Design Education for India: What should be our focus and areas of
emphasis?
Prof M P Ranjan
Professor – Design Chair,
CEPT University, Ahemdabad
28 May 2013
With several new design
schools coming up in the private sector as well as the four new National
Institutes of Design (NID) that are being set up by the Government of India in
different regions of India we have at our hands many questions that would need
ot be addressed if these are to be truly useful for the needs of our times. In
1961 when the first NID was set up at Paldi, Ahmedabad it was informed in its
content and scope by a vision report articulated by the team of Charles and Ray
Eames, an eminent American design couple who produced the India Report at the
request of the then Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. We now know that
the four new NID’s would be
located at Jorhat, Hyderabad, Kurukshetra and Bhopal since the foundation
stones have been laid for three of these already and the fourth must be waiting
for the right politician to find time to grace the occasion at a short notice,
since all the others were done in indecent haste in any case with very little
notice given to the design community at large. We are not aware of any approach
paper or feasibility report that has been drafted for the new NID’s and it is
widely assumed that what worked in Paldi will work for the future as well and
this is unfortunately a very lazy assessment. Very little is visible in the
public domain for the plans and future actions proposed at the four new NID’s
except the three foundation stones that are in place and very little else by
way of intellectual articulation of focus, curriculum and strategy that would
inform the management and growth if each of these new NID’s in the days ahead.
A group of concerned design
activists formed and set up a group called VisionFirst <http://visionfirst.in> soon after the
Government and the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotions (DIPP) that
handles NID matters at the Central Government level had called for public
tenders for the setting up of these proposed four new schools of design and the
manner in which the matter was handled at that time led to much dissatisfaction
in the design community online as well as in many pockets of serious
interactions. Thanks to this public pressure and the intervention of Sam
Pitroda at the Planning Commission level the plans were modified and the effort
was made to make the Institutes fully Government owned and operated. The
VisionFirst group had been calling for a fresh assessment of needs in the
country and the experience that we have in the country is so diverse and that experience was at hand for the repositioning of design and its use at the heart of
government and industry.
The group was invited to meet representatives of theDIPP and at this meeting they suggested that wide ranging consultations would
be the order of the day since design action in all these areas were available
in the field in a pretty diffuse manner and offered to help garner these ideas
based on which the country could move forward rapidly and with a clear focus.
One of our colleagues on the
VisionFirst group, Uday Dandavate, wrote to the DIPP to supplement the submissions made by the core
team in their face to face interaction at New Delhi. This submission can be
seen at this link on the VisionFirst blog site. However I quote two highlighted
paragraphs from Uday’s letter that capture the essence of our concerns.
I Quote, “I share strong concerns the design
community in india has about the current process being followed by the DIPP in
appointing a consultant for setting up four new campuses of NID.
The current process has by-passed a critical phase of institution
building- that of building a vision. Therefore I believe this process must be
paused. It will lead to arbitrary use of public funds without following due
diligence. The haste with which the RFP process is being pushed has created an
impression in public that the government is more keen on spending
large amount of money than following due diligence in building institutions of
national importance and contemporary relevance.” UnQuote
And at another place in his
letter he says – “By
excluding leading thinkers of design profession from the process of visioning
the expansion of NID’s the Government is sure to fall into the trap of
investing in outdated concept of design education. I wonder what would have
been the fate of India’s democracy if we had floated a tender inviting consultants
for building various ministries”instead of forming a constituent assembly to
draft the constitution through collaboration of the eminent thinkers of India.”
End of quote
There was a long silence
after these interactions in 2011 and then there was a spate of stone laying
functions at Jorhat and then at Kurukshetra and Hyderabad. The India Design
Council held a three day conference on design education titled “DesigningDesign Education for India (DDEI) which many of us hoped would represent a
progressive approach to national consultations but the website that called for
perticipation opened public registration just one week before the event and
many of were excluded from this event due to tight time planning that would
have been required to make it to the event. I hope that the event that did take
place was a useful one and that we will soon see some of the discussions that
did take place there and that the website will soon be updated and provide the
proceedings for public review. http://www.ddei.in/
What the VisionFirst team and in particular Uday Dandavate in his letter to
DIPP had offered was a platform for co-creation and what was managed was a
seminar with “peer reviewed paper” whatever that means in this particular
context, all done in great haste in one week before the conference itself.
