Animation at NID: A brief History

Chitrakatha 2009 and the memories from NID's animation journeys

Prof. M P Ranjan

With the CNBC TV18 bestowing a singular honor by recognizing Sekhar Mukherjee as India’s animation teacher of excellence through their Golden Cursor Excellence in Animation Awards conferred on him 8 May 2009 at a glittering function in Mumbai we get an opportunity to look back at the stirrings of animation in India and how it set roots at NID.

Image01: The CNBC TV 18 award to Sekhar Mukherjee has finally brought some recognition to NID teachers in Animation Design discipline. We can review this in the backdrop of the Chitrakatha 2009 events at NID over the past three days.

This is a brief but incomplete history of the valiant efforts made at NID over the years to establish an animation based profession in India, the first institute to take up this challenge. Jayanthi Sen in her article in Animation World Network ion 19 October 1999 maps the origins of animation in India with the arrival of the Cartoon Film Unit at the Films Division set up buy the Government of India. In the mid 50’s they brought Disney Studio maestro, Claire Weeks to train the first batch of trained animators for the Indian scene. The story of NID’s contribution to Indian animation has not been written and I do hope that some serious research scholar will take up this challenge and articulate the epic journey from its origins in 1963 when the Oxbury camera came to NID to the Chitrakatha 2009 and beyond.

Image02: Animation heros seen at the Chitrakatha 2009 event on the NID campus at Paldi. Each of them a leader in the field and with many successful films to their credit.

However in 1961 NID was set up at Ahmedabad and very early in its development the Visual Communication programmes were established with the offering of the first Post Graduate Programme that started in 1963. Amongst the first batch was Ishu Patel who having joined the programme to study Graphic Design gravitated to learning animation after a foundation in Graphics from the master Armin Hoffman. While he was a student at NID two animators came to NID and made a great little film in the mid 60’s called Swimmy. Leo Leonni and Gulio Gianini were assisted by Ishu Patel, Mahendra C Patel, Vikas Satwalekar and I S Mathur, all first generation students at NID in the Visual Communication programme.

Image03: Chitrakatha 2007 showcased NID animation and set the stage for a broader recognition of NID’s contributions to the field of animation film making in India over the years.

Ishu Patel studied Graphics at Basel under Armin Hoffman and in 1970 was deputed to the National Film Board of Canada to study animation. This started a life long passion for animation and a long string of great experimental films made both at NID as well as at the NFBC which he joined full time in 1972. He returned to India each year to share his work at the Institute and many NFBC films came into the NID archives most notable of which are the fine collection from Norman McLaren and later from Ishu Patel himself. Saul Bass and Charles and Ray Eames too were highly influential in the early years in shaping the directions of animation at NID through screenings of their work on a regular basis in the NID auditorium.

Ishu Patel on Wikipedia
Leo Leoni on Wikipedia
Gulio Gianini on Wikipedia
Charles and Ray Eames on Wikipedia
Saul Bass on Wikipedia
National Film Board of Canada on Wikipedia

Image04: Scenes from Chitrakatha 2009 at NID campus between 29th and 31st October 2009.

The next generation of NID students included R L Mistry and Narayanbhai Patel who took to animation and illustration through their long career as student and later teachers NID. Narayanbhai experimented with paper sculpture based animations while R L Mistry explored many styles of illusrtration and developed his art to a very high level of perfection and achieved the distinction of getting the National Award for his film the national Highway from the President of India. After Ishu Patel left NID in 1972 it was R L Mistry who took up the major responsibility of teaching animation to students at NID and there were a steady stream of interested candidates who loved the medium and wished to explore but the funding was limited and hard to find and the Oxbury camera was available only in limited periods due to cost of operation. NID’s exhibition design projects brought in many opportunities for the animation activity and the education programme too legitimized the periodic use of the medium for basic exercises that were many.

R L Mistry on NID website : A book by Prakash Moorthy

Image05: Additional scenes from Chitrakatha 2009 at NID campus between 29th and 31st October 2009.

The next batch of NID animators included Nina Sabnani, Binita Desai and Chitra Sarathy who joined NID as informal learners in short term programmes offered by the department and International consultants were present to conduct some of the programmes for these students at NID. The trio spent a period of experimental work in Calcutta with the Graphic Designer Raghunath Goswami who experimented with the medium for social communication tasks as part of his studio in the Eastern India. NID produced a intermediate technology animation stand for use with a stop frame movie camera and this stand was shifted to Calcutta for use by the NID animators in Goswami’s office. Late 70’s and the early 80’s found Ashoke Chatterjee at the helm of NID as its Director and he insisted on the use of animation for developmental comminication of a variety of types. He managed to get the Ministry of Health to invest in NID animation abilities and Nina Sabnani produced a series of films on the subject of maturation of the girl child and child birth and the associated health issues. In the 80’s and 90’s animation was used extensively for making many short instructional films for screening at the NID designed theme exhibitions such as the Energy pavilion in 1983 that was headed by Vikas Satwalekar. However in spite of these successful demonstrations funding from Government sources was hard to come by and it was back to education assignments to keep the Oxbury camera busy through the year.

Binita Desai made a presentation about 20 years of NID animation at Chitrakatha 2007 and the link here shows her talk in summary on the blog All About Animation:

The UNDP programme of support for the Institute in late 80’s saw the arrival of some support for the animation programme at NID by way of international consultants and travel and study opportunities for NID faculty. Nina and Binny having joined the faculty were deputed to the UK to study animation under Roger Noake while their initial training was provided by Claire Weeks at NID. After their return Nina and Binny got involved in animation education and in making occasional demonstration films and work on a variety of projects that included animation skills such as the animated symbols for the Doordarshan TV channels. The next generation of students included both those in the Post Graduate programme as well as students for the Under Graduate programme at NID. With the arrival of digital technology in the 90’s the field of animation received a great deal of interest in India and the spread of Television across India also brought in new opportunities for the NID animation students. The music channels provided internship opportunities and soon a flood of employment opportunities came their way and Bombay studios gave many of our students professional placement. The other major employer was the IT interactive media industry that took students for gaming and new media product applications and numerous diploma projects were sponsored by industry and these gave a new edge to the animation activity at the institute. I hope that some of these stories will be documented and shared in the days ahead and I am happy that the two Chitrakatha episodes of 2007 and 2009 have given our alumni a platform to share their journeys.

Image06: Stills from the trailer of “Arjun” an animated feature film being directed and produced in Mumbai by Arnab Choudhury and Pavan Buragohain for the UTV Productions due for release early in 2010.

The NID animation department has produced many champions of Indian animation and their story too needs to be told at some length, hopefully after a good deal of research since there is much to be said here. However I am aware of some of these cases since these students have been in touch with me over the years and I have been watching their progress as young professionals and now as accomplished animators that India has to offer to the world. This group includes many individuals and here I can only mention a few that I am aware of in some detail. They include Prakash Moorthy, Umesh Shukla, Dhimant Vyas, Vaibhav Kumaresh, E Suresh, Arnab Choudhury and Pavan Buragohain. I do hope that the others will share what they are up to these days and tell us about the exciting projects that they have on hand, a bit of which we were able to glimpse during the Chitrakatha 2009 that just concluded at NID between 29th to 31st October 2009. Besides the international presenters from Mexico and China we had some from experts from industry and education from Kolkatta, Mumbai and Ahmedabad. However bulk of the presentations were from the NID graduates who are making waves in India across a number of media sectors from advertising, TV entertainment, game design, childrens animation, edutainment, and most exciting of all mainstream feature length animation due to hit the stands shortly. Student animators too showcased their work across many sectors and entries were screened from many nations during the three days as part of the student competition entries that were judged by a panel of jurors and awarded at the end of the event. Others who came to NID for the event include Sheetal Sudhir and Manish Sehrawat of Channel V and Sanjay Jangir, a recent NID graduate showed his Diploma film that was feated at film festivals in Canada, Switzerland and Japan recently.

