitality, retail, entertainment, IT and allied services
• Interdependence of discipline with allied industries from the manufacturing sector
• Role of crafts in interior design
• Adaptive re-use and interior design
• Sustainability and environmental issues within the scope of interior design
• Influence of new tools and techniques in visualisation, design and execution
• Interdisciplinary influences - attitudes and approaches
• Firm growth of the profession, establishment of formal education and rise of premier institutes
• Forecasting the major challenges and barriers of the near future

The seminar will provide a conducive environment and platform to share thoughts, discuss approaches, initiate rich interaction and exchange amongst all stakeholders that will help make sense of the many important
issues that play a determining role in interior design of the present day and the future we hope to create.

SPEAKERS AND PARTICIPANTS
Speakers of national and international repute have been invited to present their views on this theme. Apart from the faculties and students from the host institute, this seminar invites the heads, faculty and students of interior design and other related disciplines, interior designers and other professionals connected to the discipline and practice of interior design from all over India.
Aman Nath, Neemrana Group of Hotels, New Delhi
Amit Pasricha, Photographer, New Delhi
Bijoy Ramachandran, Hundredhands, Bangalore
Canna Patel, HCPIA, Ahmedabad
Dean D’Cruz, Mozaic, Goa
Jacob Mathew, Idiom Design and Consulting, Bangalore
Kishore Singh, Senior Editor, Business Standard (to be confirmed)
Lata and Jaigopal Rao, Inspire, Cochin
Latika Khosla, FreedomTree Design, Mumbai
Nitin Kilawala, Group7 Architects, Mumbai
Pronit Nath, Urban Studio, Mumbai
Ranjit Makkuni, Sacred World Foundation, San Francisco (to be confirmed)
Ratan J Batliboi, RJB-X, Mumbai
Ravi Sarangan, Edifice Architects,Mumbai
Sameep Padora, sP+a, Mumbai
Samira Rathod, Samira Rathod Design Associates, Mumbai
Shilpa and Pinkish Shah, S+PS Architects, Mumbai
Stephane Paumier, SPA Design, New Delhi
Uday A Athavankar, IDC, IIT Mumbai

Two sessions will also have the alumni of SID presenting their explorations in the world of design.

Seminar Convenors
Nimish Patel and Parul Zaveri, Abhikram, Ahmedabad

SEMINAR SCHEDULE:
The seminar will span 3 days with four sessions on each day starting at 10:00am and will go on till 6:00pm with tea and lunch breaks in between and dinner on Day01. Each session would last for 90mins with two speakers in each session and enough time for discussions.

REGISTRATION DETAILS:
Registration will take place at the venue on the first day from 9:00am onwards. As seats are limited, prior intimation/pre-registration by e-mail would be highly appreciated.

The registration charges are as follows:
Professional/Faculty: Rs.1000
Students: Rs.450

For more information, contact:
anand ramakrishnan . +91 97247 12537
kamalika bose . +91 99098 96482
seminar co-ordinators
SID Research Cell, CEPT University
Kasturbhai Lalbhai Campus, University Road
Navrangpura, Ahmedabad 380 009 INDIA
T : +91 (79) 2630 2470, 2630 2740 (Extn.181), 2630 6652
F : +91 (79) 2630 2075
E : research.sid (at) gmail.com

Design for India

Poverty and the Village Economy: Design Strategies for India

Image: Models prepared by systems design students from Product and Graphic Design after their recent visit to Jawaja in Rajasthan.

Poverty and the Village Economy: Design Strategies for India
This year the Design Concepts and Concerns course offered to the Foundation batch at the NID is looking at how design can help address some pressing needs of our villages, particularly in dealing with the problems associated with systemic poverty and how design thinking and action can help the people help themselves. The theme of this year’s course is water and its numerous manifestations and applications and the students have explored this space through mapping out design opportunities while trying to understand the needs of the five selected regions that have been assigned to the groups for their study and action. The Government of India has all but admitted that they have failed to deal with the huge problem of rural indebtedness and failure of agriculture and the only thing that they could think of was to give sops (as usual) in the form of a Rs 60,000 crore farm-loan-waiver scheme which addresses the symptoms and not the cause. I wonder what would happen if such funds were applied to the creation of imaginative solutions that are specific to each location through the use of design and through local participation? The massive and repeated occurrence of farmer suicides that have been reported from many parts of our country are the symptoms for a deep seated malaise that Government with all its massive investments in science and technology programmes on the one hand and in numerous financial and management schemes on the other, all of which have come to no real solution to this endemic problem.