If there are detailed plans
drawn up by the DIPP and the NID administration, these should be shared with
the Indian public and with the Indian design community before public money is
expended on making clones of the NID in Paldi, Gandhinagar and Bangalore.
Design is getting National attention today and the Indian Cabinet has placed
its recommendation on the agenda of the Indian Parliament for the recognition
of NID as an Institute if National Importance. What we are suggesting here is
that we go one step further and make the NID and the design agenda one of
national relevance as well. Design is a subject that evolves with time and is
very context sensitive and this needs to be recognized when looking at new
design infrastructure and education processes that will address the needs of an
India of the current and the next century.
The evolution of design education
was the subject of my paper at the DETM conference at NID in 2005 and I offer
it here below as a footnote to our call for a fresh rethink in the shaping of
the new design education landscape for the India of today and the future.
~
Lessons from Bauhaus, Ulm and NID: Role of Basic Design in
PG Education
M P Ranjan
Faculty of
Design
National
Institute of Design
Paper submitted for the DETM Conference at the National
Institute of Design, Ahmedabad in March 2005.
Abstract:
Basic Design
within Design Education has come a long way since its origins at Bauhaus and
its further evolution at Ulm. At NID it has found a durable place in the
Foundation programme offered to the Undergraduate programme students but is not
yet seen as either critical or necessary in the various Post Graduate streams
that are offered today. The assumptions seem to be that the mature students who
enter these disciplines can pick up the concepts of design due to their
advanced learning qualifications or backgrounds. The other concern that
surfaces with the widespread use of computers is the notion the traditional
skills need not be offered since design too has become a knowledge driven
discipline with the significant use of computing tools thereby obviating the
need for basic skill training. The author argues that basic design as it is
offered in the Foundation Programme has evolved from a need that was originally
perceived and dealt with at Bauhaus and Ulm as a critical orientation to design
thinking and action and this need has not changed in spite of a substantial
change in the tools and processes of design in the information age. We
therefore need to revisit the traditions of design learning and try to
understand the role played by basic design and see how it should be woven into
the process of inducting new entrants into the realm of design thinking and
action. Design is taking on new meaning and it is increasingly being separated
from the skillful base that it was originally married to due to the tools and
traditional processes that are a fallback of various historical stages of
evolution in a large number of disciplines. Design is being recognized finally
as being distinct from both art and science and the search for educational
processes that are distinctly designerly may not be a misplaced pursuit.
Key words:
Basic Design,
Foundation Programme, Design Fundamentals, Design Education, Design History
Background
Modern design
education had its roots in the Industrial revolution when changing modes of
production displaced existing crafts traditions and apprenticeship processes
through which design used to be transmitted to new incumbents within guilds,
work spaces and educational settings which echoed the situations that existed
in the realms of practice. The Bauhaus in Germany was the first school to
formally create a series of assignments within a curriculum to prepare new
students to enter a journey of design learning. Set up in 1919 after the end of
the First World War, the Bauhaus was a center of creative expression that
housed some of the greatest design thinkers of our times. The educational
experiments of the school still find an echo in all design education across the
globe. What the founders of the Bauhaus tradition formulated is of value since
they were looking at those qualities that needed to be nurtured in the art and
design student, both in the form of skills and sensibilities as well in their
conceptual abilities and attitudes when dealing with materials and the real
world of design action. Thankfully
for us the Bauhaus pedagogic experiments were published by the teachers as 14
remarkable monographs that were edited by the founders Walter Gropius and
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The work that was started in the Bauhaus continued unabated
after the teachers were dispersed to new locations by the upheavals in Europe
that led to its closure.