Pavan Buragohin on the web link:

A note about the making of “Arjun” screening at NID during the Chitrakatha 2009 that appeared in the Ahmedabad Mirror.

Sanjay Jangir web link for Raah:

Image07: An exhibition about Comic Books on the sidelines of the Chitrakatha 2009 at the NID Gallery and other related events exploring the role of Comics in national education of the future.

While the most exciting presentation for me personally was the screening of the making of “Arjun” which promises to be the first ever full length feature animation film to be produced by a group of NID animators and that too as a fully indigenous production effort. This was particularly interesting since Arnab Choudhury shared the design process and the stages through which the film had to be visualized with the use of live action to discover both characters as well as postures and action sequences, dramatization of the theme and scenes, and the followup articulation with sketches and diagrams of key figures, characters and scenes so that these could be passed on to the production stage in a coherent manner involving a vast group of service providers without compromising the quality and intention of the designers involved. This process promises to create a solid foundation for a vibrant animation industry in India that delivers compelling products instead of just BPO type finishing touches to international producers. Further the quality and impact of the presentation was such that many of us left the auditorium feeling that the team had a Oscar quality film in the making, we wish the team all the very best in the days ahead. NID animation has finally arrived at the national stage and that too with a big bang!! Other young designers are in the ranks and they will be able to dream big and have the conviction to take on the Bollywood producers and money bags who have been sitting on the sidelines so far in the days ahead I am sure. Government of India could do well to find and channel venture funding for the young creative animation producers and this will speed up the process of seeding a fantastic industry based on design talent in India of the future.

I was invited by Sekhar Mukherjee to sit in on a panel discussion on the topic of the role Comic Books in Education in India. The discussions were quite stimuilating and there is indeed a role that Comics will and can play in the days ahead. I mentioned the book by Scott McCloud called “Understanding Comics” which I have been reading with great interest for the theory that it provides us and also about TED talks where Scott McCloud gives us an insight into the world of Comics that is both informative as well as entertaining.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Gajanan Upadhayay: A new monograph and exhibition of furniture designs

Gajanan Upadhayay: Documentation and Peer Critique

Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

The creative professionals of Ahmedabad have bestowed an honor on the former NID Faculty member and designer Gajanan Upadhayay through a week long exhibition that opened at the Herwitz Gallery on 19th June 2009. The exhibit curated by the HPC Design & Project Management Pvt. Ltd headed by architect Bimal Patel and the TDW Furniture Pvt. Ltd. Headed by Ismet Khambatta and is accompanied by a Monograph titled “Gajanan Upadhyaya: Furniture Designer” which was released by NID Director Pradyumna Vyas at a simple function in front of a very distinguished audience of architects, designers, teachers and students of the Ahmedabad’s creative fraternity.

Image01: Inaugural session at the Herwitz Gallery with the monograph launch by Pradyumna Vyas and the brief lecture by Prof M P Ranjan about Gajanan Upadhayay and his design achievements.

The distinguished audience included architects B V Doshi and Hasmukh Patel, Bimal Patel and Ismet Khambatta and a number of designers and faculty from NID, CEPT and students from these schools.
I was requested to speak at the function to introduce the creator and to provide a backdrop that could place the furniture creations in their proper context, a real tall order, when we look at the prolific contributions of Gajanan Upadhayay over a career that spans five decades and his professional experience coincides with the history of design in India and that of NID. I took a few minutes to ponder the question in the morning before the talk and jotted down a few key thoughts that could guide my comments about my colleague of more than 40 years at NID. Yes, we do go a long way together, in the same department and teaching some courses together and working on many joint projects, but still keeping our own separate identities and in some cases, points of view that differed in many ways. Whichever way I look at GU, as we have fondly called him, both his students and faculty deeply respect him for his work and it was no easy task to summarise a lifetime of work that stands tall in my view comparable with the worlds best in the field of furniture design. This small documentation of GU’s work is I believe the first in a long series of future publications that will unravel the mysteries of the man and his work that is as yet unknown to design circles outside a small band students, faculty and associates at NID and other associated designers and friends from Ahmedabad and other parts of India.

Image02: Inside the Herwitz Gallery a view of furniture designed by Gajanan Upadhayay over his career spanning from the early 60’s till date.

I divided GU’s career into four distinct stages. His first stint at NID as a young designer and architect trainee in 1962 to 1965 when he interacted with Gira and Gautam Sarabhai being introduced to the idea of design that was flowing into NID through the regular movement of great designers from Europe and America in those days. GU worked with some of these designers and drew inspiration from their work to make the first tentative explorations into fine furniture design. Even these pieces were exquisite and he was selected by NID to do a stint of formal training at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the Furniture Design department, perhaps the best place in the world in those days for the deep study of furniture design. At NID he had the opportunity to work and be exposed to the concepts of great world designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nakashima, Louis I Kahn and Hans Gugelot from Hfg Ulm which resulted in two very remarkable ranges of furniture that were prototyped and modeled in those days but never saw production like many NID offerings since Indian Industry was blind to the possibility of design being cocooned in the days of “License Permit Raj” where there was no scope for competition through design but industry survived either through ministerial and bureaucratic patronage or just plain corruption. However, the NID documentation of the days credited the works to the visiting consultants and the young Indian designer was denied the credit due to him, but this has been corrected in the new monograph. I admired the “Round Stick Furniture” inspired by Louis I Kahn and the the “24/42 Furniture” inspired by Hans Gugelot when I came to NID as a student and nobody could tell us more about the people and circumstances under which these items were designed although Gajanan Upadhayay was spoken of in whispered tones and he was already a bit of a legend in those days since he had jumped ship and stayed on at the Danish Academy and not returned to NID as he was expected to.

Image03: A fleeting glimpse of the pages of the monograph showing the range of work done by Gajanan Upadhayay shown here as six groups of four pictures each from top left to bottom right: 1. Early work at NID and Denmark, 2. NID Classics from the early 80’s, 3. Library stackable chairs for NID, 4. Metal range for canteen and Board Rooms and Hostels, 5. New range for TWD in the 2000’s, and 6. Institutional furniture for schools, management school and the High Court at Ahmedabad.

He did return briefly to Ahmedabad in 1968-69 before he returned to Denmark to continue to work as a teacher and designer in close proximity with the great Danish Furniture designers of all time for a long stint of eight years before returning to Ahmedabad to settle down if you can even describe him as settled at any time or place. This was his second important phase of work, which is the Danish phase from 1966 to 1974. Working at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen closely with some and influenced greatly by the Danish greats of Poul Koerholm, Hans Wagner, Borge Mogensen and Nils Fagerholt besides others and he imbibed the finest traditions of Danish furniture design and construction and he also worked on drawing and making the design expressions of these designers professionally while working with them in school and in their studios while absorbing the values of the structural logic and design principles that are deeply ingrained in his own work ever since. On his return to India in 1974 he soon realized there was little scope for design as a professional occupation those days since nobody was willing to pay for design, not industry. He joined NID as a faculty in 1976 and I too had returned from Madras in the same time to rejoin NID and we seemed to have many interests in common. We criticized the existing Foundation course of Geometry and were immediately asked to reformulate it and conduct it for the 1976 batch of the NID Foundation programme. This course is still being conducted in the manner that we had planned and evolved keeping all the assignments of drawings, paper models and geometric concepts in much the same way as it was offered then. Geometry and structural logic are the striking features of GU’s furniture design work and this is what he tries to instill in his students as they interact with him.

