Hand-Head-Heart: Ethics in Design

September 30th, 2009 by cithra

Hand-Head-Heart: Ethics in Design : Keynote address at the 4th National Design Convention at Istanbul on 8th October 2009.

Prof M P Ranjan

Prof M P Ranjan has been invited to deliver the keynote lecture at the 4th National Design Convention at Istanbul that is being organized by the Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey. This gives us an opportunity to look at the forces that are influencing design today and those that have helped shaped it over the past five to eight decades since the Bauhaus and the Hfg Ulm schools in Germany. My lecture looks at the ethical dimensions in design and I am quoting the abstract of my paper below along with a couple of models that I shall be using to explore these dimensions in my lecture. It is supported by case studies that we had researched for the sustainability posters that we had designed for the World Economic Forum in January this year as well as some of our own work at NID that could illustrate these ethical dimensions as we go forward from here. The various ethical dimensions have been grouped into the three orders of design that had been written about in a previous post on this blog and the list of books from my design bookshelf is also quoted below for immediate reference.


Image01: Title page of the visual presentation titled “Hand-Head-Heart: Ethics in Design”

Abstract:

Keynote lecturer at the 4th National Design Conference between 8th and 9th October 2009 at ITU in Istanbul, Turkey at the invitation of the Department of Industrial Product Design at Istanbul Technical University (ITU) and the conference co-sponsors, Koleksion A.S., Profilo and the ITU.

Our understanding of design has been evolving steadily over the past 100 years and in recent years there has been a rush of new research into a variety of dimensions and Ethics is one the many dimensions that have received research attention. In this paper we look at the various dimensions of design and at current and past definitions to see the contemporary understanding of the subject as we see it today with the aid of models that the author has evolved over several years of reflection and research. We then trace the evolution of design as a natural human activity and restate this history in terms of the major stages of evolution from its origins in the use of fire and tools through the development of mobility, agriculture, symbolic expression, crafts production and on to industrial production and beyond to the information and knowledge products of the day. This sets the stage to ponder about the future of the activity and of the discipline as we see it today.

With the use of a model the expanding vortex of design value and action is discussed with reference to the role of ethics and value orientation at each of the unfolding stages through which we have come to understand and use design over the years. Beginning with the material values of quality and appropriateness we explore the unfolding dimensions of craftsmanship, function, technique, science, economy and aesthetics that has held the attention of design philosophers and artists over the post renaissance period. In the last fifty years our attention has shifted through the work of several design thought leaders to aspects of impact of design on society, communication and semiotics, environment and even on politics and culture with some discussion on each of the major contributors in this ongoing discourse. The further developments that lead to systems thinking and on to the spiritual levels are introduced to place the ethical debate at the centre of the design discourse at each of these levels of engagement.

Some critical case examples are introduced to exemplify the arguments that have been made to establish the various levels of ethical actions that design has discovered and with these the author will argue that design is evolving to a more complex form that will require new kind of integrated design education that is already being experimented with across the world in the face of a series of crisis that we have been facing in industrial, economical, social, and most visibly at the political and ecological levels. These ethical lessons are still diffuse and disconnected in the fabric of design action across the world and we will need to find ways of bringing these to the hand, head and heart of design education if we are to find a new value for design that will help us address the deep crisis that we are facing today.

The full paper addresses the following six questions by expanding on each as we go forward with the discussions that each question entails.
1. What is Design today?
2. How did Design evolve from being a core human activity to become a modern discipline with a significant future?
3. What are the unfolding dimensions and orders of Design that we can call the “Ethical Vortex of Design”?
4. Who are the thought leaders who have anticipated these expanding dimensions of Design particularly from an ethical perspective?
5. Are there some critical cases in this broader filed of Design that could provide clues for our journey forward at each of these ethical nodes towards an “Integrated Design of the Future”?
6. How do we move towards a new Design education that can “Create the Unknowable – the future for all of us”, in an ethical manner and still be in tune with the needs of our times?
~

Image02: Three Orders of Design: Model showing the expanding dimensions of the vortex of design thought and action.

Thought Leaders in Design: List of books that shaped design thinking in India.


Image03: The Ethical Vortex of Design with the Three Orders overlapped showing the placement of design thought leaders from my personal view and reading.