The Bauhaus Way
The foundation
programme was however credited to Johannes Itten was a master at the Bauhaus
from 1919 to 1923 when he left due to disagreements with Walter Gropius. His
book “Design & Form: The Basic Design Course at the Bauhaus” was published
much later in 1963 but the seeds sown at the Bauhaus were durable and it spread
to most design schools across the globe. The focus of the Bauhaus Foundation
was spelt out quite clearly by Itten and the core objectives and the teaching
strategies employed are listed below.
Objectives:
Liberate
creative forces
Open artistic
talents
Train own
experiences and perceptions
Create “genuine
work”
Remove deadwood
of convictions
Develop courage
to create own convictions
Help make career
choices
Expose to
variety of materials and media types
Help discover
comfort levels in materials and media
Understand
creative composition principles
Explore laws of
colour and form
Develop ability
to handle subjective and objective problems of colour and form
Explore
permutations of the interplay, build a vocabulary
Teaching Strategy
Evoke individual
responses from students
Encourage
variety of talents and temperaments
Create an
atmosphere conducive for original work
Encourage the
“Genuine”
Help student
acquire natural self-confidence
Help students
discover the self and their talents
Explore student
strengths in the elements of design
Categorise and
diagnose student leanings and qualities
Help students
open these discovered talents or leanings
Develop
individual potential by directing teaching of media explorations
Basic Premises:
Imagination and
creative abilities to be liberated
Strengthen
Imagination and expression
Build on these
capabilities and set technical and practical goals later
In the early
years when it was implemented at the Bauhaus the various workshops were yet to be
fully established. Several other masters, all painters and sculptors, from the
Weimer days were involved in the instruction of theory and method, were called
‘masters of form’, while the craftsmen heading the workshops were ‘workshop
masters’ were involved in technical instruction. The preliminary course called
‘Vorkurs’ was initiated by Itten and made compulsory a year later. Other
masters contributed to its strengthening and in developing the core meaning
that it held for the curriculum as a whole. What is significant about the
Bauhaus Foundation course is the close interplay of theory and skill. The
sensitive hand and the experience of doing structured assignments are used to
raise awareness and to raise critical issues that lead to the development of convictions
and conceptual understanding. The production and understanding of theory is
therefore a direct outcome of numerous practical engagements within
well-defined constraints of structured assignments that are mediated by the
masters who use their diagnostic skills to advise and direct the learners to
help discover creative potentials in themselves.
The sequence of
learning therefore went through the following stages: experience, perception,
practical ability, intellectual explanation, comprehension and finally
realization. The assignments for the foundation courses explored three basic
directions:
1)
Experience with the senses: Sensory stimulation and
training the senses
2)
Objectivising these at an Intellectual level: Development
of logic and understanding concepts
3)
Realising these through synthetic means: Ability to produce
or execute with quality
This three stage
process is iterated numerous times with various design parameters such as
contrasts, form, colour, texture etc till the learner develops his critical
faculties and is able to make his or her own judgments.
The arguments
that came up within the masters veered between theory and practice. Masters of
form focused on theory and its application while the masters of workshops dealt
with the practical. But in the early stages of the Bauhaus a lot of theory was
perforce discussed in great detail at the Bauhaus perhaps since the workshops
were still to be formally set up as the school was extremely short of funds.
This set an unusual trend for design schools where theory played a lesser role
with most teachers were practitioners who wrote very little. The masters of
form at the Bauhaus were an exception to this rule. After the departure of
Itten the foundation programme at Bauhaus was influenced by Albers, Klee,
Moholy-Nagy, and Kandinsky. Further development of the foundation programme
took place in the United States by the masters, each at their chosen centers of
learning.
