Mission and Vision: Craft Ecology for IICD Jaipur

Mission and Vision: Craft Ecology for IICD Jaipur

Prof M P Ranjan, NID, Ahmedabad (18 October 2008) Based on note prepared for the Governing Council at the IICD, Jaipur.

Image: Models proposed in the IICD Feasibility Report (download pdf file 386 kb) to capture the tasks, objectives and processes through which these would be carried out.

The Indian Institute of Crafts and Design (IICD) was set up in 1993 based on a Feasibility Report written by the NID, Ahmedabad. The Government of Rajasthan had placed its support for the creation of the IICD in Jaipur because of its promise to bring together three core capabilities of Design , Management and Technology for the development of the Crafts sectors of India. This is the first and only Institute that is mandated to develop knowledge resources and the “Agents of Change” who could make this happen in the field. The Institute has taken time to establish its foundations at the new campus in Jaipur and over the past ten years a credible education programme in crafts design has been established and the students of these programmes are showing their impact in various fields across the crafts sector. Now it is time to take stock and review directions as well as the changes in the macro-economic environment in India as well as across the Globe.

Indian crafts is facing its most critical test of survival due to the massive change that is happening in the National infrastructure leading to huge displacements of population and loss of traditional occupations and unrelenting urbanization development. The focus today is still people as it was when the Institute was established and being a small organization in relation to the huge size and reach of the crafts sector in India the appropriate strategy would be to continue to build high quality catalysts who can act as the transformers in a growing circle of influence through research, design and direct field action.

The Institute will need to expand its focus to include integrated services and know how across various areas of need that are faced by the crafts clusters in India and offer a single window of interface enabled through the “agents of change” who are the main products of the Institute. In addition to design and innovation the services that these agents should offer would now need to encompass social empowerment and confidence measures that would come from an understanding of business processes, finance and management literacy and access to real markets that can produce value to selected groups of crafts entrepreneurs who would form the second leg of the tripod offering. The Institute, in partnership with its main products the “change agents” will engage with numerous crafts entrepreneurs in the field to form an ecosystem of people and processes that would bring stability and creative renewal at all the centres that the Institute chooses to engage with, usually at the invitation of the various stakeholders involved.

Therefore rather than looking at the students as completed products at the end of their education at IICD we would need to innovate community building systems using web based networking and rapid research feedback to create a living meta organisation of collaborators and a growing knowledge base. The institute will quickly need to initiate a direct contact programme with the crafts entrepreneurs drawn from numerous crafts clusters and through a formal programme instill in them the confidence and the abilities to work with the trained designers and technical experts who are the growing number of IICD graduates from its major education programmes.

This new programme will have synergies with the main education programmes and the ripple of impact will grow with each batch of crafts entrepreneurs who return to their major clusters along with new ideas and an integrated set of tools to transform his or her landscape in his cluster while generating value for self and the community. They cannot act independently in the initial stages of their return to their clusters and it is here that we need to partner with development agencies such as the DC(Handicrafts) DC (Handlooms) and the Ministry of Rural Development at the State and Central Government level besides a host of NGO’s and Crafts based industries active in that particular region besides National and International philanthropic systems for support and sustanance. This ecosystem development approach should be refined with the building of working prototypes and in this way a small institute in Jaipur can make a huge impact in the transformation of vast sectors of our crafts based economy which is still a living resource across India today.

We would need to review policies of faculty engagement and introduce liberal approaches to attract and hold high quality professionals from a number of fields including design, management and technology. The Institute must encourage individual and team based research and adopt web based methods of dissemination to help support a widely dispersed user base who would be the growing stakeholders of the Institutes offering. This effort would need to be an integrated region development initiative rather than just an effort to help a sustainable development model across diverse crafts activities all of which would require new knowledge and creative resolution to achieve both ecological as well as socio-economic sustainability models in each of these locations in an ever growing circle of influence.
Staying small and flexible on the one hand and with a big reach on the other hand through the use of web based technologies and networks of field based collaborators for communication and research dissemination would be at the core of vision and drive the mission of the Institute going forward, particularly in the next ten years.
~

Prof M P Ranjan,

Handmade in India: Book Launch in New Delhi

Handmade in India
Edited by Aditi Ranjan and M.P. Ranjan
Book design by Ms. Zenobia Zamindar and Girish Arora.
576 pages, 3500 colour photographs and 140 maps, 9.5 x 13.5” (240 x 340 mm)
End matter includes a Technical Glossary, Annotated Bibliography, Craft Categories, an Index and also a detailed Acknowledgement and Credits.
Co-published in association with COHANDS and Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, Government of India, the book is produced by Mapin.

Image: Front and back cover of the new book and one sample page from the Rajasthan section dealing with the Ajmer metacluster. The book is to be released for the public on the 21st of July 2008 at a brief function at the Rajiv Gandhi Handicrafts Bhavan on Baba Kharakh Singh Marg, New Delhi by , Shri Shankarsinh Vaghela, Honorable Minister of Textiles, Government of India. The book is distributed by Mapin and will be widely available in bookstores in India and overseas.