Design Theory related books which I call the “Design Bookshelf”.

1. Bruce Archer, Design Awareness and Planned Creativity in Industry, Office of Design, Trade and Commerce, Ottawa and the Design Council, London, 1974

2. John Chris Jones, Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, London, 1970

3. John Chris Jones, Designing Designing, Architecture Design and Technology Press, London, 1991

4. Johannes Itten, Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus, Thames & Hudson, London, 1963, 1975

5. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color: Revised Edition, Yale University Press, 1971

6. Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1953, 1962

7. Paul Klee, Paul Klee Notebooks Volume 1 The Thinking Eye, Lund Humphries, London, 1969

8. Paul Klee, Paul Klee Notebooks: The Nature of Nature Volume 2, Lund Humphries Pub Ltd, 1992

9. Lazlo Moholy Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design. Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Daphne M. Hoffmann, Dover Publications, New York, 2005

10. Nigel Whiteley, Design for Society, Reaktion Books Ltd, London, 1993

11. M K Gandhi, Gandhi: ‘Hind Swaraj’ and Other Writings, in Anthony J. Parel (Ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997

12. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, Harper and Row, New York, 1965

13. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, HarperCollins, New York, 1969

14. Robert Prisig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, Bantam, New York, 1984

15. R Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, St. Martin’s Griffin; 2nd edition, New York, 1982

16. Otl Aicher, World as Design, Wiley-VCH, Berlin, 1994

17. Thomas Maldonado, Gui Bonsiepe, Renate Kietzmann et al., eds, “Ulm (1 to 21): Journal of the Hoschule fur Gestaltung”, Hoschule fur Gestaltung, Ulm, 1958 to 1968

18. Tomas Maldonado, Design, Nature, and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology, Harper & Row, New York, 1972

19. Gui Bonsiepe, Interface – An Approach to Design, Jan Van Eyck Akademie,Netherlands, 1999

20. Christopher Alexander, Nature of Order, Book 1 – Phenomenon of Life, Book 2 – A Vision of Living World, Book 3 – The Process of Creating Life and Book 4 – The Luminous Ground, The Centre for Environmental Structure Publishing, Berkeley, 2001 to 2004

21. David Pye, The Nature of Design, Studio-Vista, London, 1964

22. David Pye, Nature and Art of Workmanship, Cambium Press; Revised edition, London, 1995

23. Norman Potter, What is a Designer: things, places, messages, Hyphen Press, London, 2002

24. John. Heskett, Industrial Design, Thames & Hudson, London, 1985

25. John. Heskett, Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002

26. Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, Pantheon Books, New York, 1971

27. Victor Papanek, The Green Imperative: Natural Design for the Real World, Thames & Hudson, 1995

28. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, Volume 2, University Of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983

29. Stafford Beer, Platform for Change: A Message from Stafford Beer, John Wiley & Sons Inc, London, 1975

30. Charles & Ray Eames, Eames Design: The Work of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, in John Neuhart, Marylin Neuhart and Ray Eames (authors), Abrams, New York, 1994

31. Jiddu Krishnamurthy, Freedom from the Known, HarperOne, New York, 1975

32. Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin, Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies, University Of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995)

33. Victor Margolin, Politics of the Artificial: Essays in Design and Design Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002

34. Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan, Idea of Design: A Design Issues Reader, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996

35. Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, Basic Books, New York, 2002

36. Donald A. Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Basic Books, New York, 1983

37. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., USA, 1987.

38. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring Sciences into Democracy, (tr. by Catherine Porter), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., USA, 2004.

