Understanding Food: Anthro-Design Research

Understanding Food: Anthro-Design Research in the DCC class at Bangalore
Prof M P Ranjan
Quoted with permission from "Design Concepts & Concerns" blog

Image 1: Presentation by the Tamilnadu group in session at the NID Bangalore Centre. The group chose to build a flow chart of their understanding and the presentation uses a “story-board” that was represented like a film strip from the Tamil cinema story as shown in the illustration below. The storyboard was personified by the image of “Annaswamy” their man from Tamilnadu, from childhood to old age, and the food for all seasons brought into sharp focus by the overlapping threads of their story.

The first assignment at NID Bangalore dealt with mapping ones own knowledge about food and each group had a particular bias from which their knowledge was to be mapped and shared with the rest of the class. As describer earlier this thematic bias plays a strong role on how the subject is addressed and it even shapes the perception of the situation and this was quite evident in the various interpretations that were exhibited by the groups, each working with Climate, Region and Culture, as their given bias for investigation and articulation. While I did not specifically tell the students that they were not expected to do elaborate research on their subject of food with the bias assigned to each group, they did not have the time to do such research and all the teams had to fall back on their well of knowledge that resided in their collective memories and from which they drew quite liberally through a process of brainstorming, categorization and articulation to show their models and constructs on the given subject FOOD – with the bias of Climate, Region and Culture.

Image 2: The ‘story board” shown by the Tamilnadu group who used the persona of a young Tamil software engineer to represent their understanding of the chosen theme of “Food from Tamilnadu” shown here as a life time story, a journey from the cradle to a ripe old age, very interesting indeed.

The Second assignment saw the groups fanning out to various places in Bangalore to carry out direct contact research in the mode of “anthro-design” with each group being assigned to a particular region State of South India. The assigned States were that of Tamilnadu, Andhra and Karnataka, each assigned through a draw of lots, which was done on behalf of the group by their student coordinator. The group members then went into a huddle and made a plan for gathering information and this information strategy played out over the next three days with the groups meeting and exploring Food and eating places in Bangalore, each looking at their respective State issues and trying to make sense of the vast field that could be covered by the omnibus assignment with very low definition and broad interpretation. As designers they were to investigate the subject directly from the field in live contact with ‘experts” and ‘stakeholders’ from whom they could get valuable insights about their assigned subject – FOOD from one of the three chosen States of South India.

Image 3: The Karnataka group looked at the business of Food and explored the various dimensions of Karnataka cuisine as well as the typical resources of the State as they had discovered through their engagement with their contacts and eating-places across Bangalore city.

The Udipi café, MTR – “Mavali Tiffin room” and Café Coffee Day success story played strongly on the minds of this group and shaped the story that they had to share with the class through their wall size model and their mega success stories of food and the potential for a revolution from the State of Karnataka to the world at large. Their presentation was located in the basement workshop space of the NID Bangalore Centre and they impressed with their scale and sense of structure that was achieved in their model.

Image 4: The Andhra group was shocked by the stories of poverty and distress that came from many of their contacts across the migrant labour now in Bangalore. Their installation, which is the appropriate term that can best describe the assembly of objects, sarees and posters that the group assembled to tell their story, was colourful and then filled with coloured light and everything turned red….

Making contact with live sources of informants in the field is so important for design students since it is important for them to learn that what they need is not knowledge of the kind found in books as much as getting a feel of the situation and in picking up specific insights that would give them a sense of direction and a glimpse of the way the trends shaped up in their area of investigation. It is here that anthro design as a subject area gets appreciated and some degree of competence is built up in handling such research where book based knowledge would certainly not fill the need. This kind of experience would be useful for design students and through these experiences they would also learn about research strategies to be used in the field and the whole range of processes of making contact, making observations, meetings and interviews as well as processing the rich data from the field in order to glean insights about latent needs and future possibilities are all critical for design education.

Prof M P Ranjan

CFBI-NID: Bamboo for Grassroots Development:

CFBI-NID: Bamboo for Grassroots Development:

CFBI-NID (Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID), Tripura Bamboo Mission initiatives: NID IPRITI IL&FS TBM – bamboo craftsman training initiative at Bangalore.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image 01: Workshop commences at IPRITI, Bangalore with bamboo craftsmen from Tripura and NID designers with technical inputs from IPRITI scientists.

The National Institute of Design (NID) through its Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID (CFBI-NID) and the Infrastructure Leasing and Finance Services (IL&FS) entered into an agreement to develop and deliver a bamboo based small craft industry initiative as part of the overall mission objective of the Tripura Bamboo Mission (TBM) that is spearheaded by the Government of Tripura. The IL&FS has extended their technical, financial planning and manpower expertise in furthering the mission objectives of the TBM and they in turn have cooperated with the CFBI-NID to move the bamboo furniture and product design initiative through a project format that includes product design, craftsman training as well as field training that would help seed and incubate the new micro-enterprises in the State of Tripura.

Image 02: Stackable Café tables and benches, a local to local strategy offered by NID to kick-start local entrepreneurship in the Agartala region.