Handmade in India, An encyclopedia of the crafts of India is a tribute to the Indian craftsperson and is organized by the geographical distribution of the crafts across all states and regions of the country. The Indian craftsperson has demonstrated an uncanny understanding of materials which is combined with a mastery of the tools, techniques and processes that have evolved over the centuries through social and cultural interactions, a tribute to the creative design abilities of the village society. The Eames India Report talks about a search for the values that is uniquely Indian and it is here that the study of Indian crafts will help inform current and future actions in the continuous evolution of the economy and the form that it takes in shaping the culture of the land. Today this craft continuum constitutes an enormous resource that can be harnessed for the future development of our society, particularly as the backbone of a creative economy that is enabled by the embedded knowledge in the traditional wisdom of the sector as well as the digital technologies that help connect this ancient skill to new and future opportunities for the craftspersons across India. We will need to make this enormous knowledge base accessible to planners, business and the rural and urban craftsmen as well as connect these to new local and global opportunities for these skills and resources to be reinterpreted in imaginative ways.

Image: Sample pages from the Rajasthan section. Each section has a master State page which is followed by the Meta-cluster pages and in each of these are the Crafts pages. Shown above are the State double page spread (top left), the Jaipur meta-cluster spread and the Blue Pottery craft (top right), the Ajmer metacluster spread with the crafts of Phad painting and Miniature painting on wood (bottom left) and finally the double spread that includes the crafts of Mojari making, handmade paper, felt products and the Bahi – the clothbound book crafts of Rajasthan.

These examples, we believe are some of the foundations of the creative economy of the future in a web enabled world and easy access in both directions which promises to link the craftsmen to new markets across the world. For this scenario to happen there are several steps involved and the book will be the first in offering insights and data on this vast resource as well as be a vehicle that can provide a platform and a structure to enhance this knowledge. Using the new digital networks and tools of access and interaction that it provides, this knowledge can be put to good use provided the required investments are made in infrastructure and training to realize this inherent potential. It is our intention that the information as well as the framework of situated keywords provided in this book will help all concerned with the promotion, development and use of the crafts of India and that they would be empowered to build a sustainable network of live information. This we believe will help our craftsmen re-connect with world markets, just as they had been doing for centuries in their own village and in their trade route networks of the past, and now the world can be their new village economy, if they are enabled and empowered to change, to meet these new circumstances with access to information that is both live and relevant.

Image: Two models that were prepared in the early 90’s to capture the scope and intentions for the promotion of the crafts sector in Rajasthan and across the rest of India which led to the setting up of the IICD, Jaipur. We were asked to imagine and envision the format and scope of the new Institute for Crafts in Jaipur and today this is an active centre for the creation of change agents hwo are capable of working in the transformation of the crafts sector in India. We will need more such initiatives in the future in India.

“Handmade in India”, is the first of three books, in the series Crafts of India, that are planned. It provides a geographic organization of craft distributed across the length and breadth of the country and shows how craft permeates even the remotest corner of India. It is a confirmation of more that 40 years of effort by faculty and students of the National Institute of Design who have sustained their interest in the crafts of India as a design and development resource for the country when few other organizations showed real interest in what was seen as a glory of the past. That it is a living resource as well as a resource for the future is something that we would strongly advocate and call for sustained investments from both government and industry to ensure its continuity. The realization that it can steer the creative economy for the benefit of an estimated six million crafts persons is a real possibility. These craftspersons have kept this knowledge alive in a tacit living form through their actions and traditional methods of transmission which we are now trying to capture in an explicit format between the covers of a book.

Image: A small collection of colourful toys from a variety of materials by Indian craftsmen from many locations that are featured in the book.

We have had thinkers from the past comparing the crafts of India with the oceans of the world, vast and impossible to put into a bottle of any kind. We are very aware that it is only the whole earth and its gravity that can act as an adequate container for the oceans and water bodies of our planet’s ecology. Our crafts traditions and practices can be compared to this vast ocean and it is only the tips of the ice-berg that are visible in the book and we hope that the web and the digital networks that are built in the subsequent phases can support and play the role of making the rest of the hidden volume visible and accessible in the days ahead. It is a pleasure to see the realization of a dream and the fructification of the efforts of several generations of NID designers as well as a large team of contributors who have made this book possible. With sustained support from our sponsors The Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, Government of India, the COHANDS, and the expertise of Mapin Publishers as well the members of our Institute, the National Institute of Design this product is a reality today. They have provided us the opportunity of producing this work and we look forward to an active period of cooperation in taking this forward to the next stages through books two, three and beyond on the web as a major portal for the Handicrafts of India.

Aditi Ranjan & M P Ranjan
Editors: Handmade in India
National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India
19 July 2008

For further information contact:

The Council of Handicraft Development Corporations (COHANDS), New Delhi.
Email: cohands4 (at) vsnl.net

The Office of the Development Commissioner (Handicrafts), Government of India, Ministry of Textiles, R K Puram, New Delhi
Email: dchejs (at) nic.in

National Institute of Design, Paldi, Ahmedabad 380007, Gujarat
Email: outreach (at) nid.edu

Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd, Usmanpura, Ahmedabad 380014
Email: mapin (at) mapinpub.com

Indian Institute of Crafts and Design: IICD, Jaipur: Looking back in 2008

IICD, Jaipur: Reflectiions on its inception and establishment as a sector focused design institute, perhaps a model for the 230 other sectors that need design in India today.