Image04: Canteen chairs used for a poster at NID in the late 90’s to showcase the Furniture Design Discipline at NID shown alongside thumbnails of the pictures that I had captured towards making of the poster seen on the right.

This period from 1976 to his retirement from formal teaching at National Institute of Design (NID) at the age of 60 in 1994 would be for me the third phase of his prolific design career during which he created the wooden classics that are all over the NID campus and the hostels since they were produced in the NID workshops in the first round and in another round in later years the metal range that includes the canteen range, the board room furniture and the metal classroom range were produced here. In the early 80’s we offered the wooden furniture range to the Indian industry through an exhibition at the Trade Fair in New Delhi and Mini Boga took up the license to produce a number of these items through her Taaru factory and shop in New Delhi. In 1986 I traveled with GU to Agartala to make the presentation of the Tripura Bamboo Collection that we had jointly produced and on this visit we went to Katlamara to see the bamboo plantations of pole vault pole bamboos, as we called it in those days. We traveled by local bus, me inside and GU on top of the bus, all the way to Katlamara and we were excited by the possibilities of the material that we saw but we had to wait many years till 2003 when we managed to get limited funding to go again to do a workshop at the BCDI together. The monograph does not however cover all his offerings since it is a very small selection from his vast range of offerings but it is a great beginning and I am sure more will come as a result of this opening.

Image05: Gajanan Upadhayay stands behing four distinct versions of the Canteen Chair. Left to right: Fixed frame and non-stackable, Non-folding but stackable, Folding and stackable model (NID Canteen), Stainless steel frame and stackable.

Among the last projects that he handled at NID was the design of furniture for the Gujarat High Court that brought him into close contact with Bimal Patel of HCPDPM and Ismet Khambatta of TDW Furniture and soon thereafter he started working as a consultant with Bimal in his office and offering new design ranges to the TDW production and these started appearing in their showrooms as well. This is the fourth phase of GU’s design career and I am sure Design historians will study the impact of Gajanan Upadhayay on Indian design for many years to come and also on his influence on the young Indian furniture design industry which has been impacted by many students from NID setting up their own production facilities, first as small scale ventures which have by now grown into fairly substantial and sought after production houses in Bangalore, Jaipur, New Delhi and other cities in India. All of them have been strongly influenced by the Upadhayay design logic of modernist expression and fine craftsmanship. At the inaugural lecture for the GU furniture exhibit I spoke about the great furniture designers of the world such as Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe of the Bauhaus, Alvar Alto of the Finnish design tradition, and Jean Prouve of France, and Hans Gugelot and Gerd Lange of Germany and I do believe that Gajanan Upadhayay too will be one day compared to some of these international masters when the documentation of his work is done in the same depth and with the critical appreciation that it deserves.

References:

1. HCPDPM & TSW, “Gajanan Upadhayay: Furniture Designer”, Ahmedabad, 2009
Monograph available from HCPDPM, Ahmedabad. Pages 88 plus Cover and Dust Jacket.

HCPDPM
http://www.hcp.co.in
email: hcpahd (at) hcp.co.in
Price: Rs.250/=

TDW
http://www.3-dworkshop.com
email: info (at) 3-dworkshop.com

2. Exhibition of Furniture at the Herwitz Gallery with inaguration on 19 June 2009 and exhibit showing from 20 to 25 June 2009 from 4.00 pm to 8.00 pm daily.

Contact Info:

Gajanan Upadhayay’s furniture is available from TDW at their Ahmedabad showroom

T D W Furniture Pvt. Ltd.
Near Iscon Plaza, Satellite Road,
Ahmedabad 380 015 Gujarat India

email: info (at) 3-dworkshop.com

Design for India: 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…

Eames Demitrios at NID : Eames Photo Exhibit and Reflections on 50 Years after the Eames Report

Revisiting the Eames Legacy and Design Education in India and at NID

Prof M P Ranjan’s papers

Image 1: Eames Demitrios at the opening of the Eames Photo Exhibit at NID, the book of 100 Eames Quotes and his personal inscription on my copy. The 100 quotes are presented in the following languages: English, Complex Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Brazilian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Eames Demertios visited NID to launch the Eames 100 Photo Exhibition, which he had contributed to select on behalf of the Herman Miller Inc. and the exhibit has traveled across many nations before coming to NID to coincide with the celebration of Eames India Report (download PDF 360 kb) reaching the 50-year landmark. This gives us an opportunity to reflect on the impact of the Eames legacy in India and the impact of the National Institute of Design on the design needs of India, which is still very large and complex. However the larger series of events that I had proposed for the Eames Report Silver Jubilee celebration was unfortunately truncated due to lack of official fervor to back the event, which were however announced over one year ago. However, for this particular event I was away at a lecture meeting in Pune organized by the Interior Designers Association of India which was also planned to coincide with the Eames India Report celebrations and this meant that I missed being at the NID event since the dates clashed. I was however able to see the student and faculty excitement before the event and later hear about the opening ceremony when I came back to NID a couple of days later. I missed meeting Eames Demetrios this time but I was able to visit the photo exhibit several times and ponder on the Eames vision of India as shown through the pictures that only he could compose and capture with his inimitable sense of vision and purpose. Eames Demetrios was kind enough to leave an inscribed copy of the Eames 100 Quotes book for me as shown above. Charles and Ray Eames had much to say about the world and about design and this book is a handy guide for students from across the world.

Image 2: Eames Demetrios at NID with students and faculty on the occasion of the Eames Photo exhibit opening ceremonies at NID Gallary, an event that I unfortunately missed.

NID has been a Mecca for great world designers and in the 60’s and 70’s we had some of the most distinguished international designers, over a 100 of them, visiting NID in the aftermath of the 1958 Eames India Report, based on which the NID was set up in 1961 by the Government of India. Having his grandson visit NID in 2008, exactly 50 years after that writing of the report was indeed a significant line of continuity for the shaping of design for the Indian cause. The documentation of NID’s contribution is however very sketchy due to some deep seated apathy to documentation and publication from the official and faculty sources at NID which unfortunately continues to this day. The last comprehensive publication of the NID’s professional and education work was prepared by Gira Sarabhai (one of the founders of the NID and the Calico Museum in Ahmedabad) in 1970 titled “NID : Documentation 1964 to 69” which is now fortunately available as a PDF file for download from this link below. (NID Document PDF File 25 MB). Aditi and I started the Young Designers series of publications that documented the work of Diploma Projects of our students from 1989 and this has fortunately been maintained by the Institute as an unbroken tradition since then with one book being produced each year and last year onwards the student diploma work has been showcased on the website at these links below. Young Designers 2007 and Young Designers 2008. However this still leaves out several major areas of work done by students and faculty through education, research and outreach activities and the full range of professional work done be the faculty of the Institute. The tradition at NID has been that faculty have not been permitted to do any personal practice and all the work had to be done through the Institutes professional practice wing or outreach wing. The Institute does have some research publications such as my book on “Bamboo & Cane Crafts of Northeast India” (download PDF 36 MB) and more recently the “Handmade in India” which I have reported about on this blog at these links here. There have been a handful of other publications by faculty colleagues but these however do not cover the vast contributions made by the NID faculty and this represents a huge research opportunity for some young design historian to follow up on in the days ahead.