The Ulm Experiment
One of the
Bauhaus students, Max Bill went back to Germany to become the first Director of
the new design school at Ulm, the Hoschule fur Gestaltung, that was to continue
the work begun at the Bauhaus on the basic design courses under his active
guidance. Max Bill managed to bring back some of the Bauhaus masters and their
teachings to Ulm and he set up a course similar to the foundation course at the
Bauhaus incorporating the advances made by Albers at Yale and Peterhans at the
Institute of Technology in USA. The Ulm school design pedagogy went through
many critical stages of transformation under successive leaders who came after
Max Bill. Otl Aicher, Thomas Maldonado, Hans Gugelot, Herbert Ohl, Herbert
Lindinger and Gui Bonsiepe made major contributions to the design pedagogy and
in particular to the evolution of the foundation programme at Ulm. The Ulm too
shared the results of teaching systematically with the world at large through
the publication of the Ulm Journals, which represents one of the greatest
contributions that was made to design education in the fifties and sixties.
While Max Bill
stood for an aesthetic tradition it was Thomas Maldonado who drew attention to
the need for scientific temper in design education and its associated set of
theory inputs. Maldonado understood that design needed to draw fro many other
disciplines and the sciences and he talked about an almost feverish and
insatiable curiosity towards some disciplines that appeared on the time horizon
in the late fifties. Cybernetics, theory of information, systems theory,
semiotics, ergonomics and disciplines such as philosophical theory of science
and mathematical logic were explored to bring a solid methodological foundation
to design thinking and action for the first time. The focus on science and
methodology was a Pandora’s box that literally swallowed design thinking and
sensibilities at Ulm for quite some time and it took great effort from the
inner group of designers Maldonado, Aicher and Gugelot to reassert the
supremacy of design at Ulm. The third and final phase of the Ulm pedagogy experiments
brought in the use of the social sciences with Abraham A. Moles playing a
critical role.
The foundation
course or “Grundlehre” focused on non-object-oriented design and the training
of the hand and the eye and a number of assignments were innovated by the
teachers. While Albers came back to teach colour at Ulm with a hand on
approach, Itten who came later intellectually opposed Albers. Further the
teaching of colour theory by Helene Nonne-Schmidt upset Albers who withdrew
from teaching at Ulm. Maldonado took over the foundation programme and brought
in simplicity and precision to the core of the assignments. Drawing too was
modified to focus on reflective visualisation. In a way Maldonado carried out a
purification of the Bauhaus way in the teaching of the foundation programme, he
made it interdisciplinary and brought in theory of symmetry, topology and
Gestalt. None of the Ulm foundation assignments had a practical basis and they
were all abstract and non-object oriented in nature. The focus then could be on
the understanding of principles and not on immediate application of the
concepts. It was here that the basic design course got elaborated and evolved
further to have a discipline focus, the assignments were developed to meet the
needs of different disciplines such as graphic design and that of product
design, industrialized building and information design. Maldonado stressed on
the need for continued non-objective studies even in the senior years when
students were dealing with real life design problems however with gradually
reduced time allocated for such studies in the curriculum. The non-objective
assignments provided the students with critical abilities in the judgment of
form when applied to real design situations. In the search for new capabilities
a number of three-dimensional assignments were innovated to suit the needs of
product design students and nature studies and bionics got integrated into the
search for science principles that permitted new explorations.