1: What is Craft: A model from the IICD Feasibility Report of 1993

The Rajasthan Government exhibited an unusual degree of imagination and vision when they commissioned the National Institute of Design in March 1991 to conduct a research project leading to the creation of a feasibility report for a new School of Crafts, as it was called then. The then Chief Secretary, Mr M L Mehta and the Commissioner of Industries Mr R S Sisodia were the high level team that spearheaded the Governments’ initiative and at the operational level it was the management of the RAJSICO and the Office of the Director of Industries that was given the responsibility of steering and managing the project as it went through the research, evaluation and proposal phase over the next two years. The feasibility report submitted by the NID team of J A Panchal and M P Ranjan was approved in April 1993 by the State Government and under the direct control of the RAJSICO it was decided to set up an instuitute at Jaipur as proposed in our report, the draft of which had been discussed at a well attended round-table and workshop that was held in February 1992. The feasibility report itself was based on a set of nine models that captured the contours of the domain that was to be influenced and led on to the products and by-products of the proposed institute. These models defined the term crafts as an economic development activity that was located in the cusp of core areas of employment in the rural sector that drew their opportunities from the major agricultural sector on the one side and the social and cultural activities on the other while the central focus had the crafts as an industry that employed the largest number of people after the agri-sector in India. Other models spelt out the linkages and constituents and the profile of programmes and activities. The schedule of education programmes as well as that of spaces led to an organizational structure that was developed with the assistance of faculty from the IRMA, Anand and the IIMA, Ahmedabad. These also envisaged the stages of creation of the institute and the ideal location for its establishment and the impact that it could have on the crafts sector as a whole. The last model enlisted the proposed outcomes. These nine models helped make visible the core ideas that were included in the text of the document and these were particularly significant since many of the stake-holders were not expected to read the full text of the document but could still get a birds-eye-view of the substantive proposals that were included in the report. From our experience this was a very effective strategy since most people had a clear understanding of the intentions of the institute if not the methods and means to realise the stated objectives.

2: Schedule of Programmes for the IICD from the Feasibility Report

The institute was commissioned in early 1994 and a Governing Council was constituted which included representatives from the Rajasthan Government under the Chairmanship of the Chief Secretary. The external members included the Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, the Directors off NIFT and NID as well as some prominent master-crafts-persons and this composition demonstrated the seriousness with which the Government viewed the role of the institute at the very inception. The stated mission of the institute, which was accepted by the State Government, was to make an institute of national importance that would focus on the creation of knowledge and human resources for the benefit of the crafts sector using design as the prime driving principle. This was a visionary step at a time when all the resources that were being invested into the crafts sector were entirely in the nature of grants and aid that supported the training of craftsmen as well as support for crafts promotion activities such as market meets, museums and retail stores for the handicrafts sector. While doing our research we found that there was not a single institute or university department anywhere in the country that was mandated to develop knowledge resources for the crafts sector although NID and NIFT as well as some design programmes at the IIT’s had taken up this task on the basis of faculty interest at these institutes. It was therefore decided to make the creation of knowledge in design, technology and marketing as an area of focus and the creation of educated and capable “agents of change” as the mission for the proposed institute. This was easier said than done. While the mission was understood in its abstract statement the translation of these intentions into action was quite another ball game particularly since most people who had previously been involved in the crafts sector were steeped in their concern for the craftsmen and their present condition and the need for innovation and a shift of focus to these “agents of change” was often seen as another elitist endeavor that took the attention away from the plight of the craftsmen in the field. This mindset was perhaps the biggest stumbling block in the early years of setting up of the institute. The need for a new institute was not disputed and it was agreed that, I quote from the feasibility report – “ There is an urgent need for the creation of an institution of excellence that is charged with the mission of developing the crafts sector in an integrated manner. Design, as defined in the broadest possible sense, shall be the discipline used and nurtured by this institute to affect the envisaged development mission and to realize its objectives. The range of tasks and challenges, which such an institution would need to undertake, implies the use of information and knowledge-rich approach over and above the usually accepted component of skills. Only an institution operating at a level of excellence will be able to command the respect of and attract the best people from various fields to participate as faculty and staff in furthering and realizing its mission and objectives”. – Unquote.

3: Proposed Education Programmes for the IICD from the Feasibility Report

The State Government made a valiant effort to set up the institute and get it running while plans were afoot to find a location for its proposed building to commence the education programmes. A core faculty team was appointed in 1995 and the basic activities of curriculum building commenced soon thereafter. The institute was formally registered and a committee of teachers from NID and NIFT were given the task of developing the curriculum for the first Craft Design programme in the country. This task was completed in April 1997, which set the stage for the commencement of the first batch of design students at the Post Graduate level. In the intervening years the institute conducted several craft specific training programmes of three and six months duration as well as commissioned and undertook a number of craft documentation and design projects that were handled by the faculty as well as other resource persons from NIFT and NID on a sponsored project basis. This helped the institute commence a number of activities that could be handled in a collaborative mode even when its own staff and faculty strength were still at a nascent stage. The next year the faculty strength was stabilized with the induction of fresh members and the PG programmes were commenced from rented premises in Jaipur city. The first batch of students gave the faculty a realistic platform to develop a design curriculum that could address the needs of the crafts community across many material and technique categories as well as the huge number of locations in India where an enormous variety has been catalogued and studied. The challenges of the programme and the fledgling institute were many. However the spirit was one of exploration and discovery in which all members took great pride in participation and the journey was quite exciting for all participants. I was involved directly for two years as an acting director in the years leading up to the first programme at the request of the Government and NID made this possible by offering my services on a part time basis in a project format that was handled under the Outreach Programmes of NID. However this arrangement was not continued and the NID involvement got disconnected due to political uneasiness that seemed to emerge from the two roles played by an NID faculty, one as a director of a new institute while continuing to teach and work at NID.