Image 3: NID students and faculty from the Furniture design discipline in hands-on mode planning the setting up of the Eames Photo Exhibit at NID Gallery. Anuya Naik, Rama Krishna Rao and L C Ujawane in discussion with Furniture Design students on how to mount the Eames Photo Exhibit in the NID Gallary.

Eames, both Charles and Ray, visited NID several times together at first and individually in later years, 1978 and 1988, and they contributed to the building of a work ethic at the institute which thankfully continues to date. This photo exhibit was another such opportunity for NID faculty and students to get together once again in a typically Eames style "hands-on mode" to help set up the exhibit on campus for a wider audience to participate in. This tradition of working together has however been eroded somewhat in recent years but we need to remind ourselves of this great Eames tradition of hands-on design that was practiced in the Eames Office and at NID ever since the great Eames’ Nehru Exhibition was designed and executed at the Institute in the mid 60’s as a project commissioned by the Government of India and this tradition continued for many years through major exhibition projects done by the institute where students and faculty worked together and built a shared understanding of great design action. I have a paper, which I had prepared about exhibition design at NID in 1986, which may give some insights into the learning process that was truly the NID way in those days. (download paper here - PDF 36 kb)

Image 4: NID students and faculty in active mode of setting up the Eames Photo Exhibit and being inspired by the Images of India from an early visit by Eames.

The furniture design programme at NID was inspired by the work of Eames although the formal education programme started in 1969 with design teachers from Germany, the early beginnings of the Eames influence came from the full set of furniture and products that were donated from the Museum of Modern Art’s classic design collection which included many items of Eames furniture in wire, plywood, fibre glass and cast aluminium range besides original products by Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and others too numerous to be named here. These originals in our prototype collection were a source of inspiration and all students of furniture design got an opportunity to study these in detail as part of their education at NID. Further the NID’s wood and metal workshops were constantly producing a number of furniture designs by international masters like George Nakashima and our own present day master, Gajanan Upadhayay, and this production continued till recent times as a live reminder of high quality of workmanship as a living tradition inside the NID workshops. It is not surprising that the students and faculty from that era had a deep understanding of materials and process and a very refined range of furniture did get designed and made at NID till the end of the 90’s. The turn of the century was a bit of a disaster since after the bamboo boards & beyond workshop of 2000 the wood workshop was rudely dismantled to make way for the digital Design Vision Centre (DVC), which all but destroyed the hands-on tradition that had taken deep roots at NID. Somewhere we seemed to loose our way and slogans of “Mind to Market” took on the place of real “Hands-on” action that was the true NID way in the spirit of Eames.

Image 5: Anuya Naik with NID students setting up the Eames Photo Exhibit and the 100 images poster that captures the whole exhibit at a glance.

I am indeed happy to see the return of faculty and student involvement in hands-on activities of exhibition design and fabrication and I do hope that this will be continued to other such opportunities in the days ahead. The students who pass through these experiences develop a deep sense of collaborative spirit and are less prone to ego trips when deciding the form and quality of their design offerings. Design is indeed changing but we do not need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and we will need to deeply examine the role of the digital in our design processes and preserve those values that are durable from the hands-on tradition which may indeed turn out to be the very heart of design thinking and action in the days ahead. The furniture design activity at NID has retained the deep respect for prototype building and learning by doing is alive and well in this discipline while a body of theory has also been introduced into the programme along with a considerable amount of exposure to digital tools and processes in information processing, drawing, image management and presentation documentation etc.

Image 6: An article in an Interiors magazine featuring great Indian product designers. It is gratifying to see that all six designers were NID graduates and all of them have been my students at different times. Sandeep Mukherjee, Reboni Saha, Vibhor Sogani, Neil Foley, Mukul Goyel, and Alex Davis: clockwise from top left.

Last year, in late November, as the Eames Exhibit was being assembled at NID we came across this article in a national Interior Design magazine that celebrated the work of some of the finest product designers of India. It is not surprising that all the designers featured here were products of the NID workshops “hands-on” tradition and these were the same people who found value in pottering in our workshops with materials and concepts that has now been recognized as valuable contributions by that design media in India. There is value in the hands-on approach and we must cherish this as a way forward even in the digital era. There are many other design groups who have set up entrepreneurial ventures across India in the areas of textiles, furniture and ceramic design and these enterprises have grown over the years to be recognized as a design led industry from India. However the designers in India have failed to organize themselves into associations at a professional level and due to this their influence on National policy is still rather limited. The SIDI (Society of Industrial Designers of India) that flourished during the 70’s to 90’s became defunct due to apathy from members and the self-interest of the office bearers. Some recent initiatives in the form of the AIDI (Association of Industrial Designers of India) started by the Bangalore designers and the informal online efforts of the DesignIndia group are some fledgling initiatives in the making. The Pune Design Foundation is yet another recent initiative and we hope these shape up and take root to lead the design movement in India in the days ahead.

Image 07: Exhibition of Furniture made from Bamboo Boards at the UNDP Lawns on 17 February 2001, which made a huge impact in New Delhi, and on National Policy that led to the creation of the National Bamboo Mission, which is still in progress. I got my 5 minutes of fame since I was invited to the NDTV studio that night to be interviewed live on the 9 o’clock news just after Dr Anil Agarwal of Down to Earth fame had completed his interview on the subject of environment. Awareness about global warming was still a long way off in the minds of people at large.

In the late 90’s and early years of this century we have had a growing interest in bamboo as a furniture design material and NID and its Centre for Bamboo Initiatives has been at the heart of this development. As many a 40 students from furniture and product design and over a dozen faculty colleagues were involved with me to explore this material and as a result we have a well documented body of work that is perhaps a significant contribution to world knowledge of building with bamboo and this is well acknowledged as a result of the publication of our, books, CD ROMs and web based publications that can be seen at these links here on this blog as well as on my website at this link below. (web link to Bamboo Initiatives) (links to other blog posts).

Image 08: Sandeep Mukherjee and Sarita Fernandez set up Quetzel in Bangalore, which makes fine furniture in the Eames tradition of design and build.

In my presentation last month at the Design Cities Debate at the Design Museum in London I shared several case studies from design groups in Bangalore. Quetzel and Dovetail are two such cases of innovative companies set up by NID graduates who set out to make furniture of their own design and these have now grown into substantial business groups in their own right.

Image 09: S Sunder and John Mathews have set up Dovetail which also designs and produces fine furniture which is made available through their retail as well as direct supply to large clients.

In the Bangalore presentation at the Design Cities Debate it was clear to me that design would need to scale from being a play of materials and aesthetics to be able to move up the growing vortex of design concerns to include social, ecological and ethical levels of exchange and contribute at that level. Dovetail. IDIOM, Trapeeze, Ray + Kesavan and all the other design initiatives including the IT sector that is growing to cope with the higher offerings of knowledge economy and raising to the level of offering products would all be part of the next design revolution in the making, I hope.

Bangalore had all the ingredients in place to move up the political ladder and to try and influence decision makers about the role of design in our evolving society and through this find a place for it which was I believe envisaged in the Eames India Report of 50 years ago. We need to re-read the Eames Report as well as his 100 Quotes and find our own way forward in this complex milieu if the next 50 years is to bring design closer to the hearts and minds of people who need to be served by this wonderful resource but they may not yet know that they do. The Jaanagraha’s feeble attempt to influence the participation of people (see my blog post below) in the local and national democracy is a good sign and designers need to back these initiatives and join them to make them work for all of us in the days ahead.