The NID had entered into a MOU with IPRITI, Bangalore earlier this year to cooperate in new initiatives in bamboo product development with a special focus on laminated bamboo and bamboo mat board applications in a number of fields. In mutual agreement with all the partners we decided to bring the project with the IL&FS to Bangalore since the NID Bangalore campus is located just opposite the IPRITi campus in Penea, just next to the large CMTI campus on the very busy Tumkur road. This proximity and an already agreed platform of cooperation opened a new window for bringing the IL&FS – TBM project to Bangalore campus where the faculty and students of the Design for Retail Experiences (DRE) discipline were keen to explore bamboo as a future material for eco-friendly retail environments.

Image 03: Rubber wood gussets and planks used to upgrade bamboo furniture form another leg of the NID design strategy to leverage the availability of this new material from local production facilities in Agartala.

IL&FS has identified nine master craftsmen from the Agartala region to partake in the CFBI-NID design development and training programme and along with these craftsmen an IL&FS supervisor was deputed to manage the day to day programmes with the NID Bangalore coordinator Divya Darshan and Joint Project Head and NID Faculty, C S Susanth from the NID Bangalore Centre. Prof M P Ranjan as Head of the Project stationed himself at Bangalore from 17th September to 30th September 2008 for the design development and training components of the project that is being handled under the management of the NID Outreach Department located in Ahmedabad while NID Bangalore handled all the local logistics and project support systems through Shashikala Satyamurthy and Centre Head S Goshal.

Image 04: The ubiquitous “Alna”, a local clothes rack, offered in new design configurations using rubber wood gussets to support the “Local to Local” design strategy advocated by NID.

Dr C N Pandey and his team were very supportive and provided the space in their well equipped Bamboo Development Centre for the conduct of the workshop as well as provided some key training inputs in bamboo treatment and finishes that was organized as associated demonstrations and lectures. The NID design team of Prof M P Ranjan and C S Susanth was joined by other members from NID Bangalore including Divya Darshan and Niju Dubey who participated in the design and training activities on a regular basis. Further, three NID students from Furniture design discipline joined the team as experimenters and occasional trainers and they too developed their own understanding of the new material through their association with the workshop, the results of which will be seen in the future, I am sure. Of these students, Garima Agrawal has chosen to take the bamboo project as her major diploma project and she will be taking this initiation and travel to the field to commence her research and study at Agartala in the near future.

Image 05: Exhibit of all new bamboo products developed at the design cum training workshop at IPRITI as shown at the NID Bangalore lawns for the closing function on 30 September 2008.

The design strategy outlined by the team this time looked at the building of products and systems that had a “Local to Local” character since the craftsmen while being very skilled at bamboo work were still to learn about being entrepreneurs and learn to manage a business enterprise on their own. The IL&FS and the NID design team are providing handholding and mentoring supports as part of the next stages of this project and in this the making of local products would bring a degree of self confidence to the crafts entrepreneurs since they could learn from direct experience and use their local knowledge to build their business experience. The major product category chosen for this strategy was the local “Alna” an ubiquitous clothes rack usually made in wood and found in every home in the Eastern Region of India as well as all over the Northeast of India. We therefore designed a wide range of “Alna” type products to demonstrate product diversification and the possibility of customization of a basic idea to generate variety. The other products included benches and tables that could be used in domestic situations as well as in local café’s across Agartala region, which by the way is a huge local market that is attracting many furniture makers from New Delhi and Mumbai. These are local opportunities that the Tripura craftsmen can learn to address in their process of learning a trade which they could then sharpen and refine to address more sophisticated markets in other cities in India as well as in the export sector, once their level of confidence has grown to manage these with comfort and quality.

Image 06: The closing function attended by Director IPRITI, Il&FS Managers, Coordinator Tripura Bamboo Mission, Centre Head NID Bangalore and Head, Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID and the design and craftsmen teams.

Another major design decision was the use of rubber wood in combination with bamboo for several of the products. In an earlier collection we had designed all bamboo furniture as part of our “Katlamara Chalo” strategy where the joints were made using round holes drilled with a flat-bottomed drill bit and secured with bamboo dowels and bamboo counter pins. This joint was used once again for all the bamboo pole joints and all bamboo components were kept straight without the use of any bending that is commonly associated with bamboo furniture. The rubber wood components were of two types, plates for surfaces and shaped gusset members for particular joints between bamboo frames. This way the bamboo craftsmen could obtain the rubber wood components from the new and growing rubber wood industry in Tripura and offer value to their customers with the added functionality of smooth surfaces and precise gusset joints that are also visually modern. This strategy had us seeking the help of Sandeep Mukherjee for the precise manufacture of the gusset components, drawings for which were prepared on cad software by Niju Dubey. Several ranges of “Alna” were developed using these special gussets and as we go forward we anticipate an enlargement of the range with the addition of new components as dictated by the design scheme and the functionality required. The Tripura craft scene is now sufficiently sophisticated to accommodate this shift to outsourced components as they develop their marketing strategy in the days ahead and this would also help them fetch a better price in the market and provide value to the customer who is being exposed to many imported products of high quality.

Image 07: The new “Alna” and other products at the lawn exhibit at NID Bangalore for the closing function.