4: Expected Products from the IICD as expressed in the Feasibility Report

The State Government appointed a full time director with administrative authority and the institute expanded its programmes and activities over the next few years. However it was felt that the massive role that was set for the institute could only be achieved if the organization had the autonomy and the requisite funds without being burdened by the Governmental mode of functioning although in the intervening years a new campus had been established and a number of batches had graduated successfully. Last year the State Government decided to transform the management style of the institute by inducting an industry partner to fund and manage that activities in a flexible and effective manner while the ownership of the instutute remained with the Government. A call for partners culminated in the selection of the Ambuja Education Foundation being co-opted as the private sector partner with Suresh Neotia as the Chairman of a new Governing Council which was established with five nominees each from – the Government, the partner and from a pool of independent expert members. This Governing Council has now taken charge and a new director, Prof Sangita Shroff a graduate of NID and a former faculty of NIFT, has been appointed to lead the institute on a planned programme of growth and experimentation as envisaged in the feasibility report.

5: Handmade in India – Evidence of a living tradition that can support the Creative Economy of India

Read more about the Handmade in India book here
The crafts of India is indeed an ocean of opportunity and with the anticipated evolution of the creative economy we see a new role for the crafts based producers in becoming a vibrant entrepreneurial pool of resources that can help transform the rural and urban employment settings by creating value added opportunities that can help create wealth and sustainable livelihoods for a huge population of skilled people in the country. The institute will need to scale up and expand its activities in research and knowledge creation tasks so that the needs of this creative economy can be supported by the products of the institute which would be both in the form of trained human resources as well as design, technology and market strategies that would be innovated as part of the research driven agenda in the years ahead.

Download Feasibility Report as pdf file 386 kb
Link to the IICD website here

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

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

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

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

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

Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

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

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

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

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

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

Rockytoy story: Reflections on the building of a micro-enterprise with design in India

Image: My father, M V Gopalan is standing in the middle dressed in white as always and my brother M P Manohar is the one on the right sporting a beard standing with colleagues at the factory with some of the wooden toys on display. This picture was taken sometime in the early 80's when I had returned to NID as a faculty.
Having written about the Lego story in my last post below, I felt that it would be appropriate to continue the toy-story thread with some reflections on my own life and my personal interface with toys and toy making. By the way, I was born in 1950 on the 9th November and on that same eventful day, according to Rene Spitz in his book “hfg ulm: The View behind the Foreground”, the Ulm School of Design got its name, a significant moment for design, the naming of the great school in Germany, not my birth. I was born in the humble house of a carpenter, nay a young engineering teacher turned carpenter-entrepreneur by choice and I am told on that same day the house and the factory attached to our house got connected to the electric power grid for the first time. It was also an auspicious day for all Hindus’ since Deepavali (Diwali – the festival of lights) happened to fall on that day in that particular year, which was the 9th of November 1950, I am told. My full name is M P Ranjan, where Ranjan is my first name and "M P" stands for my family name when expanded, but this is never used except on my passport document. "M P" stands for Mundon Pandan. My students call me "Ranjan", my first name and in most formal situations I am Prof. Ranjan or Mr. M P Ranjan. This is a very personal story.

Image: Rocking horses in wood documented in 1975 after I had changed the colour schemes and added polka dots to make them contemporary for the market
By the way, the toy factory was called "Modern Agencies" and was set up by my father, M V Gopalan, in 1942 in Madras in South India (now called Chennai) with a capital investment of Rs 350/- after he chose to “retire” young from his engineering college teaching job to become an micro-scale entrepreneur. I have not written about my toy experiences much before but I think that it is now time to add this dimension to my website and the blog. The toy factory made wooden toys and playground equipment and included toys for home use as well as many educational products and furniture for the local school markets, over 400 products were on the price list and as the factory grew it became the biggest toy company in South India with supplies going to all major cities of South India by 1964. At this time it employed over 400 full time workers and many others on contract labour who worked from their home and this community may have numbered over 1000 individuals who worked from home to carry out these contract tasks. The product line included papier mache dancing dolls, wooden toys, educational aids, school furniture, office and domestic furniture as well as flush doors and specialized industrial wooden products of many descriptions.