Prof M P Ranjan’s papers

Evolution of Design at NID: 50 Years on and still unfolding...

Evolution of Design at NID: Lessons for “Deep Design for India”

Prof M P Ranjan
The Government of India set up the National Institute of Design in 1961 through a stroke of madness or of sheer genius. This was a visionary move far ahead of the norms of the day when science and technology were the ruling deities in the country and many institutions were established across the land. This particular move was aided by the visionary document that was drafted by the Eames couple in 1958, called the India Report and fondly known as the Eames Report. The report called for sober investigation into those values and qualities that Indians hold important to a good life….

Image01: The Eames India Report and the famous quote about the role of design in India and its relevance to the grassroots level.

On the 29th of June 2009 I was invited to speak at the National Institute of Design (NID) Auditorium on the occasion of the World Industrial Design Day. I chose to expand on the personal journey that I have had at NID and in that my own reflections about the evolution of design thought and action at NID. The pdf file that formed the slides for my hour long talk as well as the voice file recorded during the lecture are available for download from this link here as “Evolution of Design.zip” that contains two separate files, a pdf file with all the images and an full length MP3 voice file (38.6 MB zip size) that can be viewed together if downloaded. This event gave me the occasion to reflect on the origins of NID and the early years of the Institute that was modeled like a clinical hospital with concurrent teaching and practice where the faculty and students were involved in handling design projects together and over the years many live and vibrant projects of national importance were addressed and through these the design culture at NID evolved as teaching and learning progressed at the Institute while the market for design services matured in the country.
Download Evolution of Design show and lecture here as a zip file.

Image02: The early years of NID education and practice from 1961 to 1975 saw the development of a campus for design education at Paldi in Ahmedabad and a number of significant projects that were handled by the institute where students and faculty worked closely with international consultants to deliver amazing results of high quality benchmarks in the early years of its existance. Fortuitously the first major project was the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Exhibition which brought Charles and Ray Eames and their team back to NID to work with the young team of faculty and students from the first PG course in Visual Communication. Product Design education started soon thereafter and many professional projects were handled by the faculty in those years.

Significant projects from that era were assembled as part of an NID brochure that was prepared in 1998 called the NID Milestones and I used the pictures from that presentation since they were available in an organized manner. However these do not cover all the significant projects that were done by NID over the years since that will be the subject of a huge research project that is still to be done by someone in the days ahead. However this presentation does cover the projects included in the Milestones brochure of 1998 and the images here show the thumbnails of the pictures shown in sequence as they appear on the pdf presentation that I used for the lecture at NID. The early period included many major identities for Indian corporations and shown here are the symbols for Indian Airlines by Benoy Sarkar, State Bank of India by Shekhar Kamat and the Operation Flood for the National Dairy Development Board by Vikas Satwalekar. The caption below each thumbnail picture has the year in front followed by a cryptic description and some identification of the individuals in the picture or the initials of the designers behind the project that is represented here. The voice file would have some further description when each of these were shown on the screen for the audience at my talk.
Download Eames India Report here as a pdf file 359 kb size
Download NID Documantation 1964 to 69 here as a pdf file 25 MB size
Download “NID Milestones 1961 to 1998 from here as a 2.1 MB pdf file.

Image03: The period between 1975 and 1985 saw some significant communication design projects with Ashoke Chatterjee as the Executive Director at NID. The Agri-Expo was perhaps the single largest design projects where the whole school with the exception of the foundation programme was involved in actively for many months in the research, design and execution phase of the massive exhibition project which was a true multi-disciplinary treat for all participants.

NID in those days lived up to the model of a design school as a clinical hospital where all the faculty and students were engaged in live projects inside and outside the classrooms. Pure Industrial Design projects were few and far between since Indian industry did not see the need to innovate in the “license-permit raj” of the day nor did Government have a vision of the potential uses of product design for the social needs of our country. The Jawaja Project that commenced in that period was an exception and Prof Ravi Matthai and Ashoke Chatterjee drew NID and the IIMA into a partnership that went on for many long years to bring the village needs to both the design and the management schools attention. Doordarshan the Indian Television channel got its symbol through a classroom assignment where the offering made by Devashis Bhattacharyaya a student of Visual Communication as part of the class explorations, a real life client inside the classroom and this set the tomne for the decades to follow. My own project where I was the Project Head, that made the Milestones list, was the Manipur Pavilion that was done in 1981 for the State Government of Manipur using the considerable research that we had already done for the Bamboo & Cane Crafts of Northeast India that was a book still in the making. This project won the Gold Medal for the State category at the India International Trade Fair at New Delhi and it brought me some personal recognition too and a place in the NID Design Office in the 10 years to follow. This gave me a vantage point from which to look at all the NID projects as the then Chairman Design Office and along with it came a huge body of experience in managing diverse projects that flowed into the Institute from a variety of sources.

Image04: Two significant events shaped the decade of the 80’s at NID and this was the arrival of the Sir Misha Black Award for Excellence in Design Education that was bestowed on the NID programmes by the Design Council, London through a function at NID when Ashoke Chatterjee was given this honour on behalf of NID and the second was the Award of the First Eames Award to Kamla Devi Chattopadhayay with the award being given to Kamladevi by Ray Eames in the presence of Prof Yash Pal the then NID GC Chairman and Vinay Jha who was the Executive Director from 1985 to 1989. With Vinaj Jha came many industrial design projects and the most significant amongst these was the design of the Electronic Voting Machine for the ECIL and the Election Commission of India besides a surge of new industry contacts and a renewed association with ICSID, the international body for Industrial Design.

Mega projects in Communication and exhibition design continued in those days but a new fresh crop of product design and craft design projects came up through Government contacts as well as efforts to build bridges with the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) besides active collaboration with a few Indian companies that showed some interest in indigenous design. These were tough years for Indian product design and on an average one project materialized from out of about ten detailed and actively followed up project proposals, a huge body of experience for the faculty concerned but little to show by way of results. However while reflecting on these years in a paper that I wrote in 2001 for the first National Design Summit I called this phase a period of struggle that supported the “blossoming of cactus flowers in a desert”, commenting on what for me was India’s innovation stifling landscape in those pre-liberalisation days.
Download “Cactus Flower” paper and presentation, both in pdf format from here as a 14.1 MB zip file.
Download DesignFolio 7 with a report on two rural crafts and context studies from here as a 2.0 MB pdf file

Image 05: The late 80’s and early 90’s saw the setting up of a formal Publications Programme at NID and many significant exhibition design and industrial design projects were undertaken by NID designers. The area of social communication found special attention with the missions on water, Health and Family Welfare and the Festivals of India brought in more projects such as the My Land My People that traveled to the Soviet Union.