This took the
Ulm contributions well beyond the areas of explorations conducted at the
Bauhaus since these were restricted to the application in small objects of low
complexity and the Ulm designers were venturing out into the world of complex
products and looking for means to deal with this complexity at the structural
and formal levels. The Ulm teachers raised the understanding of design to a new
level through their practical demonstrations in the fields of household
products, electrical and electronic products, automobile and transportation
systems and in industrialized building while establishing unchallenged
leadership in the field of Graphic Design. Taken together, the live
demonstrations of design success across disciplines and a systematic
documentation of their design pedagogy helped create the Ulm influence across
the globe and spread it to many centers of design education
Otl Aichers'
models for design education explorations at Ulm that are beautifully modeled
and represented in Rene Spitz's book "hfg Ulm: The view behind the
Foreground", (page 86) where he compares conventional education models of
the situated lectures (model 1) with the teacher in a dominant position holding
the students in an array in front and holding forth with his lecture from a
position of authority as compared to an alternate model where the student group
is divided into sub-groups in a networked structure (model 2) with the teacher
playing a facilitating role and the text caption accompanying both these image
representations is quoted below:
Quote
Model 1: Pedagogical principles: Organisation,
Lecture, Authority
of teacher and of the material. Mass processing, Examinations, Supervisions, Certificates
of class attendance, Rigid syllabus and scheduling, From theory to practiced, Knowledge
Model 2: Pedagogical principles: Free community
Free form of
instruction, Discussion, Teachers only in auxiliary capacity, From practice to
theory, Working independently, Personal interest Incentive, Enjoying the work,
Going deeper, Unfolding of personal talents, Experimental learning instead of
dead facts, Teaching framework in lieu of syllabus, Independent critical
judgment
Unquote
So this does
throw some light on the difference in lecture based conventional education and
the hands on experiential education seen in the basic design courses at Ulm and
now in many design schools. I also see that while "Design Research"
may be about the creation of "design knowledge" the use of this
knowledge in "Design Action" would be in the form of an exercise of
contextual judgment in design synthesis when numerous threads of factors from
multiple knowledge streams get embedded into a particular solution. Design
education needs such critical-ability forming processes and not just knowledge
gathering skills and processes.
Transfer of pedagogy to NID
At NID too we
have been keenly interested in the design pedagogy of Ulm right through the
seventies and later and we were fortunate to have had faculty members who spent
a good deal of time at Ulm in the sixties and therefore our programmes too got
a strong dose of the Ulm flavor in the early years. Prof Sudha Nadkarni was a
student at Ulm and Prof H Kumar Vyas was deputed to spend 10 months at Ulm
before commencing our first Product Design programme in 1966. Our library also
had the full set of Ulm Journals and these were a great source of inspiration.
We have since been active in following the Ulm people having had contact with
several of them over the years. Gui Bonsiepe and Kohei Suguira being the most
prominent of these. Herbert Lindinger was a consultant to NID for the Product
Design programme as well and his book is also in the library. The Ulm story
never fails to inspire, since the achievements have been so stupendous.
The Ulm will
have great significance for the international design community for many decades
to come since so much was done by way of path breaking thinking and much of it
was documented in real time and now we have such a fantastic resource created
by Rene Spitz that it opens up the material for further contemplation by a
wider audience.
My brief account
(above) of the influence of Ulm on NID is far from complete and much new
information will emerge if design historians subject it to serious research in
the years ahead. Hans Gugelot from hfg Ulm was responsible for drafting the
curriculum and then commencing the Product Design programme at NID. He visited
NID in the early stage and he passed away soon after his return from India. He
was followed by E. Reichl ( Director, Institut fur Produktuntwicklung, Neu Ulm)
who was recommended by Gugelot and later Herbert Lindinger came from Frankfurt
( Institut fur Umweltgestaltung ) to evaluate the Product Design course and to
help formulate the proposed undergraduate programme that commenced in 1970
which included the NID foundation programme across all disciplines for the
first time. The other prominent teacher to visit NID was Prof Herbert Ohl.
In the Visual
Communications stream we had Christian Staub, Hfg Ulm, who set up our
Photography Department and commenced the education programmes in Photography.
We also had a strong German presence ( from outside Ulm) in Ceramic Design ((Zettler Lutz), Furniture Design ( Arno Vottler,
Braunschweig and his students Rolf Misol 69-70 and Max Janisch 70-72) and in Exhibition Design (Frei Otto).