Image: M P Ranjan as a child and one of my favorite toys that was made in my father's factory and one that I got to redesign in 1974 when I returned from NID.
The product range, which started with Rocking Horses, in wood, were the most popular product line in the fifties and the early sixties, The other items included school counting frames using wooden beads, outsourced from the town of Channapatna in Karnataka State. The next most popular item that I remember is the Papier Mache Dancing Dolls that sold in the hundreds of thousands at local exhibitions and they literally flew off the shelf and these were all made by the contract craftsmen families living in the city of Madras, near Saidapet, Velecheri (near our factory located in Guindy) and some as far away as Royapettah and Perembur across the city and quite far away to the North of the city. My father was quite proud of the fact that he had managed to provide stable employment for so many people when getting an honest days wage was an uphill task in most Indian cities. In the late fifties he had set up a toy retail shop under the brand name of "Rockytoys" after the popular rocking horses that he had innovated and produced from 1942 onwards. He had designed his own jig-saw "machine" in 1942 that used a bullock-cart wheel that was used to power the cutting machine, which was operated by a person who turned the fly-wheel using a hand-crank, and a stout rope then transferred this power through a system of pulleys to work the simple “machine”. He developed a similar sand-papering machine and with these two creations set about the making of his single product, in those days, the hugely popular wooden rocking horse. The rocking horses that were made in the early days were sold in the city of Madras directly by my father who used to take the finished product on the back of bicycles and later in larger numbers on hand carts when the production and sale grew in response to demand and these were first sold directly off the streets and later in stores that kept regular stocks as the market expanded for these products.

Image: The old and new jeep toy as seen in the old Rockytoys photo album in my mother's house. The new jeep was a redesign done by me in 1974 and I will detail the design strategy and more about it in my next post.
From these humble beginnings his factory grew and prospered and the product range was diversified further into furniture and school equipment. Many new machines came in and the production then included the making of wooden components for railway coaches for the fledgling coach factory in Avadi, Madras and the manufacture of plywood flush doors using a new lamination technology that he learned from an Italian engineer, Bottichelli (pronounced Butty Jelley in those days). With the help of his expertise the company took up the fascinating task of building 14 plywood houses for the faculty and an auditorium for the experimental dance school of Rukmini Devi Arundale at the Kalakshetra Foundation in Madras. I was fortunate to watch these developments at close quarters as a child and to visit the construction sites with a sense of wonder at all this adventure in small-scale manufacture and entrepreneurship. This is a long story of entrepreneurship that has been repeated many times in India and it is a true rag to riches story that I will try to tell later in some detail when time permits. I did not know it then, but it was design and innovation that was the driver for my fathers efforts and when I look back I realize how fortunate I was to experience these events and I wish that many more of our young students in India would have such exposure which their schools just cannot or do not provide today.

From the perspective of my real world education the story gets interesting here, In 1964 to 1967 my father’s factory and his network of suppliers faced their first major labour unrest. The city of Madras and the whole of South India discovered Red flags and Communism in a big way and due to the associated trade union action and the factory was closed down for over a year and then in smaller sessions due to the labour strikes and follow-up court action. Needless to say my father lost all his money. I was 14 years old then and old enough to understand first-hand what he was going through in his moment of crisis. Some production however continued through the network of outsourced contract labour and his business survived (another long story waiting to be told) and as a result I decided in 1968 not to join either the local Engineering College or the School of Architecture, where I had obtained admission after completing my one year Pre-University course from the prestigious Madras Christian College at Tambaram. My childhood education was the best that money could buy in Madras in those days. I went to Church Park, Presentation Convent at Thousand Lights in Madras for my junior nursery to fifth standard classes (seven years of Convent education by Irish Nuns - my language competence came from here, I am sure) and then to high school at the Madras Christian College High School as Chetput in Madras where I did engineering as my major subject. However, I now realise that I had lived a double life, one with great schooling and academic rigor and the second with a terrific grounding in real world skills at our factory and our business on toy design and manufacture and marketing. In 1969 I applied to NID’s Post Graduate programme in Furniture Design as an "Experienced Cabinet Maker" after working full time with my father in his business for one year, although I had been involved in his business already from 1964, if I look back and my childhood experiences.

Image: A collection of toys made during the "Bamboo Boards and Beyond" project at NID in 2000 as part of the range that I designed based on my Rockytoys experience.
At NID most of the products that I designed as a student were for children, I made a stackable fibreglass chair and table and prototyped it in 1970, a Tier-bed for children in metal tubes and wood which was knockdown and many toy ideas that were sketched and built as concept models. In 1972 I was inducted on to the faculty at NID and I decided to follow my growing interest in research and education and my disillusion with Indian business climate as a whole from my early experiences in the field. I hit a road-block in 1974 when I was asked to leave NID abruptly, in my view unfairly, but I had no option but to go back to Madras while I continued to argue my case with the then NID management for redress. At Madras, I realised later, that this was a blessing in disguise, a trial by fire if you will, and I set up my own design practice from my bedroom and using my fathers phone, I took on all sorts of design assignments on the basis of my very broad education and exposure at NID, interiors, Graphic print brochures and symbol design for a local advertising agency and exhibition design which resulted in a very healthy cash flow, far in excess of my NID salary. In the nights I worked on design of a new range of wooden toys for my fathers factory to pay back for the lunches, dinners and for the roof over my head. In two years at Madras I had designed more that a hundred new toys (some redesigned or with new colour-schemes) and this transformed the profit profile of our company and our sales from the Rockytoys Showroom sky-rocketed in those days, thanks to the design inputs which became visible and appreciated due to the real demonstration that was taking place. But I was however restless and continued to follow up the NID dream. I was finally re-inducted at NID on the faculty in 1976 and among the first project that I took up independently was the Chennapatna Toys collection for the crafts community there with sponsorship from the All India Handicrafts Board (now called the Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, Government of India). The toys that I designed then are still in production at many centres across India since they are made using wood turning and are easy to make and sell with very little capital to start a new company. In the bamboo range we have designed many toys and children’s furniture, which are now being promoted as poverty busters that can help Rural India survive the globalisation pressures. I now realize that I had intuitively embedded certain qualities into the products that could support start-up entrepreneurship and this is perhaps the reason why these products are made and produced at so many locations around India by small producers who like my farther have tried to find their feet and survive in a situation of poverty and absence of capital.