Vikas Satwalekar took over as NID’s Executive Director in 1989 and while many massive exhibition projects were undertaken by NID we also saw a substantial increase in product design and craft design projects coming to the institute and a stable flow of corporate identity projects continued without break. I switched from the Design Office to become the Chairman of NID’s Publications and Resource Centre in 1991 and we were able to launch many new books and establish a design publishing house with strong linkages with the book trade in the country for a limited period but this could not continue due to changes in internal policies. We started the Young Designer series that captured for the first time NID student projects within the covers of an annual publication that continues to date. The Milestones brochure missed all the craft design projects in textiles and handicrafts that continued all through these decades almost as if these were all flying under the radar of both internal as well as external attention. Also missed were the hundreds of corporate logos and other graphic design assignments that were perhaps too numerous to be seen as major landmarks in the NID design journey through the decades. The Bamboo book (Bamboo & Cane Crafts of Northeast India) which was published in 1986 lay dormant for many years till the UNDP came to NID in 1998 asking us for a vision report for the development of the bamboo sector in India, a project that was assigned to me which spelt the end of a long drought in the flow of funds for design in the bamboo sector, at least from the NID perspective.
Download UNDP vision report here as a 1.5 MB pdf file

Image06: The last of the Milestone entries from 1995-98 are followed by my own articulation of the bamboo story at NID which I used to summarise the insights from the many years of watching design thought and action unfold before my eyes as an observer and a keen participant in the evolution of design at NID. Significant bamboo projects shown are the bamboo house of 1969-70, the Manipur project 1981, Tripura bamboo collection of 1986 and the Bamboo Boards & Beyond 2000-01.

What was significant about the evolution of design at NID was in my view an unfolding of many convictions about the nature of design and the fact and realisation that neither the Government which continued to fund NID nor industry that had intermittent engagements with the institute had any real clue about the deeper value of the design offerings that were coming out of this very small institution located in one corner of the country, in far away Ahmedabad. Our graduates were making their mark in a number of sectors with graphic design being the most visible of professions but in a number of other sectors our graduates were climbing up to be recognized as leaders in their own creative fields such as animation, television, advertising and in the industrial design areas in textiles, engineering goods, consumer goods and most of all in the crafts sector all over India. Many of our graduates had set up their own business ventures that were doing significant work in crafts and textiles – retail and exports, furniture manufacture and interior, design consulting in graphic design as well as a small number in the area of product and industrial design. However during this presentation I had chosen to focus on the lessons from the Bamboo Initiatives at NID in which I was closely involved along with a number of faculty colleagues as well as a very large number of students whom we were able to provide sponsorship that covered materials, travel and in some cases stipend for diploma projects which have been reported as part of our Centre for Bamboo Initiatives reporting earlier on this blog.

CFBI-NID link on this blog
Download CD ROM “Bamboo Board & Beyond” as a 550 MB zip file here.
Download CD ROM “Beyond Grassroots” as a 560 MB zip file here.

Image07: Highlights of numerous bamboo and design projects from 1998 through to date along with the insights about the evolution of design and from these on to an understanding of the nature of design as we know it today. I call this journey the discovery of deep design at NID and look forward to the next 50 years of research and discovery.

While working with bamboo and with people at both ends, at NID and in the field, the linkages between design offerings and its effect on the people become visible quite slowly, just as a seed that germinates in a fertile climate may lie dormant for many years in a hostile environment, it so with design which needs a favorable climate in which it can grow and take root so that the benefits can flow to the people for whom it is being carried out in the first place. A number of insights were gained from the early design efforts which paved the way for new offerings and changes in our strategy that called for a shift from product focus to people focus in the field and through this the creation of a number of new institutions that could provide sustained supports that can help establish the deep value that the design efforts attempted to provide. The Iceberg Factor and the What is Design? Slides seen in the image above deal with the hidden dimensions of all complex design offerings and the need for extensive exploration and nurture as a core value of the design process which are not visible till the process has developed to a more mature level. This is a perennial dilemma in design support since we are face to face with a chicken and egg situation where supports are only forthcoming when some demonstration is made and demonstration is only possible when some faith is reposed in the design offering and it is given visionary support for the explorations and the maturation to take place. Will the next 50 years be better for design in India? Will we have a Ministry for Design that understands thus dilemma and provide the necessary supports to make Deep Design flourish and provide the much needed solutions that address the real quality of life issues that Charles and Ray Eames had talked about in their India report of 1958? Only time will tell.
Download Evolution of Design show and lecture here as a zip file.

Prof M P Ranjan

Directors at NID: A Time to Reflect

Directors at NID: A Time to Reflect

Design for India: Prof. M P Ranjan

The stainless steel name boards in the picture below as seen outside the Directors office at NID were installed by Dr Darlie O Koshy just before he took premature relief from the post of Director NID in October 2008. This however does not tell the whole story of the Chief Executive positions at the National Institute of Design. The history of NID is yet to be written and the history of design in India too would be intricately intertwined with the actions and roles of the various persons who have played a leadership role at NID, particularly in the position of its CEO, which has had various nomenclatures at different points of time. With the announcement last week of the next incumbent to the post of Director NID, Prof Pradyumna Vyas, we get a chance to reflect on this particular position and to look back at the individuals who have played a role in this particular office at NID over the years.

Image 01: Stainless steel nameplates to celebrate the various persons who had occupied the position of Director NID over the years.
However the inlaid comments show that the actual nomenclature used was that of Executive Director till 2006 when it was changed during Dr Koshy’s second term to that of Director NID for which there has been no real explanation so far from anybody. The names and designations in between the plates are those of individuals who have held charge in the gap between two formally appointed Executive Directors which happened in 1972 and in 2008, both due to an unplanned transition in each case.

However, the NID did not start with its organization being headed by one Executive Director. According to the organization chart that was published in the NID Documentation1964 to 1969 (download the 24 mb pdf file here about the early history of NID) the institute was managed by a Directing Board which was later substituted by an Internal Management Board, both of which were headed by Gira Sarabhai while Gautam Sarabhai held the position of the founding Chairman of the Governing Council of NID. In 1970 they brought in Vice-Admiral Soman as the first Executive Director of NID with the intention of helping the faculty to ease the interface with the Ministry of Industries and the Government of India in order to obtain funds and to manage the general accounts and administration of the Institute. This did not work out as envisaged and there was a falling out of severe proportions and the first Executive Director, a distinguished Ex-Serviceman, was sacked by the Governing Council and all hell broke loose in the media and NID entered its first era of severe crisis of management.

Image 02: Organisation structure of NID before the induction of Vice Admiral Soman to the post of Executive Director at NID and Gira and Gautam Sarabhai with the Eames Office team at NID in 1964. The Directing Board was constituted to include the Heads of Industrial Design, Communication Design, Studios and Workshops, Architecture and the Secretary (Finance and Administration) and Chaired by Gira Sarabhai.

Prof Kumar Vyas and Dashrat Patel were both members of the Directing Board and later on the Internal Management Board, each representing the two major faculties, Industrial Design and Communication Design, respectively. I was a student at NID at that time and we too took sides in the grand battle lines that was drawn up between the ideological design teachers and students on the one side and the then NID Administration on the other trying to control and dictate how design education should be carried out. Vice Admiral Soman was a distinguished public figure but he was also quite unsuitable for the role that he took at NID and his departure from the institute and the controversy that followed left a long period of turmoil at NID after a decade of amazing developments that saw hundreds of great international designers making contributions to the shaping of a unique institution at Ahmedabad.

Image 03: Charles and Ray Eames camped at NID with the Eames Office team in 1964 to work on the Nehru Exhibition and this project was a major training ground for the first faculty at NID.

A list of these international design experts is available at the back pages of the NID Documentation 1964-69. Gautam Sarabhai produced an immaculate document that captured the spirit of NID culture and shared it with all of us students and the faculty in a series of meetings. The document, fondly called the “Structure Culture Document” has returned time and again in the hands of students and faculty whenever administrative problems came to a head at NID. Design was not understood by many and design education was an even bigger mystery for most administrators and Government babus, quite unlike the fairly comprehensible and stable systems that seemed to be present in medicine, technical and management education of the day.

