Ethics in Design: Istanbul conference and after

Images and Comments: Istanbul conference and after

Prof. M P Ranjan

On the 8th of October 2009 Prof M P Ranjan delivered the keynote address at the 4th National Design Conference at Istanbul Turkey and spent the next day listening to the numerous sessions at the conference on various issues dealing with design that the Turkish scholars found interesting and relevant, all in Turkish, with two student guides whispering the English translation into his ears. The conference was stimulating and the event was conducted in a historic setting of the Istanbul Technical University at Taskisla in Taksim in the heart of Istanbul. The conference was organized by Prof Alpay Er, Head of Department, Industrial Product Design at ITU and the participants came from many of the 24 schools of industrial design in Turkey and included teachers, students and professional designers. The keynote paper and visual presentation titled “Hand-Head-Heart: Ethics in Design” can be downloaded from here from this blog.
Download full paper titled "Hand-Head-Heart: Ethics in Design" here -PDF file 360kb Full Text
Download visual presentationas a pdf file here - PDF file 4.8 mb visual presentation screen resolution

Image1: Prof M P Ranjan delivers keynote lecture titled “Hand-Head-Heart: Ethics in Design” at the ITU Auditorium in Istanbul on 8th October 2009. The theme of the conference is “Design or Crisis”.

Image2: The historic building of the Istanbul Technical University has a mural painted by Abdurrahman Öztoprak from 1950’s while the building itself dates back to the 1850’s.

Cigcem Kaya, one of the researchers at ITU wrote to me that this fresco on one of the walls of Istanbul Techical University, School of Architecture, is one of the major works of Abdurrahman Öztoprak from 1950s. Trained in Academy of Fine Arts (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University) by Nurullah Berk, Öztoprak is one of the first and most reputable social realist painters of the country with some embodiment cubism as well. Although housed in an architecture school not many people know about the legacy of this fresco. It lies silent behind gatherings and conferences: untitled. Further enquiries with Fatma Merve, one of my student guides revealed that, "Abdurrahman Öztoprak (*1927 Istanbul, lives in Akyaka) is one of Turkey’s leading contemporary artist of international stature. His works are represented in the permanent collections of major museums and private collections in Turkey. He draws his inspirations for his abstract compositions primarily from Classical European Music. He created a unique body of abstract works during a fifty year period. On July 1st 2007 Abdurrahman Öztoprak has been eighty years old. Öztoprak was educated at the Art Academies in Istanbul and Rome and worked in Germany between 1960 and 1975. Öztoprak’s abstract paintings are a true archive artistic dialogue between East and West cultures and testimony to the way in which different traditions express their feelings. Their messages are continually universal. The geometrical abstract works of artist demonstrates a unique imaginative form vocabulary. Öztoprak’s paintings have recorded interesting dialogue between Oriental and Occidental Art; through them we witness a fertile symbiosis of Turkish and European Culture."

Image3: The beautiful courtyard at the Istanbul Technical University springs to life in the coffee and cocktail breaks and students stream out to sit in the sun and socialize between classes. Pelin Kazak who picked me up from the airport won the best prize for the student exhibit.

Image4: Experiencing street food views in Istanbul with student volunteers on the day before the ITU conference.

Image5: Entrance to the ITU building with the conference poster and views from the conference venue during the keynote lecture.

Image6: On the sidelines of the conference XXI Design Magazine conducted an interview with Prof M P Ranjan

Image7: On the day after the conference Merve and Saniye, student volunteers showed me the scenes of the Bosphorus, crossed over to the other side of Golden Horn and looked at the covered market and took the ferry ride to end the day.

Image8: Sunday it was street life in Istanbul on both sides of the Bosphorus, teeming with people, dressed in their best and nowhere to go in particular and nothing to do in particular, an interesting day of ambling about on the town.

Image9: Return journey through Doha Airport in Qatar is one big shopping mall and a number of halls full of Eames Tandem Sling Seating just like the original prototype that we have in the NID Prototype Collection back home at Paldi campus.

Prized takeaway from Turkey: A small book, "On Methods of Research by Bruce Archer, published locally by METU Faculty of Architecture Press, Ankara, 1999" was presented to me by Prof. Dr Fatma Korkut and Prof. Dr Gulay Hasdogan, both faculty at the Department of Industrial Design at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara in Turkey. This book is in both English and in Turkish language, front to back, and as a low cost offering it makes available valuable insights into design and research from one of the world thought leaders in the subject. I was wondering if India too could not do this and if some Indian school takes up this challenge they will soon be seen as the design leaders in the region themselves. I have a wish list of a set of books that must be made widely available to Indian audiences from the school level all the way to the level of industry stalwarts and Government officials who should be exposed to ideas in design if we are to see a change in the use of design in India in real sectors of national need. Is anybody listening?