The training programme culminated in the production of several new designs that aligned to the product strategy proposed by the NID team and at a concluding function at NID Bangalore on 30 September 2008 we conducted an exhibition of all the products at NID Bangalore which was visited by George Jenner, Chief Coordinator of the Tripura Bamboo Mission, Sharmishta Mohapatra, Senior Manager and Advisor – Trade Facilitation, IL&FS, New Delhi, Dr C N Pande, Director IPRITI, Dr S Goshal, Centre Head, NID, Bangalore and all the crtafts trainees and the NID design team with the students of the NID Bangalore and they were hosted by Prof M P Ranjan, Head, Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID. At the concluding function the dignitaries spoke to the audience about bamboo and its role in the future as well as the strategies of the Tripura Bamboo Mission and the plans and activities in the coming years. These provided new opportunities for all partners to use their skills and knowledge for the development of the bamboo sector in Tripura and in the process bring overall development to Tripura State, particularly in the rural areas that have been deprived of industrial development over the years. Plans and now afoot to send our teams to Tripura for the next phase of the project that includes the setting up of micro production units with the use of an appropriate set of hand held power tools and the hand-holding supports from the IL&FS teams in finance and marketing support in the field. NID designers will work closely with these craftsmen to realize the objective of getting these new products to market and in the process establish the confidence levels of the crafts entrepreneur as well as help maintain quality of production with the use of simple manufacturing strategies that are embedded in the design programme.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Design Happenings in Bangalore: Two Weeks at NID Bangalore

Design Happenings in Bangalore: Two Weeks at NID Bangalore
Prof M P Ranjan

Image 1: DCC models about food at NID Bangalore: Climate, Geography and Culture.

I have been in Bangalore, nay Bengaluru now, for over ten days and have been conducting the Design Concepts and Concerns Course (DCC) for students of three disciplines at the NID Bangalore Centre. The theme continues to be food and the assignments have gone through a small transformation. The first assignment had three groups looking at the macro aspects of food and the economy across the broad fields of influence under the heads of Climate, Geography and Culture. The first assignment ended with the three groups having explored the chosen areas through brainstorming and some supporting research ending in the production of a visually rich model that could help in the “visual sensemaking” process as defined by the NextD Leadership Institute.

Image 2: DCC team presentations at NID Bangalore

Each group came up with compelling presentations that revealed a great depth of information carried by the team members and they were all able to produce rich models and make their presentation to the faculty and students at NID Bangalore. The Geography group used a compact model of the continents which revealed both their knowledge as well as their areas of ignorance about the world of food, since the North American and European regions were better represented than the South Americas and the African continent. The climate group divided the world into zones along the longitudes and used one table surface for each zone to capture a picture book of “Poloroid pictures” just as a returning traveler would have shared their vast journeys with their clansmen in the past. The third group had everyone holding their breath with their stunning portrayal of culture using their knowledge of India and the variety of foods and their associations with religious and cultural affiliations. The three dimensional display was well classified and translated into banners each that covered one major category of food and a central display mapped the three major religions that dominate the Indian landscape.

Image: Neelam Chibber with Prof. Ranjan at NID Bangalore and with students of the DCC class.

Neelam Chibber who visited the NID campus briefly to see the bamboo workshop at IPIRTI across the street from the NID campus was quite taken in by the presentation of the culture group and she has commissioned the team to make a refined set of banners about food and culture for her new stores in the now revised Industree Crafts stores that are taking shape in her back office operation of scaling up and diversifying her already successful operation to bring value to Indian crafts at the grassroots level. The Industree Crafts Foundation as well as Industree Crafts Pvt Ltd is being transformed after taking strong roots in Bangalore and I will bring this story to this blog when Neelam is ready with her new and revised offering. Industree Crafts Foundation and the business wing Indistree Crafts Pvt Ltd. works on a Fair Trade principle with over 15,000 village craftsmen across seven states and the Northeastern Region of India and it grew from a small investment of Rs 12 lakhs (1.2 million Rupees) to reach a valuation of over Rs. 15 crores today and growing further by the day. Neelam worked with Gita Ram of the Crafts Council of India and Poonam Bir Kasturi in the early days to nurture a lofty thinking organisation and has shown us that design and social equity can bring good value for all partners. You can download a pdf article about their Fair Play principles from this link as a 688 kb pdf file titled "Fair and Just".

Image 3: Swiss design team conducting a workshop at NID Bangalore

The Swiss design team of industrial designer Frederic Dedelley and design journalist Ariana Pradal conducted a one day sensitizing workshop for all the students at NID Bangalore when they shared the Swiss Design experience through a slide lecture which was followed by a hand-on workshop aimed at creating a designer Letter Opener by direct action on materials and ideas. The evening saw an exciting presentation of over 50 different design offerings which were stimulating and showed the students the dominant design activity of product diversification with the use of micro detailing and form giving that are central to a designers bread and butter operation in their dealings with industry.

Image 4: Guided tour at the Swiss Design exhibit at Bangalore Max Muller Bhavan.

I got to visit the Swiss Design exhibition, Criss+Cross at the Max Muller Bhavan in Indra Nagar and also to take the guided tour offered by Ariana Pradal. I was joined by my daughter, a Bangalore based Graphic Designer, Aparna Ranjan in this very informative tour and later we sat together for a long chat with Frederic Dedelley on various issues and directions in design for India and the world.

Image 5: Bamboo workshop at IPIRTI with Tripura craftsmen for the IL&FS project.