Image 04: Governor of Gujarat, Sriman Narayan being hosted by Gautam Sarabhai at NID studios in 1972 and below Vice Admiral Soman guides distinguished visitors through the NID workshops.

Prof. Kumar Vyas was made the Head of the Internal Executive Committee that managed the affairs of NID from 1972 and 1975 during which time the affairs of the Institute were subjected to much scrutiny by a number of committees appointed by the Government of India to address the acquisitions of the outgoing Executive Director and in this period Gautam and Gira Sarabhai withdrew from the active management of the NID affairs leaving a bit of a power vacuum at the top of the NID management structure. The Wanchoo Commission Report of 1973 and then the Thaper Committee Report of 1974 – 75 gave a clean chit to the Sarabhais while they called for the creation of systems for the management of creative educational activities at NID. Romesh Thaper was instrumental for bringing in Ashoke Chatterjee as the next Executive Director of NID and he joined the Institute in mid 1975. Prof Kumar Vyas returned to being Head of Industrial Design Faculty. In the meantime my own relationship with the Institute was strained since I had joined the Faculty in early 1973 and had signed a bond to serve the Institute for a period of five years in return for the opportunity to travel to Chile, USA and UK as part of the Nehru Exhibition team in January 1973. However in the political turmoil of the era my services were abruptly terminated in May 1974 and I had to return to Madras to work with my father in his factory making wooden toys. Prof Kumar Vyas did not have an easy time at the top due to the constant fire fighting that needed to be done internally and the public reviews that were being conducted by various committees appointed by the Government of India. I was in constant contact with him through my mails from Madras asking NID to take me back as a faculty member and my appeal was forwarded to the then Chairman of Governing Council, Pupul Jayakar. Ashoke Chatterjee eventually invited me to come back to NID in mid 1976 to rejoin the faculty since I had by then made numerous representations to the Institute for a review of my case, and for me this being banished from NID was a blessing in disguise since I had a wonderful opportunity to work full time in a small scale industry and help transform it in a couple of years and in the process build a great deal of self confidence from this deep exposure to the real world of business and design. The story of my explorations with Rockytoys in Madras between 1974 and 1976 which was my period of being away from NID has been on this blog for some time now at these links below:
Rockytoys revisited blog post
Design for Small Scale Inductry: Some Reflections

Image 05: Ashoke Chatterjee with Romesh Thaper and a number of distinguished Governing Council members meeting senior faculty at a display of NID work in the show room and Aquarium area.

Ashoke Chatterjee (AC) came to Madras to meet me soon after he had settled himself in the hot seat at NID as the second Executive Director of an Institute in crisis. My letters for justice to the Chairman Governing Council had landed on his table and this visit besides other tasks was to check out what I had been up to in the year and a half that I had been away from NID. What he saw there at my fathers’ factory and the Rockytoys shop must have comforted him since I soon received a letter from Prof Kumar Vyas offering me a position at NID as a full time faculty, which I accepted and joined back in June 1976. AC was very fair in his dealings with everyone while he was firm in all his dealings and in doing what he thought was right, a stickler for ethics and values, which many feared since it was a new dimension for them in the bazaar values that prevailed in those days. He was interested in and understood Communication Design and in my view had a bias towards this field while the Industrial Design activity languished since there was no sympathy for this fledgling activity and industry in India did not seem to understand it either, need it or want it at all, at least in the form that we were offering it at NID. As a result much investments were made in communications design and designers at NID while the ID chaps bashed on at a lower echelon in the order of things at NID. Ravi Matthai emerged as a major mentor in this period and the Jawaja project.

Image 06: Ashoke Chatterjee and young NID faculty and students welcome Charles Eames on his last visit to NID in 1978.

The Rajasthan Family Welfare & Health project; the Water Mission Projects and the Agri Expo were examples of development action that AC supported and nurtured in his long tenure at NID as its ED from 1975 till 1985. Industrial design being left largely alone discovered other avenues of relevance and many of these were in the development and the crafts sectors in India and with opportunities in rural India, which was not being addressed by the communication design group. Under AC’s leadership NID conducted the remarkable UNIDO-ICSID Conference on Design for Development in 1979 and also won him the Sir Misha Black Award for excellence in Design Education at NID. In this period NID also won recognition at the ICSID-Phillips Award for excellence in Design for Development, a golden period for NID. (download the Ahmedabad Declaration as a pdf file and the Major Recommendations here). During this period NID also got massive financial support from the UNDP to upgrade equipment and send faculty for training as well as afford to invite a large number of international design consultants to review and strengthen its programmes and activities. However much of the UNDP investment went into the Communication Design areas of Video, Photography and Exhibit Design and I was a vocal critic of this imbalance particularly since there was no investment in the area of computers, which I felt was a critical new area to be explored. A huge number of Corporate Identity projects were handled by the NID faculty and students during this period.

Image 07: Vinay Jha and Prof. Yash Pal, Chairman Governing Council with Ray Eames and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya at the Eames Award Ceremony in 1988 on the NID Lawns, now called the Eames Plaza.

The strong bias towards Communication Design changed substantially, though briefly, when Vinay Jha, IAS joined NID for a brief tenure from 1985 to 1989 during which time the linkages with Indian Industry were improved through our sustained contacts with the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) and the CII-NID partnership took hold. On the international front the ICSID contacts took a fresh turn when Vinay Jha joined the Board at ICSID and forged strong linkages with a number of international schools and design professionals through his involvement on the ICSID Board. I was fortunate to be handling the NID Consultancy Division as the Chairman Design Office from 1981 to 1991, in an acting capacity in the early years and in with a full charge when Vinay Jha took office at NID. Vinay Jha brought in administrative reforms and decentralized decision-making and delegated financial authority to faculty heads and activity chairmen for the first time at NID. We made grand plans to reach design to industry and a number of road shows about design were rolled out to take NID designers and design teachers out of the campus to meet corporate leaders and this was organized through the CII connections. However the economic liberalization of the Indian economy was still in the making and much of this investment fell on deaf ears but few projects did materialize through all the legwork that was done in those days. 4000 proposals that I was personally involved in drafting on behalf of the NID faculty teams as head of consultancy led to the actual landing of about 400 professional projects, small and large, at NID and this was a huge body of experience which is still to be fully analysed and appreciated, hopefully to be documented and published some day. In all these projects the NID Executive Director had a large role in both client interface as well as in providing internal resources and supports. In 1986 Vinay Jha supported my suggestion that the book, “Bamboo & Cane Crafts of Northeast India” could be designed and printed at Bombay which we completed and launched in October that year. I had also repeated my plea that NID review its computer policy and Vinay Jha decided with the help of a Governing Council Committee to use the residual funds from the UNDP grants to set up a Mac and PC Lab at NID, which brought in computers for distributed use into NID in a substantial way for the first time.

Image 08: Vikas Satwalekar as a young faculty in 1972 and later after he stepped down as Executive Director, NID in 2003 (picture uploaded by Vikram was taken at the 2003 Convocation exhibition).