Design Thinking: Is however the Flavour of the Day. Design Thinking Exchange posted a list of thinkers that generated scores of emails and Facebook & Twitter posts that came my way. Thank you all for your mails and Tweets. More about this in my next post, particularly since I am off to Melbourne next month to participate in another conference on Design Thinking organised by the Swinburne University by Prof Ken Friedman, Dean, Swinburne Design.

Prof. M P Ranjan

IIMA Auditorium Chair: A tale of three chairs for India

Design for India

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seminar series on INTERIOR DESIGN TRADITIONS in INDIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seminar Convenors
Nimish Patel and Parul Zaveri, Abhikram, Ahmedabad

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

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

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

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

Design for India

Herman Miller and Vitra bring back the spirit of the Eamses to Bangalore and India

50 years of the Eames Legacy: The spirit of the Eamses in Bangalore and India

Image: Prof Ranjan and Sridhar Harivanam at the Herman Miller office in Bangalore with the Eames Wire Chair
Charles and Ray Eames are back in Bangalore and their spirit and their design presence is palpable at the Herman Miller office in Indra Nagar, Bangalore as well as the Vitra International showroom on Lavelle Road, Bangalore. I was able to visit these places during this Diwali vacation on my brief stay in Bangalore. I had a mission to fulfill and this took me on an Eames tour of Bangalore, which is possible today since the furniture designs of this legendary Eames couple, Charles (1907 – 1978) and Ray (1912 -1988) are now available in Bangalore through the Herman Miller Inc. and the Vitra International offering. I have been requested by my Institute to explore and develop the concept for a major conference on the Eames legacy in India, which will reach a landmark of 50 years after the writing of the Eames India Report in November 2008. This task will give me the occasion to revisit the Eames story from a number of perspectives and I proposed to share the findings periodically on this blog in the days ahead. Look out for the conference announcement and details on the NID website.

Image: Eames Wire Chair at Herman Miler Bangalore
The Herman Miller office is located a few metres short of the flyover to the Airport Road from the Indra Nagar’s famous 100 feet road, this is one of the many multinational offices that are now dotting the Bangalore landscape and a stark reminder of the massive changes taking place in the Indian business environment. Design is taking centre stage through the arrival of the Eamses through their remarkable furniture, which used to be available only as expensive rip-offs but these are now offered as original licensed products with the legendary Herman Miller warranty for the first time in India. These do not come cheap due to the still high customs duty and exclusive pricing policies but the quality is immaculate and the design memorable to guarantee satisfaction.

Image: Prof Ranjan with the Eames Chaise Lounge at the Vitra Show room in Bangalore. designed and prototyped in 1948 for Museum of Modern Art exhibition it was brought to market by Vitra in 1991.
On the other hand the Vitra business model is unique since all offerings from the Bangalore showroom are made to order at their factory in Germany and shipped direct to the customer in exclusive shipments. Vitra had licensed the Eames products originally from Herman Miller for sale in Europe and the Middle East between 1957 and 1984, but in 1984 the rights were transferred to Vitra who have been offering the products directly to their customers.
Image: A wall at Vitra Bangalore showing the exquisitely made miniature classics offered by Vitra Design Museum
I am sure that the Indian audience will gain insights about the Eames legacy and would appreciate the finer aspects of their design offerings if they have a first hand exposure to the design philosophy and product quality that is represented by the furniture designs on offer by these two licensed producers who have been faithfully following the Eames detailing and keeping the product collections in production over the years. The Eames molded plastic chair for instance has seen an amazing production run of over 5 million pieces in the 25 years after it was designed in the 1950s and it is still as fresh as it was when it was first offered.

There is much more to the Eamses than meets the eye and we will need to devote more space and time to explore the variety of design offerings that they brought to the table. Furniture, products, toys, exhibitions, animation and live action films, photography as well as the now famous “History Wall” for many specific exhibitions which was a fore-runner for the hypermedia structure that has emerged on the web, and I would like to explore all these dimensions in the days ahead.

Image: A snapshot of a quote from the Eames India Report as it appeared in the Design Issues from the MIT Press
I close this post with the opening quote from the Eames India Report, a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, that sets the tone and context for the new design Institute that they proposed to the Government of India in 1958, the then proposed National Institute of Design which was eventually set up at Ahmedabad in 1961. More to come.