39. Hazel Henderson, Beyond Globalization. Kumarian Press, 1999

40. Hazel Henderson, Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006

41. Bryan Czeck, Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop them All, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000

42. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity : Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Harper Perennial, New York , 1996

43. Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon, Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet, Basic Books, New York, 2002

44. Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon, Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning. Basic Books, New York, 2002

45. Klaus Krippendorff, The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design, Taylor & Francis CRC, New York, 2006

46. Wolfgang Jonas and Jan Meyer-Veden, “Mind the gap! on knowing and not-knowing in design”, H.M Hauschild GmbH, Bremen, 2004

47. John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, MIT Press, 2005

48. Harold G. Nelson & Erik Stolterman, The Design Way: Foundations and Fundamentals of Design Competence, Educational Technology Publications, New Jersey, 2003

49. Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think, Architectural Press, New York, 1997)

50. Bryan Lawson and Kees Dorst, Design Expertise, Architectural Press, New York, 2009

51. Kees Dorst, Understanding Design: 175 Reflections On Being A Designer, Gingko Press, Berkeley, 2004 & 2006

52. Peter G. Rowe, Design Thinking, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1991

53. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. University Of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1972

54. Frei Otto, IL20 TASKS, Institute for Lightweight Structures, Stutgart, 1975
~

Download full paper titled “Hand-Head-Heart: Ethics in Design” here -PDF file 360kb Full Text
Download visual presentationas a pdf file here – PDF file 4.8 mb visual presentation screen resolution

Download visual presentation at print resolution as pdf file here – PDF file print resolution 14.8 mb

Prof M P Ranjan

Prof. M P Ranjan is a design educator from India’s National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad.

Posted in Design Bookshelf, Design Vortex, Istanbul. Ethics In Design, Sustainability, Thought Leaders, World Economic Forum | No Comments »

Agriculture under Water stress: Design Opportunities in India

August 28th, 2009 by cithra

Design for Agriculture: Who is addressing these issues today?

Prof M P Ranjan


Image01: One of the first design projects done at NID by the first batch of Product Design students in 1967, a Seed Drill that could be pulled by bullocks in small Indian farms. Images are from the NID Documentation 1964-69 (Download 25 MB pdf here)

The World is facing climate change and India is facing severe draught across 250 districts, almost half the country, out of a total of 604 administrative districts have been declared drought hit this year. The stress will be on the local farmers who have to fend for themselves in such times of monsoon failure and they are at the mercy of the elements and also an uncaring administration that would wait till the media raises a stink before any action is taken and usually all too late. This is perhaps where design imagination should come in and anticipate such situations and have strategies in place to meet the contingencies with imagination and viable offerings well before the event takes over. Are we ready for it? Far from it, as it apparently seems to be, but why?. Our design infrastructure is quite incapable of making any immediate and specific offering since no investments have been done in the past to explore and address such systemic eventualities that seem to revisit us time and again. Agriculture is unglamorous and unlike fashion gets very little attention from the media and from the design community as well. In the 60’s and 70’s Bucky Fuller wrote about an anticipatory design science movement that could and would address many of these glaring eventualities and he went about setting a personal example with path breaking thoughts and conceptual offerings that could be followed by others in the years to come, most of them well documented. The Bucky Fuller Institute now has instituted an annual design competition that is looking for mega solutions that follow the Bucky Fuller spirit and each year one design team is awarded the coveted Bucky Fuller Challenge Award while several others are honored as runners-up and finalists, all showcased at the Challenge website here : Bucky Fuller Idea Index


Image02: A low cost grain thresher designed in 1968 by Product Design students at NID as a response to the challenge from the Eames India Report of 1958. (Download 360 kb pdf file here)

At the Government of India level however, we seem to think and act as if design applies only to the needs of organized industry which may perhaps explain why the National Institute of Design (NID) is located under the administration and budgetary control of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) and perhaps this also explains why NID has never had invested in an education programme dealing with design for agriculture all these years. On the other hand media thinks and acts as if design is located in the arena of fashion and huge media space is accorded to this form of design at the sad exclusion of all other kinds and genres of design, the kind that is desperately needed across as many as 230 sectors of our economy today. The National Design Policy too is silent on the needs of this vast sector and it is particularly so on the needs of the public goods and services that are usually the domain of Governments to serve, being mostly ignored by private industry since the consumer base is too diffuse to be of immediate value to them. The economists who advise our Governments and industry tend to overlook the sector as a whole and leave these matters to politics and legislative processes under the broad umbrella of development programmes, but usually to provide lip service just before the elections. There are a few exceptions to this rule however and they include Hazel Henderson who debunks the theories of Nobel Prize winning clan of the Chicago School and Brian Czeck who in his obscure book titled “Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train” debunks the “growth at any cost theories” of the Keynesian school and proposes a more humane and ecological form of economics that looks at a steady-state and sustainable models of development.