There were perhaps others who are not mentioned in the available texts since
the NID’s documentation and publication record is indeed very poor. Even Sudha
Nadkarni who was a student at Ulm and who joined in Product Design as a faculty
in 1967 was still at NID when I came to NID in 1969 as a student in Furniture
Design. His name is not mentioned in the list of faculty of Product Design in
our 1969 documentation titled "National Institute of Design: Documentation
1964-69", NID Ahmedabad. I am surprised at this omission and I am sure
that there is some minor politics of that time at play here since I was
personally interviewed by Prof. Sudha Nadkarni and Prof H Kumar Vyas along with
the junior consultant and teacher Rolf Misol when I first joined NID as a
student in 1969 April-May. Prof. Sudha Nadkarni left NID soon thereafter and
set up the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) at the IIT in Bombay in 1969. He
retired a few years ago and was then given the task of setting up yet another
school, this time in the IIT Guwahati which is now the first undergraduate
programme in design under the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) fold.
So three schools
in India were directly influenced by the Ulm doctrine and many friends of Ulm
have connected with these schools in the years that followed which has not been
documented as yet properly. The NID library had the only set of Ulm journals in
India and I made a xerox copy of the full set (piracy admitted) for the IDC
library at the request of Prof Kirti Trivedi faculty IDC and a few years later
he re-published some of the papers in a collected volume called "Readings
from Ulm" which was used at a seminar on the influence of Ulm on Indian
and world design. Prof Gui Bonsiepe and Kohei Sugiura, both alumnus of hfg Ulm,
attended this seminar and I was there as well.
The NID experiment: NID’s
own foundation
The NID
Foundation Programme started with the first batch of undergraduate students
joining NID in June 1970. Mohan Bhandari coordinated the programme and the
teachers were drawn from the various existing disciplines at the Post Graduate
level. At first the programme was an amalgamation of inputs from primarily
Product Design and Graphic Design programmes. Freehand Drawing, Composition and
Colour came from the Graphic Design stable and drew heavily on the Swiss
graphic traditions implanted at NID by Armin Hofmann from Basel who helped set
up the NID’s Graphic Design programme in the early sixties. The other courses
of Geometry, Elements of Form and Space, and Basic Materials drew on the
Bauhaus and Ulm models for assignments and pedagogy. Basic materials too faced
pressure from downstream disciplines and the Textile faculty introduced linear
materials as an input in addition to the traditional wood and metal workshop
assignments. Colour quickly moved to the Textile design teachers but a Product
Design faculty always offered colour theory. The foundation programme was of
three semester duration across one and a half years. The third semester was
used for basic courses offered by the disciplines and these included
Typography, Photography, Film Appreciation and Music Appreciation to provide
media skills to all students. Design Methods was the final course at the end of
the programme and inputs in science, mathematics and liberal arts were offered
as lecture modules. The teachers freely experimented with basic design
assignments and there was much discussion on the effectiveness of particular
courses as feedback from the disciplines to the foundation teachers. Individual
teachers had access to a very rich library from the Bauhaus, Ulm and several
other schools which had linkages with NID through the Ford Foundation sponsored
consultants who had helped set up the early education programmes at NID and
they were also responsible for training the first batch of NID faculty.
Mohan Bhandari was deputed to Germany to
work with Herbert Lindinger for a year and on his return he was asked to
coordinate the foundation programme. In 1975 he was given the task of reviewing
the foundation programme with the teachers and the management consultant
advising on Inter-personal relations, Professor Pulin K Garg from the Indian
Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Through numerous meetings all the
foundation inputs were reviewed and discussed with a view to integrate these
into a cohesive unit rather than as a collection of disparate inputs from the
specialised disciplines. This process continued well into the late seventies
beginning with a revised programme that was created and offered to the batch of
1976. This was the first time that the NID foundation had a new look and an
environmental focus that transcended the traditional inputs from the Bauhaus,
Ulm and the Swiss and French schools of design. The Design Methods course was
then called Design Process as the problem solving process in design and inputs
in sociology, psychology and field exposure were offered as a preparatory set
of inputs. The approach in Space Form and Structure too had an environmental
bias and this had extended to Geometry as well. I recall that both G Upadhyaya
and I had severely critisised the geometry course with excessive environmental
bias during the first faculty forum meeting in 1976 and thereafter we were
asked to develop the course and conduct the same, which we did for many years
thereafter. By the end of the decade Mohan Bhandari set out to capture the
revised NID foundation programme as a manuscript for publication. However he
left the Institute in 1982 and unfortunately the book was never printed. I did
try in 1991 to get him to agree to take the project forward in my then capacity
of Chairman Publications but he declined the request since he felt that he had
moved on in his views and could no longer relate to the contents. It was a
great loss for design knowledge.