This magnanimous gesture on the part of Government was further compounded by another show of opulent entertainment through a lavish indulgence that was exhibited by a group of corporate leaders and their wealthy and loaded counterparts from the entertainment world in a weekend bash at Jamnagar, all in a land of farmer suicides and abject poverty that is a real concern across thousands of villages that make up much of India. Mukesh Ambani is reported to have spent upwards of Rs 400 crores for this three day bash and I wonder if other rich farmers and our feudal zamindari system in rural India will try to emulate this act in the days ahead, some leadership, great role model!! Not that designers are far behind if one examined the luxury based projects that they carry out regularly with great aplomb and an uncanny disdain for any form of poverty that surrounds us in India, all while working for their corporate masters in the form of opulent trade shows, glamour events and branded experience merchandise and lifestyle products for the very very rich. Design itself is unfortunately seen as an activity aimed at the very rich and rarely as a process and an activity that can address the pressing needs of our country and its needy poor, which is a whole world apart.

Dr. Verghese Kurian, the great Anand milkman and founder to the Dairy Cooperative movement in India, has been calling repeatedly for the creation of rural support systems and educational institutes such as the IRMA, the Indian Institute of Rural Management, across several geographies in India but the Government continues to bash on with the setting up of more IIM’s, the Indian Institute of Management, that address the needs of corporate India when these particular entities are quite capable of looking after themselves, or should be doing so by all the means available to them. Some of us have been calling for an increased allocation of Government funds into the design education sector as well since we believe that this would help solve many of our human resource imbalances that are due to the excessive leaning towards science and technology on the one side and on corporate kind of management on the other hand, particularly at the higher education levels. This year the national budget has earmarked funds for yet more IIT’s and IIM’s while continuing to ignore the dire need for design schools as well as rural management schools that Dr Kurian has been talking about. The late Prof. Ravi Matthai, the founder Director of the IIM Ahmedabad had initiated a visionary programme for experimenting with rural education called “The Rural University Project” in the early 70’s and through this initiative he had inspired faculty and students of the IIMA and the NID Ahmedabad to cooperate in the field and build solutions for the rural poor. The Jawaja Project, as we called it at NID, had many initiatives that took design teachers and students to the villages of Rajasthan and Nilam Iyer through her Diploma Project had developed strategies as well as products using the skills and materials of the leather workers of the Jawaja village cooperative. The NID-IIMA involvement continued for many years and the stated objective of the Jawaja team led by Prof Matthai was to make the interveners dispensible completely through the building of the self reliance of the village people. This was indeed a very wise piece of advice when we look back at Jawaja after a period of 25 years. Ashoke Chatterjee in his 1997 interview with Carolyn Jongeward talks about the design journey with conviction and satisfaction. The interview was later published in Seminar magazine and can be seen at this link.

Image; Model and metaphor of the Raigar system of product based entrepreneurial venture prepared by the student team to understand the system.
The Raigar community, the Dalits of the region, were the poorest of the lot, and today they have gained the self confidence and the means to make their own living from the craft of making leather products which the are able to market in India as well as to many locations overseas. It is a confirmation that design support and local entrepreneurship can transform a communityt from being dejected and helpless to become confident and self reliant through a process of hand holding and encouragement which could induce local sustained action. It seems that the strategies that were developed and embedded into the design offerings for the Jawaja community has worked at many levels of complexity and today when a team of senior Product Design students from NID make a presentation of their field visit and findings from the Jawaja region, the message is very clear, that the design interventions have worked so well that the Raigars are the most financially secure community in the region today. These field studies were done as part of their systems design class at NID in their search for meaningful occupations for design in India today. It shows that design works and should indeed be used locally in each and every development situation to get the “Jawaja effect” to spread all over the country. Is the Government of India listening? I do hope so.

This strategy has been tried time and again by the NID faculty and students across numerous crafts communities all over India with a great deal of success. Paul Polak in his book “Out of Poverty: What works when traditional approaches fails”, tells us that his own experience with dealing with poverty in agriculture has used entrepreneurship and design strategy at the grassroots level to help eradicate poverty in many places across the world. His work and that of his organization, the International Development Enterprises, can be seen at their website link here.