Image03: A small selection of NID’s Agri-Expo, Rural and Water related projects done over the years.

With much of India facing a severe drought we need to look afresh at the needs of our agricultural sector that are hard hit by the absence of water. Design schools in India have ignored this sector except in fits and starts and that too in some peripheral areas of need. Government too did very little to encourage the design schools to take up the challenges by providing the required funding and the mandate to act in these areas. The NID, did however design a major exhibition for the Department of Agriculture way back in 1977 but this was a trade fair and after much chest thumping about the success of the mega-show which was impact assessed in those days by slick marketing teams from the advertising industry everyone seems to have once again forgotten the sector as a whole. I recall that the early projects undertaken by the students of the first product design programme at NID in the late 60’s included several tools for the agricultural sector but over the years we seem to have distanced ourselves from the needs of this huge sector that provides maximum employment across the country. Perhaps we were still under the influence of the Eames Report and the teachers and studends did look at the grassroots for inspiration and direction for action. Why should not the multiple new NID’s that are proposed under the new National Design Policy look at these different sectors of the economy rather than taking the NID Ahmedabad as a role model and continue to address address only the market driven sectors of lifestyles and automobiles and the traditional sectors of manufacturing and communication sectors. The need is clear from over 230 sectors of our economy and we need to build a market for design graduates who are capable of working in these neglected sectors and the Government has a major role to play if this is to happen. In the late 80’s I do recall that NID had an assignment to design tractors for an Indian manufacturer but like all other product design projects from that period this one too was bound to sit on the shelf due to the lack of any competition in the Indian industry in those days.


Image04: A view from an earlier post on water harvesting system designed by Dinesh Sharma for Furaat Systems in Ahmedabad inspired on the traditional step wells of Gujarat and Rajasthan.

Earlier on this blog I have shared the work of an NID graduate, Dinesh Sharma, who by drawing inspiration from the Gujarat and Rajasthan traditions of step wells made from modular blocks has designed a water harvesting system that is both elegant as well as functional. The Furaat Water Harvesting system is just one of the many possible approaches and we need too make concerted investments into the design and testing of hundreds of approaches to deal with water in our lives to face the realities of our situation in India and to find solutions for all of these, from region to region.


Image05: P Sainath as seen on Google Images search.

Farmer suicides are today a way of life in most drought hit districts since crop failures and the search for local ground water sources leave our farmers with huge debts that they cannot service and the spiral down to suicide is an almost foregone conclusion. P Sainath, an Indian journalist has spent many years studying the phenomenon of rural poverty starting with his seminal book titled. “Everyone Loves a Good Drought: Stories form India’s Poorest Districts”, in a stark commentary on the corruption and lack of care that is symptomatic of the Indian condition, particularly in rural India. According to the review on Amazon.com – “They reveal how poverty is compounded by corruption, incompetence, laziness, greed and stupidity. Instead of improving life, many government schemes/development programs only make the poorest poorer, while making corrupt politicians, land- owners and the complacent new middle class of Mumbai (Bombay) richer.”

A specific Quote from India Together online about the correlation between local borewells and farmer suicides tells us a chilling story. Quote
“Sinking borewells, rising debt 
P Sainath. 

June 2004: NALGONDA, MEDAK & NIZAMABAD (Andhra Pradesh): Musampally has more borewells than people. This village in Nalgonda district has barely 2000 acres under cultivation. But it boasts over 6,000 borewells – two to every human being. Over 85 per cent of these wells have failed. The rest are in decline. The desperate search for water has bankrupted a once prosperous village….” UnQuote Read the full story here.
And another view from Wiki on Farmer Suicide here


Image 06: Stills from an online video offered by Nature Magazine about the water hot spot developing in western India with severe water stress and ground water depletion in the States of Rajasthan, Punjab, Harayana and Delhi which also happen to be the food bowl of India.