At NID there was
a discussion on teaching maths to designers at design schools. Here too there
is a difference in both content and style of delivery for design students. In
1976 I was involved in the creation of a new course aimed at teaching maths to
design students at NID in our foundation programme. The course was called
"Geometrical construction" at that time and in later years
"Geometry and Morphology" where we introduced design students to a
vast array of math concepts through many exciting practical drawing and model
building assignments including recreational maths puzzles while relating these
tasks to the body of numerical expressions and algebric expressions using
visual analogies. While I cannot claim that it is a complete substitute for
formal instruction in mathematics, however it provides students from non-math
backgrounds sufficient conceptual tools to deal with complex structural and
formal math and logic problems. I helped teach this course for many years
before handing it over to my younger colleagues who happened to be my students
in the early days. We discovered that the domain of visuality is under valued
in most areas of formal education at the school level while the emphasis is
greatly on textuality and numeracy and we set out to correct this imbalance.
The Space Form
and Structure modules exposed the students to elements of form and space using
concepts of semiotics and Gestalt theory of figure and ground relationships. A
number of exploratory assignments are given and the results are discussed to
help build an attitude of exploration and experimentation with visual language
and in the visualisation of ideas leading to a degree of fluency of concept
articulation in the visual medium. The Environmental Perception and
Environmental Exposure modules got the students out of their studios in an
attempt to connect with society at large both to bring the real world concerns
into the classroom as well as to help prepare students in the early stages of
the Design Process where they were expected to identify meaningful design
problems before setting out to solve them with the use of various design
methodologies. The design process course went through a number of cycles of
development under different teachers. In the first phase the problems had a
distinctly scientific basis, and all introductory assignments had low technical
complexity, usually very simple products were chosen and these were redesigned
using ergonomic and functional explorations and the stages were documented and
decisions were justified, usually after the fact. In the second phase more
complex problems from the environment were identified and these required more
elaborate processes of information collection and analysis. The third phase
that began in the mid eighties took on a more systems focus and design tasks
were treated as a process of understanding complex situations through which
many potential solutions were explored. Today this course is called “Design
Concepts and Concerns” and it is offered to students from all post graduate disciplines
at NID in addition to the module offered at the undergraduate level.
This systems
model of design that some of teachers adopted for building courses and to
conduct research and client interventions had over the years given us the
conviction that design in India is quite different from that which is practiced
in the West. Design for development has been discussed at many platforms for
discourse on design, many a time leading to utter confusion with the debate
being clouded by as many differing definitions of design as there are people in
the room. Notwithstanding this difficulty with the subject as complex as design
we were convinced of the need to use the power of this discipline to further
the real needs of a huge population desperately seeking solutions to many
vexing problems in a very tight economic climate. It is our belief that design
at the strategic level can be used as a catalytic tool to mobilise innovations
and policies that can indeed transform the country in more ways than one. This
ideological bearing has informed many initiatives of design action at NID and
it was reinforced at several critical stages by confirmation of our methods and
goals by the work of other visionaries who were examining the role of design
for development. The UNIDO-ICSID conference on Design for Development that was
held at NID in 1979 and the work of Victor Papanek, Nigel Whitely and Gui
Bonsiepe, all of whom came to NID for brief or longer periods, left a mark on
the thinking of the design teachers at NID. Design in India was being
discovered as a whole new genre of action through the application of design
principles through research and development to new areas such as the
development of crafts, health communications, strategies for small industry,
and in areas of social and economic development while working at the community
level.