My brother, M P Manohar took over our factory and businesses after my father passed away in 1988, since he was already helping him for many years in the business at Madras. However the manufacture of wooden toys was coming under serious competition from plastics and the labour situation was not easy either nor did our family have the capital to grow the factory to the next level of sustainability with the introduction of automation and new quality standards that markets demanded and it was therefore closed down and eventually sold out in the mid 90’s. My brother continues to live and work in Madras (Chennai) and is now with the Dakshin Chitra Foundation to help build a Toy Museum at the Foundation's exhibition site outside Chennai. My brother too had studied with me through all the schools, just one year behind me in a junior class, and then he too joined NID as a student of Graphic design in 1973 although he too was a skilled craftsman having made over 100 or so Aero models, ships and many many other things together through our very rich childhood experiences together, including plastic scale models of architectural projects and buildings which my father had started as a side business to the toy factory. Life was tough but we can now look back and cherish the finer points of the rich experience, no regrets whatsoever. My mother too had joined the family business when the going got very tough in 1964 and stayed on with the shop in the city till my father passed away in 1988. She now lives in Bangalore in her own home near that of my sister (M P Meera - Meera Nandanan) who also lives there, having moved back from Kolkatta to Madras and then to Bangalore after our business was closed down in the mid 90's. She too contributed and managed the Rockytoys showroom during her stay at Madras from the early 80's. So in all it was a true family saga that needs to be told in some detail, hopefully sometime soon, with pictures.

This is a short version of our Toy story and I think that it is now time to blog my experience on toys and to share my experiences. By the way, since I got passionately involved in each of my activities as they unfolded I used to be called "Dr.Toy" by my friends and acquaintances in the early 80's before I moved on to acquire new skills to become "Dr. Geometry" and "Dr.Computers" "Dr. Publications" and now-a-days "Dr. Bamboo" and "Dr. Design Theory"....... By the way, I have never completed any degree qualification in my entire career but I have managed to attract these taunts, nevertheless.

Tripura Bamboo Mission: Design as a Partner in Grassroots Development Initiatives

Image: Meeting of the Tripura Bamboo Mission at Agartala on 8th December 2007 Chaired by Shri Manik Sarkar, Honorable Chief Minister of Tripura.

The State Government of Tripura has to deal with the onerous complexity of initiating and sustaining development actions in their land which is a locked territory located in the remote Northeastern Region of India lying on the east of Bangladesh and with road and rail connections to the rest of India and the outside world only through a long and difficult path through Assam, Meghalaya and West Bengal. Besides this geographic complexity, they also have to cope with the absence of any industry that has taken root in the State over the past fifty years since Indian Independence. The State has also faced a long period of political unrest as well as being impacted by similar conditions in many of the nearby states in the region. Rural poverty is therefore a major problem and the economic condition of the large tribal population in the state is also an area of deep concern. The State of Tripura has a long common International border with Bangladesh and Myanmar but these are closed for all practical purposes due to the absence of trade and political agreements between the countries involved.

It is in this challenging geo-political situation that the State Government announced the Tripura State Bamboo Policy, the first such initiative by any state in the country and well ahead of the National Bamboo Policy which came up later. A number of progressive measures were initiated and over the past few years there have been many development initiatives that have been done by the State including a major conference on Bamboo to discuss the proposed Bamboo Policy, another last year to explore and showcase areas of application and the setting up of a University programme for educating bamboo experts who could help the rural people mobilize their local resources in a systematic manner. Last year the Government invited the IL&FS, New Delhi to take on the task of manning a mission mode development initiative that could move the local bamboo crafts and small scale industry from a gross turnover of about Rupees 25 crores per annum to about Rupees 75 crores per annum in the handicrafts, mats and agarbatti sectors which employ a huge number of people, all to be done in a time bound manner of three years.

The NID teams having worked in the Northeast and in Tripura on a sustained basis for over the past 30 years was identified as a natural partner for providing design supports for this new initiative in the State. Several NID graduates are also included in the list of design support providers while the IL&FS will use their own management and local infrastructure to manage the relationships on the ground and provide the integrated linkages with the Government and all the local stakeholders in the particular locations. The Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID (CFBI-NID) has built a body of experience as well as a portfolio of bamboo based designs that are being offered to the Tripura Bamboo Mission along with a framework of locally delivered training and quality establishment processes that could be linked to the matrix of market needs and producer capabilities in the selected cluster in rural Tripura. These actions would be taken through the stages of sensing, exploring, making, evaluating and sharing. Through these stages we expect to grow the participation of our stakeholders in the rural locations and in some cases we would want these to be women’s’ groups who could manage their entrepreneurial ventures themselves. Our faculty and student teams who would be supported by skilled craftsmen who have been trained at the BCDI and capable of supporting the prototyping tasks that we anticipate as we go forward with our design support project in the state.