The IPIRITI based bamboo development workshop had nine craftsmen from Tripura along with two of our mastercraftsmen working on my new designs that used a combination of bamboo poles and rubber wood components under the supervision of NID Bangalore faculty and long time bamboo colleague, C S Susanth. The IL&FS team included a supervisor and their senior officer S Matouleibi who manages the field activities of the Tripura Bamboo Mission in Agartala, Tripura. We developed a collection ten new designs with a focus on a “local-to-local strategy”, where we selected products that would have a ready local market in the Tripura region which in turn would facilitate start-up entrepreneurship amongst the bamboo craftsmen who need to develop their self confidence through some mentored development initiatives by the design and finance teams in the field.

Image 6: Visit to Quetzel Design Pvt Ltd

This project and the strategy to use some rubber wood components had me driving all the way across Bangalore from Penea to Sarjapur Road for a visit to Quetzel, a furniture design and manufacturing firm started by two NID graduates, Sandeep Mukherjee and Sarita Fernandes. The company has grown from humble beginnings to be one of the finest furniture manufacturing firms in India that can compete with the international brands that are now entering India across all the parameters of marketing and design. Sandeep and Sarita were both my students in the Furniture Design faculty and NID and I feel quite proud to see their massive and refined industrial venture which has been built at a time when design was ignored by both government and industry alike, which is something that I had called attention to in my paper of 2001 at the first National Design Summit organized by the CII and NID in Bangalore. My paper was titled “Cactus Flowers Bloom on the Dessert” to draw attention to the extremely hostile economic and policy climate in which design was passing through and things have not changed much even today, although we have come a long way as a profession today, but no thanks to either the government and to the established industry, who have steadfastly ignored the design community in India while they have run after international collaborations at a huge cost to our economy and to the tax payer alike. Download paper here 123 kb pdf file and visual presentation here in two parts: Part 1 – 3.6 mb pdf file and Part 2 – 4.6 mb pdf file

Image 7: Visit to Trapeze Design Studio at Koramangala

On our return from our long drive to Quetzel and back I took Matouleibi to visit Trapeze, a graphic design studio at Koramangala which was set up by two NID graduates, Sarita Sunder and Ram Sinam. An exciting small studio with a row of Macs on one side and an impromptu photo studio and a table tennis facility on the other. Trapeze has an impressive range of clients from across several sectors and their work in print and web design has set standards for Indian graphic design industry in spite of their small and cozy studio size and very personalized format of operation.

Image 8: Book launch function at Crosswords for Dr Darlie O Koshy and his book “Indian Design Edge”.

The week closed with another interesting event which I will write about in some detail in a future post since it will need the time and space to read, reflect and comment about, in a balanced manner, if possible. This event was the launch of the new book, “Indian Design Edge” by Dr Darlie O Koshy, Director, National Institute of Design through the Roli Books Publishers at an evening event at Crosswords Bookstore on Residency Road, Bangalore. The event saw the main speaker Dr Sadagopan, Director IIIT, Bangalore (Tripple IT Bangalore) wax and wane about the virtues of design from the aesthetics to the usability of the Apple iPhone and his profuse praise for Dr Koshy’s many achievements in his 8 year long career at NID as its Executive Director for the first five years and later as its Director for the past three years after a terminiology change that has left us all puzzled if it is a move forward for NID or not. I bought three copies of the book for myself, my wife Aditi Ranjan and my daughter Aparna Ranjan so that all of us designers could come up to steam quickly on Dr Koshy’s offering to the design publishing space in India, which by the way is very starved of any kind of serious publishing and this particular offering will be lapped up by the much starved Indian and international design public, I am sure. Dr Koshy is also a Board Member of ICSID, the International Council of Societies Industrial Design, and by the way my blog “Design for India” has been showcased by the ICSID blog in the education section last month particularly for the Tata Nano debate that it had hosted when the product was launched with much fanfare early this year. Ratan Tata has written the Forward for Dr Koshy’s book and the Tata Nano appears on the dust jacket as well as on the contents page of the book as a symbol of Indian design success.

Image 9: Visitors at the book launch function at Crosswords, Bangalore

There was a bash across the street from Crosswords organized by a local fashion group to falicitate Dr Koshy on his publishing achievement but I did not gate-crash this bash at the Taj Gateway but chose to have a quiet dinner with my daughter Aparna along with two very interesting young designers from France and Germany, two girls who have chosen to work in India since it offers them real challenges unlike the well established and stable design climate in Europe today. We sat a Coconut Grove and got a sense of what foreign designers liked in India and how they had coped with the challenges of Indian living, both rode mobikes in Bangalore and have worked for over two years in a umber of very interesting assignments here in Bangalore. I am sure India can accommodate may more such international adventurers in the 230 sectors of our economy that is today starved of design offerings due to policy myopia in government and in industry. The design scene in India is indeed changing rapidly and this si an exciting time to be working in and in writing about design for India. Mireille Arnaud, the girl from France, is working with some stone craftsmen from a village called Shivarapatna in Karnataka and she has helped them build contemporary concepts that can take their skills to new markets in India and overseas. This is the kind of cooperation that we had envisaged when Aditi and I had embarked on the research for the book “Handmade in India” in conversations with Jogi Panghaal one of our prominent collaborators and several of our faculty colleagues at NID. India can offer creative opportunities of Indian and international designers to work closely with Indian craftsmen to build a creative economy which could be the future for many of the Indian crafts if our policy initiatives are managed in the right direction. On the other hand, Christina Hug from Germany, is working as a creative director in a local design firm with her focus on graphics and communication having traveled to India after field experiences with the Greenpeace Foundation in many countries.