Vikas Satwalekar took over in 1988, first as Acting Director and was later given full charge and for the first time an NID trained designer and a faculty member was at the helm of affairs. The bias towards Communication Design however continued at NID and this time the emphasis was on Exhibition Design and many mega multi-disciplinary projects were taken up by the Institute. In other areas the activities got bogged down in many ways and while education took centre stage with a major curriculum review programme the activities with an intention of establishing quality benchmarks in design education. The areas of research and outreach did not flourish much due to an inward looking attitude and in much effort being expended in solving legacy problems with the labour union activities at NID. Ashoke Chatterjee continued to teach and conduct research at NID, first in a special capacity as Advisor during the term of Vinay Jha and later as a Senior Faculty teaching Design Management and then as a Fellow in Communication Design with a focus on Social Communication. The work done at NID was documented in a two-page poster-folder called NID Milestones in 1998 and it lists the major achievements of NID from 1961 to 1998. (download pdf file NID Milestones here as a 2.1 mb file) A major review of education was conducted during this period and I was involved on a committee that undertook this enormous task, which resulted in the production of an eleven-volume document that was placed in the NID Resource Centre. Each course was described and teachers were asked to present their course to the Curriculum Review Committee as it was called along with work examples and the intention was to articulate course objectives, methods and content as well as assignment level details of the various programmes at NID. The quality benchmarks for each course were expressed in the document so that the teachers, coordinators and students would have adequate information about the courses being offered and could be monitored through the various regulatory channels that existed, namely the Consultative Forum, Discipline Meetings, Faculty Forum and the Course Presentations, all of which were dismantled with the arrival of Dr Darlie O Koshy. With education being the focus of Vikas Satwalekar’s term in office, I too was involved in Institution building tasks that took the NID expertise to other centres of design learning and these can be seen in our contributions to the setting up of the Accessory Design Department at NIFT, New Delhi, the setting up of the Indian Institute of Crafts and Design in Jaipur and later in the setting up of the Bamboo and Cane Development Institute at Agartala which is described at this link below.
New Design Institutes for India: Blog post<>
Lecture of Intellectual History of Design: Blog post

Image 09: A quick search of Dr Koshy on Google images came up with these pictures, which are based on his much cultivated media presence over the eight years at NID.

Dr Darlie O Koshy came into NID in June 2000 and immediately went about making mega plans for the expansion of the student base as well as disciplines that were taught at the Institute. Working on a brief provided by the DIPP and NID Governing Council he started profiling the Institute in the media and called for growth in all activities especially education. Hundreds of activities were initiated in setting up NID Satellites at huge costs in as many as 25 cities each being copiously profiled in the National media and all education programmes too were scaled up and the number game was up and running and the Government seemed to love the show and money poured in from all sides. Two new campuses were hastily initiated and set up but this I believe was unfortunately at the cost of both quality and content. He moved at great speed and it can only be compared to the moves of a “Bull in a China Shop” and whatever came in the way was laid waste and new spaces sprung up where workshops and studios existed before, each with a new name and an unclear but significant promise to be delivered down the line. Huge funds were generated from Government and massive expenses were incurred and it seemed that funds were unlimited and the supply was infinite while accountability was a thing of the past. The number game was truly on and the student numbers were constantly quoted as a justification for the critique of loss of quality that faculty and students and later the alumni joined in the chorus that became a crescendo. There was huge media coverage during this period with the NID Executive Director appearing in the media on a regular basis and the message from the Institute was disseminated through the Design Plus and on the web as a continuation of the Milestones list which can be seen at this link on the NID website. However the Milestones list on the NID website is silent on the period between 1997 and 2000 which set the tone for the Corporate Communications from NID as it was renamed like so many other NID activities, disciplines and departments under the new Executive Director in 2000 onwards. History was being rewritten at NID. The Executive Director was given a second extended term of office in 2005 but soon afterwards the designation was suddenly changed to that of Director NID. The final critique came to a head when the new Gandhinagar Campus started creating numerous logistics crises and the last straw was the problems with the buildings and facilities that made both students and faculty react strongly leading to a review of all plans for the immediate use of the new campus. Dr Darlie O Koshy took premature relief and moved to a new assignment in New Delhi. Akhil Succenna was given temporary charge of Officiating as Director in October 2008 and the Governing Council set up a Search Committee to find a new Director for NID. The process took several months and after a process put up three names to the Government for its final decision.

Image 10: Pradyumna Vyas being welcomed by faculty, students and staff of NID in the presence of Salman Haider, Chairman Governing Council of NID and Mahesh Korvvidi, COO of Design Business Incubator at NID at a community function of samosa and tea on the NID lawns.

We now have a new Director in place with the appointment of Prof Pradyumna Vyas as the second in the new series as Director at NID and eighth in the line of all Heads of Institute if we include all Executive Directors, Acting Directors and the Directors who have presided over the affairs of the Institute at Ahmedabad over the years and this excludes Gira Sarabhai who was the defacto Head of NID in her capacity as Chairman of the Internal Management Board in the early years of NID. There is now a new hope amongst students and faculty and they have been vocal in expressing their hope in looking forward to a period when design will once again be given the importance that is due both within the Institute as well as across India in the 230 sectors in which it is needed today. Prof Pradyumna Vyas had a session with the faculty where he talked about consolidation and the need to put together a comprehensive history of NID to make visible the 50 years of efforts at the Institute and I do hope that this will be something that the country can be proud about. We need our alumni and our former faculty to participate in this effort and if we can use this initiative to also map out the contributions of our alumni and graduates it would provide a platform from which design can be brought to the focused attention of Government and Indian Industry in order to bring it on par with science, technology and management after having languished on the back burner for 50 years since the Eames Report. 50 years on it is a good time to reflect and build the seeds for the future of Design for India.

Notes:
Chairman of Governing Councils at NID
1. Gautam Sarabhai - Oct 1961 to Feb 1974
2. Pupul Jayakar – March 1974 to June 1978
3. B G Verghese – July 1978 to June 1981
4. Shrenik K Lalbhai – July 1981 to June 1984
5. Prof. Yash Pal – July 1984 to June 1990
6. H Y Sharada Prasad – July 1991 to July 1994
7. Hasmukh Shah – August 1994 to June 2005
8. Ajai Dua (IAS) – January 2006 to February 2007
9. Salman Haider – March 2007 to date

References:
1. Charles and Ray Eames, The India Report, Government of India, 1958 (download pdf 359 kb)
2. Gautam Sarabhai, “National Institute of Design: Internal Organisation, Structure and Culture, NID, 1972 (download pdf 357 kb)
3. National Institute of Design, “National Institute of Design Documentation 1964-69, NID, 1970 (download pdf 25 MB)
3. Romesh Thapar, “Report of the Review Committee on the National Institute of Design” NID, February 1974
4. National Institute of Design, “Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development: Major Recommendations for Promotion of Industrial Design for Developemnt”, UNIDO-ICSID INDIA 79, NID, 1979 (download pdf file 11.1 mb)
5. National Institute of Design, “25 Years of Design Service: 1961 to 1986 – The Trainers” A poster of 43 faculty profiles from NID, NID, 1986 (download pdf 490 kb)
6. Kamla Choudhury, Report of the Review Committee on Future Directions and Forward Planning for National Institute of Design, August 30, 1989, NID, 1989
7. Ashoke Chatterjee, R K Bannerjee and Neera Seth, “40 Years of NID” (an unpublished draft manuscript), NID Publications, 1998.
8. National Institute of Design, “NID Milestones: 1961 to 1997”, NID, 1998 (download pdf file 2.1mb)
Design for India: Prof. M P Ranjan
9. Milestones on the NID website ; 1961-1970 ; 1971-1980 ; 1981-1990 ; 1991-1997; 2000-2001 ; 2002-2003 ; 2004-2005; 2006-2007 ; Integrated Design Services 2001-2005 Note these links to NID website are now disfunctional since NID has changed the links or dropped the items from their website.