On the 7th December 2007 we were invited to a formal meeting that was organised by the IL&FS in Agartala where all the partners of the Tripura Bamboo Mission met to exchange a Memorandum of Association with these partners and a Statement of Intent with the CFBI-NID on bringing design skill sets to the activities on the ground. The meeting was chaired by the Honorable Chief Minister of Tripura, Shri Manik Sarkar with an active participation and addresses from Shri Sashi Prakash, Chief Secretary, Government of Tripura, and Shri Tapan Chakraborty, Honorable Minister of Industries and Commerce. The MoU’s were signed between the Tripura Bamboo Mission represented by the IL&FS on one side at the partners on the other and these included one with the ITC Ltd. For development of the agarbatti industry in the State, another with Cottage Industries also for this sector. The Industree Crafts of Bangalore were requested to support market access for rural producers. The CFBI-NID signed a “Statement of Intent” to provide design supports and know how across three broad product categories of fine bamboo loom woven mats, splits and split based furniture and Bambusa affinis based whole bamboo furniture from the Katlamara cluster which would be disseminated to a wider audience that has now taken up cultivation as part of the Tripura Bamboo Mission based on our design demonstrations.

We are looking forward to an active period of partnership with the IL&FS teams in Tripura and with the Tripura Bamboo Mission over the next three years to bring design capabilities to the producer groups in Tripura.

User Centric Design Opportunities for GeoVisualisation

Paper and Visual presentation to the first National Conference on GeoVisualisation (GVDRP-2007) at NID in December 2007.
Image: Case Study on village resource mapping assignment by the students of Gandhinagar Campus of NID.

User Centric Design Opportunities for GeoVisualisation: A presentation to the first Geovisualisation Conference at NID.

Prof. M P Ranjan
Chairman, GeoVisualisation Task Group, DST
Faculty of Design, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad

Abstract
The first National Conference on GeoVisualisation (GVDRP-2007) gives us a unique opportunity to reflect on the design opportunities that are emerging in our country for the creation of User Centric Design in the field of GeoVisualisation. Design can bring a new approach to the use of the amazing technologies that have been developed by science and technology and this is an area that we will need to focus on if the current developments are to be put to effective use by ordinary people in their day to day lives.

India lives in many centuries and the rapid strides of development and the forces of globalisation are impacting the lives of all of us, particularly those who live and work in the rural sectors of our economy. It is here that most of our people live and perhaps where we should be making an effort to make a positive impact through a concerted effort to make the tools and processes accessible to the people who need it the most. How do we achieve this when the tools and technology has been held and operated by educated and urban oriented individuals and institutions and when these are not designed to be available to the rural inhabitants? This is perhaps where design imagination can create new avenues for the application of these new tools and techniques in a democratic and ubiquitous manner all over our land. Is this a pipe dream or can or be a reality? Can we demonstrate this possibility in a few significant case studies so that it evokes a sense of commitment across the country to use these now widely available resources particularly in an IT enabled manner.

Image: Case Study of a student project by Sujay Swadi Sanan made by hand drawn buildings to illustrate the Heritage Walk Map for the Old City of Ahmedabad. In this paper we will show that many new applications are indeed possible and these would cover the hitherto ignored areas of application in a participatory manner to make it both usable and relevant to the local condition and the aspirations of the people whom it is to serve. Some suggestions have been made using examples of classroom and research projects conducted by the students and faculty of the National Institute of Design to show how the tools and knowledge domains in the area of geovisualisation can be applied to new and interesting applications that can reach far into our rural hinterland and how these could become a mission that would be achieved through active user participation to address local needs and aspirations in a variety of critical areas of application. These could be called design opportunities since the intention is to add value to the local situation through making the information and knowledge both usable as well as accessible to the users in their own domains.

The areas of application that we see are in mapping out the resources and local knowledge resources in a highly usable geospatial data base that is empowered and enabled by local participation and with the close involvement of local school and professional participants. For this to work we would need a back end that is technology enabled and based on web based tools as well as a field level strategy to keep the database alive and locally relevant. The fields of application could be for stakeholders in primary and secondary education as well as to empower the enormous skill base that promises to become the foundation of the creative economy of the future just as it has been an active ingredient in the sustenance of the rural economy in the past. Blending the past and the future to meet emerging needs could give us immediate benefits as well as long term resources to move our economy forward with wide participation of many sectors of our population. The areas that we envisage are village resource mapping that could be carried out and maintained by the use of simple and usable technologies in conjunction with sophisticated but highly usable backend technology tools and infrastructure. Such maps would keep local data of interest to local stakeholders as an area of priority and the creation and utilization could be carried out in a decentralized manner while remaining usable for a host of administrative and developmental situations.

Image: Case Study of the proposed web enabled and geo-referernced database of handicrafts clusters in India that could be used to empower and enable the creation of creative industries based on a rich local resource of skills and tarditional knowledge. The examples that are shared include a heritage walk at Ahmedabad, a village resource and design opportunity mapping venture, a craft skill and distribution mapping research as well as some speculative applicatioins that are proposed to be taken up with design students at NID in the near future. These design driven applications and explorations will be local in character but some of the insights that are gleaned would help set the agenda for a wider mission based application that would bring huge benefits to the stakeholders across the country. It is proposed that the DST and the NID Centre for Geovisualisation could partner in the research that is needed to make these design journeys that will set the tone for new and effective applications of Geovisualisation in the country.