This week I get back to NID Ahmedabad with a good feel from Bangalore since so much has happened the past ten days and the stay was useful and productive. I look forward to returning soon to Bangalore, the city of Rain Tree avenues and a still wonderful climate, if we manage to keep it that way, Nano or no Nano!


Prof M P Ranjan

Exhibition Design at NID: A reflection on Design Education for India

…Design for India…

Image: Three major exhibition design projects from the NID documentation of 1964 to 69, the Nehru Exhibition (Eames - 1965), the Osaka Theme Pavilion (Frei Otto – 1969) and the Gandhi Darshan Exhibition (Dashrat Patel – 1971) all commissioned by the Government of India to promote the national agenda. Download NID Documentation 64-69 as a 25 mb pdf here

Exhibition Design at NID: A reflection on Design Education for India
Multidisciplinarity is sometimes used as a slogan to show that design is complex and that many different skills and knowledge areas would need to be accessed in order to solve a particular messy issue but this is rarely done in practice since this is politically a very difficult task of negotiation and coordination. However when filmmakers and media designers work to deliver complex messages in the medium of both film and exhibit design this is perhaps the only way that it can be done effectively. An exhibition or a museum is a complex but coherent message that is delivered in space and or time – through the use of many devices – and at NID we have had a huge legacy of experiences that we could draw upon from the numerous projects that were conceived and executed over the long period of over forty five years beginning from 1964. I wrote a paper in 1986 about the lessons from the various exhibit design projects done at NID and this was in the context of a conference on design of crafts museums held at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi. This paper can be downloaded from here as a word file: Exhibit Design at NID

Starting with some early projects for the Space Applications Centre and some Textile Mills at Ahmedabad in the early 60’s the first major exhibit to be assigned to NID was the Nehru Exhibition. Charles and Ray Eames designed this exhibition with their office team working along with the young NID team at Ahmedabad. The Eames Office teams located themselves at NID for a few months while the research and design of the exhibition involved the young NID students who learned on the job from the world masters. These students were the first batch of Graphic Designers being trained at NID who later became the first faculty group of the Institute. The Nehru Exhibition traveled the world and I too was involved in these projects in New Delhi in 1972 and later in Santiago, Chile in January 1973 and much later in the early 90’s when it was set up once again as the much enlarged and permanent “Discovery of India” exhibit at the Nehru Centre in Bombay. All these projects were done by the faculty of the time and students from several disciplines were involved as project associates, each with a specific design assignment from which they could learn by doing. “Learning by doing” was the slogan of the day and frequent project meetings ensured that all members got to learn about the problems and achievements of all the other teams that were handling the diverse tasks to be completed in time and at the highest quality standard, insisted upon and set by the international consultants as well as the faculty teams at NID.

Such projects in those days brought in the money needed to experiment freely with expensive materials and tools within education and the Institute would be buzzing with activity through the day and the night when deadlines got tough and the learning was taking place in a rich soup of activity and dialogue associated with these projects. These experiences also brought in many specialist experts such as copy editors, photographers, typographers, calligraphers, artists, illustrators, lighting, media and structure experts, all masters in their respective field, and their visits to the campus as well as at work locations in many fabrication shops where the various exhibits were being fashioned gave live exposure and experience to the students, and all of this was based on the design schemes proposed by the teams from NID.

Image: NID's heritage campus as seen from the lawns was the scene of all the activity mentioned in this post. Today two new campusses have been set up at Gandhinagar and at Bangalore.

In the late 70’s exhibition design was offered as a discipline for the SLPEP Programme which was then five and a half years duration with a one and half year foundation programme. Dashrat Patel headed and conducted the discipline with Pradeep Choksi as his faculty assistant during the first few years, but whenever major exhibition projects came into the Institute, students from all disciplines were involved as team members and everyone got the multidisciplinary exposure. The landmark projects handled in this period included the Our India Pavilion in the 1972 IITF Trade Fair with huge multi-screen projection systems executed with technical and multimedia experts from Czechoslovakia, the Textiles of India Pavilion for the Ministry of Textiles and the Nehru Exhibition, all of which opened on the same day in New Delhi in November 1972. The first batch of NID’s SLPEP Undergraduate students were all involved in these three projects and the learning was truly through the doing as was professed in those days as the educational philosophy of the Institute. The exhibition design education programme was suspended for a few years and then offered again through popular demand from students wishing to explore several materials as well as media, message, structure and form. The exhibition design programme flourished under the leadership of Vikas Satwalekar who took personal interest in the activity while he was the Executive Director of NID from 1988 to 2000. Included in these is the Rta Rtu exhibit for the IGNCA in New Delhi and the Discovery of India exhibit in Bombay besides a regular education offering at NID and a rich crop of graduates from the discipline, all with great leadership that was revealed by their work in the field since then.

