Web of Connections: Indian Design education with influences from the HfG Ulm
Web of Connections: Indian Design
education with influences from the HfG Ulm
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.com
and 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
~