The visual presentation titled "User Centric Design Opportunities for GeoVisualisation" can be downloaded from here as a 1.9 MB pdf file.

Handmade in India: A Handbook of the Crafts of India arrives from the publisher

Handmade in India: An encyclopedia of the handicrafts of India

Handmade in India
Edited by Aditi Ranjan and M.P. Ranjan
576 pages, 3500 colour photographs and 140 maps, 9.5 x 13.5” (240 x 340 mm), hc, October 2007, ISBN: 978-81-88204-57-1 (Mapin), Series ISBN: 978-81-88204-49-6 (Mapin), Copublished in association with COHANDS
Rs.3,950.00 / US$95.00
more about availability in October 2007
from the Mapin Publishers Pvt. Ltd. link here

Handmade in India, volume 1, is a tribute to the Indian craftsperson and is organized by the geographical distribution of the crafts across all states and regions of the country. The Indian craftsperson has demonstrated an uncanny understanding of materials which is combined with a mastery of the tools, techniques and processes that have evolved over the centuries through social and cultural interactions, a tribute to the creative design abilities of the village society. The Eames India Report talks about a search for the values that is uniquely Indian and it is here that the study of Indian crafts will help inform current and future actions in the continuous evolution of the economy and the form that it takes in shaping the culture of the land. Today this craft continuum constitutes an enormous resource that can be harnessed for the future development of our society, particularly as the backbone of a creative economy that is enabled by the embedded knowledge in the traditional wisdom of the sector as well as the digital technologies that help connect this ancient skill to new and future opportunities for the craftspersons across India. We will need to make this enormous knowledge base accessible to planners, business and the rural and urban craftsmen as well as connect these to new local and global opportunities for these skills and resources to be reinterpreted in new and imaginative ways.


Sample page showing a typical craft and associated images, text and keywords

This we believe is the foundation of the creative economy of the future in a massively web enabled world and easy access in both directions which promises to link the craftsmen to new markets across the world. For this to happen there are several steps involved and the book will be the first in offering insights and data on this vast resource as well as be a vehicle that can provide a platform and a structure to enhance this knowledge using the new digital networks and tools of access and interaction that it provides provided the required investments are made in infrastructure and training to realize the inherent potential. It is our intention that the information as well as the framework of situated keywords provided in this book will help all concerned with the promotion, development and use of the crafts of India would be empowered to build a sustainable network of live information. This we believe will help our craftsmen re-connect with world markets, just as they had been doing for centuries in their own village and in their trade route networks of the past, and now the world can be their new village economy, if they are enabled and empowered to change to meet these new circumstances with access to information that is both live and relevant.

This volume, “Handmade in India”, is the first of three that are planned and it provides a geographic organization of craft distribution across the length and breadth of the country and shows how craft permeates even the remotest corner of India. In this introductory note we have tried to summarize the enormity of craft variety and the significant role that it plays in the day-to-day lives of both rural and urban people. These linked posts below cover several frequently asked questions about this massive work that has gone on for many years at NID and now we are in a position to make it available to a wider audience for the benefit of informed decisions relating to the development initiatives associated with these crafts in India.

As editors of this work situated as design teachers at India’s National Institute of Design, we would like to celebrate the arrival of the first advance copy from the Mapin Publishers and it is a confirmation of more that 40 years of efforts by faculty and students of this great Institute who have sustained their interest in the crafts of India as a design and development resource for the country when few other organizations showed real interest in what was seen as a glory of the past. That it is a living resource as well as a resource for the future is something that we would strongly advocate and call for sustained investments from both government and industry to ensure its continuity towards a the realization of its future potential as a driver for the creative economy for the estimated six million crafts persons who have kept this knowledge alive through their actions and traditional methods of transmission which we are today trying to capture in an explicit format between the covers of a book. We have had thinkers from the past comparing the crafts of India with the oceans of the world, vast and impossible to put into a bottle of any kind. We are very aware that it is only the whole earth and its gravity that can act as an adequate container for the oceans and water bodies of our planets ecology. Our vast and varied crafts traditions and practices can be compared to this vast ocean and it is only the tips of this enormous ice-berg that are visible in the book and we hope that the web and the digital networks that built in the subsequently phases can support and can play the role of making the rest of the hidden volume visible and accessible in the days ahead. Our attempt has been to provide a framework on which this can be built in the days ahead.

It is a pleasure to hold the advance copy in hand and see the realization of a dream and the fructification of the efforts of several generations of NID designers as well as a large team of contributors who have made this book possible, thank you all. We would like to thank our sponsors the Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, Government of India, the COHANDS, Mapin Publishers as well as our Institute, the National Institute of Design for having provided us the opportunity of producing this work and we look forward to an active period of cooperation in taking this forward to the next stages through volumes two, three and beyond.

Aditi Ranjan & M P Ranjan
Editors: Handmade in India
7 August 2007 from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India

See a note on the Information Architecture used for the book to enable informed web searches on each craft that is covered here in the book.