The major projects handled in the early days included the Agri-Expo in 1977 under Ashoke Chatterjee’s leadership, the Manipur Pavilion and the DST Pavilion in 1981, Energy Exhibition in 1983, and the Commonwealth Institute Exhibit in London during the Festival of India in the UK. The other period of major projects included My Land My People for the Festival of India in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Vinay Jha between 1985 and 1988 when he was the Executive Director of NID. Two major museum design projects were already under way when Dr Darlie Koshy took over as the Executive Director of NID in 2000, the major museum project for the Reserve Bank of India and the Khalsa Heritage Museum for the Government of Punjab. While the first museum was completed and delivered in Bombay as a very high quality offering the second ran into political trouble of many kinds. However, the Khalsa project ran into all kinds of delays and the project has now been handed over to a team of NID graduates who are now completing the project since both Vikas and Suranjana Satwalekar moved out of NID after his retirement as a member of the NID faculty. However NID shifted its focus from “hands-on” production of exhibits to outsourced production and student involvement in these projects dwindled to a very small and infrequent involvement due to policy changes in education and professional practice at NID. The “Hand-on Minds-on” slogan that I had coined – for our bamboo based elective using three species, kanakais (affinis), strictus and giganteous, each from Tripura, Madhtya Pradesh and Karnataka respectively – in November 2003, which was later borrowed and adopted wholesale by the institute across many of its publications and external communications. However, in the real actions that followed the slogans, the hands-on seems to have lost out to an intellectual research focus, which saw the workshops at NID shrink in size, and activity and the student population soar in numbers across all the specialized disciplines at NID. Exhibition design once again stuttered from lack of conviction in the multidisciplinarity being at the core of design education and many narrow specialisations were launched in the claim that these would bring greater depth of research to the specific fields. Only time will tell if this will happen and I have my doubts, which I have expressed at many occasions.

We need to review the design history of our exhibition design education and practice and draw the lessons from these experiences since they were not just professional projects being carried out in a pure design office but they were truly rich training grounds for young design students who were exposed to live experiences across a multidisciplinary environment in a climate of high motivation, optimism and a high quality commitment. This kind of learning is unique to NID since professional projects were brought into the classroom and these tested the mettle of both faculty and students alike. It is not surprising that so many of our graduates occupy leadership positions in their careers across many sectors of the Indian economy and we should use these reflections to see how design education can and should be strengthened in a live manner in the days ahead. Unfortunately, as with so many other design schools around the world NID too suffers from a lack of process documentation of its work and experiences. This may be a good moment for us to rally our faculty and students as well as those who have recently retired from service to try and use the web based platform to document and garner all these experiences in a way that will give us insights that would help shape the future of design education when India is finally recognizing the need for this kind of training and the national policy is geared to set up several schools all over India. What models should they follow? Surely not the route followed by the schools of architecture and technology but perhaps that which has been adopted by the schools of medicine where practice is at the heart of education, “Hand-on Minds-on” all the way. Yesterday two students met me in my office to ask me questions about the history of the NID’s exhibition design programme and in my response to their questions many insights and experiences flashed through my mind, which has led to this paper.

Next week NID is organizing a very interesting meeting under the leadership of Gira Sarabhai who from her museum design and management experience coming from the setting up and running of the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad has asked NID to explore the need and structure for a proposed new programme on the conservation and management of the textile and museum heritage of India. Aditi Ranjan, Head of Department of Textile and Apparel Design at NID is coordinating the meet on the 18th and 19th September 2008 with international and national experts meeting together with design educators and this I am sure is a great opportunity to reflect on the NID experience in museum and exhibition design. I will unfortunately miss this event since I will be on my way to Bangalore for my two-week course in DCC for the NID Bangalore students as well as our bamboo project for the IL&FS and the Tripura Bamboo mission for whom we are conducting at the IPIRTI campus located across the street from the NID campus. However I do hope that the meeting will sift through the vast NID experience and integrate this into a rich palette of inputs and insights for the future of design education in India.

…Design for India…

Interior Design in India: SID Research Conferences

…Design for India…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…Design for India…

Criss + Cross: Swiss Design returns to India

…Design for India…

Image: Criss + Cross: Swiss Design on show at the NID Design Gallery in Ahmedabad. The exhibit opened on Tuesday, 5 August 2008 and stayed on show for public from 6 - 14, August 2008

The Criss + Cross exhibit is traveling in India after having journeyed through a number of other countries since it was first put together in 2003. Criss + Cross has been curated by Ariana Pradal, Köbi Gantenbein & Roland Eberle. The exhibitions in India are part of the jubilee celebrations commemorating 60 years of Indo-Swiss friendship and put together by Pro Helvetia worldwide, the Swiss Arts Council, dedicated to promoting cultural works of nationwide and international interest. Three hundred of the finest Swiss designs assembled by the curatorial team are on display in six “Magic Boxes” under seven themes as follows:
1. small + beautiful: meticulous Swiss precision and things that just work
2. the tiny helpers: ubiquitous products for everyday use but with a difference, the Swiss way.
3. up to the mountains: natural wisdom from the Swiss terrain and the mountains,
4. the longsellers: all time classics
5. hip + young: youthful expression and products for the young at heart.
6. a visual statement: a slide show that presents about 300 recent works of graphic designers from various fields.
7. library: beautifully designed and printed books
The exhibition opens in Bangalore in partnership with the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology & Goethe-Institut Bangalore. 
The venue: the Goethe-Institut Bangalore, Max Mueller Bhavan
: opening on Friday, 5 September 2008 at 6:30 pm 
Exhibition will be on view from 6 - 20 September 2008, each day from
10:30 am - 6:30 pm (Mon - Sat)
and 10:30 am - 5:00 pm (Sun). Those designers and design students who missed the exhibit at NID, Ahmedabad are strongly advised to catch the earliest flight to Bangalore and make it for the show. If you are already in Bangalore you have no further excuse to miss this very special Swiss treat, all packed in six crates.