Today we have an
even broader definition of design, that is design as a vehicle for leadership
as articulated in the “Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable
World” by Harold G. Nelson and Eric Stolterman, who approach design as a form of leadership from two assertions
quoted below.
Quote: “The
first is the belief that good designers (when not acting as applied scientists
or artists) are leaders by definition. They play an essential instrumental
leadership role in any change project. The second is that good leaders,
including entrepreneurs, act as designers even if they do not identify
themselves as such or are not identified by others as designers. They do not
define their work in the language of design because they have not been brought
up in that tradition, but their intentions are nevertheless realized through
designerly behavior. I have found this to be the case whether the design is of
a new nation, a governmental agency, a business or service, a research project,
a curriculum or any number of other examples. However, without a common
framework or language that is design-based, it is difficult to build a full
appreciation for the role that design thinking and designers play in the
thousands of ways that design shapes the world at every level, every day,”
unquote.
To this new
dimension and goal for design education we can add the impact of new tools that
take us into the digital realm of performance in many disciplines. This raises
many questions and many assumptions are made about the nature of design
education in today’s world that may not hold true at a deeper examination. It
is assumed by many that Post Graduate students need less intensive inputs and
resources to make them into designers and design thinkers when compared to the
under-graduate group. The second category of design thinkers are seen as a real
need and alternative to designers in a knowledge driven world and this is
particularly worrisome since it is assumed that design thinkers can be trained
without the burden of learning skills through the adoption of digital abilities
in lieu of the analog capabilities that has been the historic vehicle for basic
design education so far. We know that design thinking and design sensibilities
are earned through hard practice and through a process of systematic induction
training and these are distinctly different from the development of science
based knowledge and attitudes that takes place on a daily basis in the university
system of education. The methods of teaching adopted at the Bauhaus, Ulm and
now in the NID experience have all generated huge success stories in the
creation of the thinking and sensitive designer who is able to make critical
judgments on complex issues and perspectives and then they are also able to act
in ways that help solve these problems using creative scenarios and
alternatives which reflect their deep understanding and empathy with the milieu
in which the opportunity is located. This capability of effective design action
is unique to designers who by virtue of their training are able to act on the
real world and create future scenarios that can be embedded in the real world
as analog solutions even if they were mediated by digital means.
This brings me
to a series of linked statements by the founder of Ulm, Otl Aicher, in his book
“analogous and digital” where he says ”….the culture of thinking requires the
culture of the hand as a subtle, sensitive organ.” He goes on to say “…we are
rediscovering the domain of making as a prerequisite of thought.” Many modern
innovations have been produced outside the domains of large and organized
industry, in garages and shacks outside industry with small teams of motivated
individuals. “…human ability to make anything, his ability to design anything
is atrophying…we have become children of a thought culture that has
disconnected thinking from making…..the more we know the less we can do” and
this is not the design way. There is much wisdom in the search for processes by
which basic design evolved at Bauhaus, then Ulm and later at NID and these
lessons must not be lost because we throw away the baby with the bath-water
when we replace wholesale the analog processes of design education with digital
tools sets that we see all around us, particularly at NID. I am concerned that
many of the new disciplines at NID that attempt to teach design as a narrow
specialization at the Post Graduate level are not equipped to handle analog
design processes, that is to use the hand as a firm route to the inner recesses
of the mind in order to create the deep understanding that is the hallmark of
basic design education that has been proven and tested by time. Let us pay heed
to the masters of design thinking who have created an alternative to science
education and learn those lessons which we will need to take forward with new
experimentation and testing based on new frameworks of theory that would inform
the design educational processes in our changing times.
~
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~