Image: Criss + Cross: Swiss Design exhibition was packaged in six cases and organized in seven sections, each in wooden crates with integrated lighting and the seventh, a slide show projection system, The exhibit on the right is the “Library” of fabulous Swiss Graphic design books and on the left is the exhibit called “Small & beautiful” with several of the finest examples of Swiss fine craftsmanship from medical devices, watches to computer accessories.

My personal favorite here in this section is the Kern Compass Set, which reminded me of the much bigger and elaborate professional set that was given to me for personal use when I first joined NID as a young design student in April 1969 and this did help whip up my passion for fine geometry diagrams by using some of the finest drawing instrument in the world! NID knew quality in those days and respected it to ensure that every student used the best of class in the world of drawing devices in their classes and that for me is represented by the Kern drawing instruments that was standard supply for all students joining NID in those days. Circles drawn with the Kern set did not leave gaping holes in the drawing sheets since the compass point is of hardened metal and the tip is adjustable to remain perpendicular and most of all the joints just worked and did not shake or slip due to the fine precision that came from the Swiss workmanship and their understanding of quality and design at the functional as well as the aesthetic level. There were no compromises in their product.

The other remarkable exhibits in this section are the Swiss Passport which can make every citizen proud to hold one that is so distinctive and secure while the other is a commemorative edition of the Swatch which is one of four special designs offered for the 700 th anniversary of Switzerland in 1991. Each exhibit has a story to tell and the Criss + Cross catalogue is a useful resource that can add value to the exhibit, I have one in hand, special thanks are due to the Swiss Embassy in Mumbai which kindly spared a copy for me to review.

Image: Dimple Soni, an NIID faculty and coordinator of Exhibition Design studying the exhibit detailing at the “Little Helpers” container. A finely detailed box, hinged and mounted on roller castors can be opened and mounted in a jiffy, with all the signage, lighting and exhibits in place, all in one simple case, unpretentious and elegant, just great design detailing and treatment. At the top are a row of peepholes that invite the viewer to participate, each shows one colour slide of an object and the solution is a simple 35mm slide picture viewer mounted behind the peephole that uses the glow of the lights in the box to show the slide in sharp view, a simple plastic viewer that gives us great pleasure, that many electronic gadgets would not be able to.

The objects in this section are consumer and domestic products from everyday life, each designed to get the job done with minimum fuss and the objects all but become invisible to the user since they just work and the title “Little Helpers” is an appropriate label for this category of ubiquitous products of our day, all well designed. My personal favorite here is the Omega drawing pins with three legs instead of one central pin, each made by punching thin sheet metal into an embossed and therefore sturdy pin, comfortable for the thumb that could hold drawing sheets to the wooden drawing boards that we all used as students at NID in the heady days of the late 60’s of design learning under the Swiss influence that came through our Graphic Design department. In those days all our graphic design teachers had traveled to the Mecca of Graphic Design in Switzerland, the Basel School, to be tutored by none other than Armin Hofmann and his colleagues to come back and introduce the International Style in India with over 500 or more corporate logos, all designed by the Institute under this strong and durable Swiss influence over the early years of NID and its practice of design in India which I have mentioned in an earlier post on the subject..

Image: Detail of two of the six cases that make up the Swiss Design exhibit. On the left is the “Up to the mountains” crate showing designs produced by the traditional wisdom of a mountain dwelling people rooted in the reality of the land. On the right is the “hip + young” crate with designs for the youthful and playful generation.

Each nation around the world can boast of indigenous design solutions in their food, homes, objects as well as votive occasions and festivals, all designed through local action over the years by ordinary human actions. We too will need to look at what India has to offer as an enormous resource with our huge regional variations and long history of settled civilization. Design at this level is a product of culture and it goes to a very deep level in each refined manifestation, which may take many centuries to mature. The Swiss have learned their lessons from their mountains and these exhibits represent this deep respect for the mountain, particularly one as imposing as the Great Matterhorn, a challenge for climbers of all ages. My favorite in this section is the Avalanche dog, the Grand Saint-Bernard, a Swiss contribution to the world of specially bred and designed nature shown as a small ceramic model since the real one could not be shown. Design with nature is just as Claude Levi Straus tells us that the Mayan civilization created many of our vegetables, which were all “designed” by their careful breeding and imaginative nurture of nature in the past. In the youthful category my favorite is the Classic Micro Skate Scooter now used by adults and children alike to get around town but for me it brought back memories of my own childhood scooter from my fathers factory in Guindy, Madras when I had my very own scooter to zip around the toy factory and the vast grounds that led up to the Mount Road entrance. I will save this from another post that will link up to the Rockytoys story from my childhood days.

Image: “The Longsellers” or Swiss all time classics with many exciting and famous offerings as seen from the pages of the Criss + Cross catalogue.

Seen here are the famous Vitra design miniature pieces, each a precise scaled down model of a design classic produced by this remarkable design led company which also makes the original items in true and faithful detail, as specified by their designers. Max Bill’s Ulmer Stull is seen hanging at the top of the box and below it is the classic Univers font that was designed by Adrian Frutiiger another one of the NID’s great visiting teachers in the roaring 60’s. He was also responsible for the design of the famous NID symbol that is now standing at the main entrance gate as a cast in concrete negative form, which is back-lit at night to be seen from the road. Further on the shelf, is the triangular Swiss delicacy called Toblerone, my favorite chocolate, which is visible from both sides through the cut-out section in the display box. Clockwise, the thumbnail images below show – the section separator in the book, the Univers font by Adrian Frutiger in 1954, the famous Victorinox – Swiss Army Knife revised as ALOX in 1980, The Landi Stuhl by Hans Coray designed in 1938, the Le Corbusier LC1 Armchair from 1928, the Station Clock by Hans Hilfiker in 1955, the Garden Chair by Willy Guhl in 1954, Ulmer Stool by Max Bill in 1954, and Verner Panton chairs by Vitra from 1958 and 1960.

For me personally many these items of furniture along with the ones that we saw frequently featured in Danish and Italian magazines in the NID library formed the impassioned introduction to design as a young student at NID in the late 60’s and early 70’s when these very designers inspired me with their work and their imagination as well as deep understanding of material and form that is represented by their classic design offerings which we now see in the Swiss design exhibit now in India for the first time. The Ulmer Stuhl is for me a very special exhibit since this was one of the remarkable products that was available as a reproduction at NID along with the box-wood filing cabinet that was used by Prof Kumar Vyas and Prof Sudha Nadkarni, both having returned from Ulm exposure in the early 60’s. I was given the filing cabinet to redesign in metal wire as my very first design assignment at NID by Rolf Misol, my German furniture design faculty when I joined NID in April 1969, but that is a story for another day.

…Design for India…

Prestigious Awards and Design success: The Onio example

...Design for India...

Image: Hispital Bed designed by Onio Design, Pune for their client Godrej Interio and it won an award at the Design Brilliance Award

A press release from Onio Design tells us that they have won a prestigious award for their new Hospital Bed Design. Congratulations to Manoj Kotari and Prakash Khansode for this achievement and this is extended to the teams involved as well. According to the release the award has been instituted by Future-Group, Business World and National Institute of Design jointly. You can see the full report at this link here:

Hospital beds have been in the cone of vision of designers who have tried to show that design can work in critical areas and not just in the market economy. Prof Bruce Archer carried out some of his most intensive research efforts on the design of a Hospital Bed at a time when very few believed that design could be a systematic activity. Read more about this at the wiki link below: Bruce Archer and Design Research at the RCA

The interest in Hospital beds and the recognition that the healthcare industry needs design brought the Metropolis Magazine to ask four design groups to offer what they called "Design Prescription: The Hospital Bed: Reimagining the bane of every patient’s existence." The results of the 2005 initiative can be seen as concept designs in the slide show that pops up by clicking on the image of the traditional bed on the page. See the Metropolis link here:

I was project guide to NID student Pradeep Shodhan way back in 1976 when he designed a Hospital Bed as part of his diploma project at the National Institute of Design and this problem that was addressed then has not gone away and I am happy to see the Onio initiative offering an alternative for the Indian market. The diploma document can be seen at the NID library but it did not reach market although it was fully developed and ready to go. In those days industry was not looking at innovations to drive the market since it was the license and control Raj that was in operation in India. Specifications was king and innovation took a back seat. I wish that NID would make these archival documents available online as digital files which is so easy nowadays.

Recently Seymor Powel designed an improved aesthetic bed for Huntleigh Healthcare which has function and form at the heart of the offering. Created as a range to meet a variety of critical needs these beds use metal and blow moulded components to achieve a more humane look and feel for patients in high performance healthcare situations. The company claims that besides meeting the needs of patients the needs of maintanance engineers, porters, cleaning staff and all direct users such as doctors and nurses were also met through deep research. See the Seymor Powell bed here:

The Onio bed for Godrej looks smart and works well in an economical and ergonomic manner, congratulations team. I wish it commercial success. The bed was designed for their clients Godrej Interio, a furniture manufacturing unit of Godrej Group of companies that has been a leader in the furniture industry in India.

Image: Snapshots of the Onio website showing unconventional design offerings.

This Onio offering can be a role model for drawing much needed investments into design for non luxury products much needed in India today. The Businessworld Awards in India and most other international design awards each year are filled with examples of luxury products where industry has been using design to push and grow the market just as fashion product manufacturers have tended to look to design to keep the wheels of their industry moving each year through new and enticing offerings that can attract a consumer in a very crowded marketplace. I hope this particular demonstration from Onio opens a new trend for India and we would see many more of these design offerings with the much required investments in sectors of real need such as public utilities, BOP products as well as other sectors of real need from both industry as well as the Government in the years ahead. See BusinessWorld Awards here:

Victor Papanek had called for an awareness of real world issues in his book titled “Design for the Real World” in the early 70’s and and much later in the mid 90’s he called for a concerted effort from designers to address environmental and ecological issues in his book “The Green Imperative”. Papanek visited NID in 1979 to attend the UNIDO-ICSID conference and I remember that the students were drawn to his ideas like flies to some sweets but the conference organisers found his views too radical to be brought centre stage at the ICSID and UNIDO agenda although this did happen much later. The Design for Development conference in 1979 gave me the opportunity to design a new auditorium chair for the NID and twenty years later this set the stage for the design of another new chair for the Ravi J Matthai Auditorium at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad which I have written about in my previous post on the Design for India blog.

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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