The alarming news is that this water stress is being felt across the food bowl of India across the fertile plains of Punjab, Harayana and Western Uttar Pradesh. While the Design Concepts & Concerns (DCC) course has been addressing the various issues of water in our lives across many domains and verticals we have constant news flows about the shortage of water coming from many sources. The latest one is the result of a six year long satellite based study conducted by a consortium of scientific institutions led by NASA. The alarming video can be watched at the Nature Magazine website at this link here. We need to seriously address the issues that this holds for the design community in India and how we can rally to deal with these realities on the ground and how well we are currently prepared to face these realities. That design can address this kind of challenge is not really in question since this is the only discipline that can bring an integrated and focused body of human experience to bear on these really wicked problems with imagination and political will to find lasting solutions that will get us through this impasse.


Image07: One of the short listed projects under the Bucky Fuller Challenge–New Mexico Renewable Energy Strategy Maps for sustainable regional development.

The Bucky Fuller Challenge Award for 2009 went to the sophisticated Urban Transport solution that redefines personal transportation in our cities. But for me the runner-up, titled “Dreaming New Mexico” shows great promise as a way forward with local planning taking the lead and with the use of maps local communities are involved in envisioning desirable and viable futures which is followed by a sustained programme of “Bioneering” involving the use of imagination, innovation, technology as well as political processes to get the task done. Regional design schools could help locate these dialogues with the community and assist decision makers build new and imaginative solutions to address a host of local issues towards resolution of the same.


Image08: Paul Polak and his product offerings for marginal farmers in Asia and Africa through his international entrepreneurial initiatives.

India needs to look seriously at the needs of our agriculture and rural micro-industry sectors and not just the crafts sector that brings in export income by through a huge number of export oriented industries. The benefits of the huge export sector rarely reach the remote rural producers but increasingly the strategy has been to cluster the production in class two towns and cities and real rural producers are left to fend for themselves. Paul Polak–founder of Colorado-based non-profit 
International Development enterprises (IDE)—is 
dedicated to developing practical solutions that attack 
poverty at its roots, who in his book “Out of Poverty” outlines strategies and products and services that he has developed to achieve huge successes using appropriate design at the marginal farmer level with huge success. Design in India needs to look at these models of rural development and not just the “Lifestyle product” category for the export markets with our crafts capabilities. Another example of design at the periphery comes for the “d-school” in Stanford University’s Stanford Institute of Design where their Executive Director, George Kembel has taken their students to Nepal and Thailand to search for real challenges to create entrepreneurial designs for extreme affordability. (download pdf of the d.school offering here)

India needs to take a leaf out of these initiatives and try and integrate design into our Agricultural Universities or focus the attention of the next NID fully on the needs of the agricultural sector as an integrated offering that looks after the design needs across all the sectors of need from water harvesting and management to managing the cold chain for reaching the food to the consumers across the land and all the tasks and services that come in between these two extremes from the point of view of our fragmented farm ecology all over the country. Wikipedia gives a list of 41 Agricultural Universities in India and it is my view that all of them need to integrate design abilities and actions into their many programmes if they are to be successful to prevent farmer suicides in the future.

Prof M P Ranjan

Prof. M P Ranjan is a design educator from India’s National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad.

Posted in Agri-Expo77, Agriculture, Brian Czeck, Design For Society, FURAAT, Hazel Henderson, National Design Policy, P Sainath, Paul Polak, Rainwater Harvesting, Stanford University, Water | No Comments »

India Incubates Design: What is a Design Business?

July 31st, 2009 by cithra

Government of India takes a step forward: Supports Design Business Incubation

Prof M P Ranjan


Image00: NDBI Magazine launched today. More at this site.

The National Design Business Incubator (NDBI) was set up at the National Institute of Design (NID) about five years ago with support from the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India. It has now matured into a Section 25 Company with an infusion of funds from the Department of Industrial and Policy and Promotion (DIPP), Government of India when it has received a grant of Rupees 10 crores (Rupees 100 million) to be disbursed to design business incubates over the next four years.


Image01: NDBI incubates meeting Ajay Shankar and Renu Sharma from the DIPP at an informal photo session and tree planting ceremony at the NID Paldi campus.

Today morning the Secretary, DIPP, Ajay Shankar IAS, and Joint Secretary Renu Sharma, IAS visited NID and the NDBI for a special function held at the NID auditorium to disburse the first of the many design incubator grants under the programme called the NDBI’s Venture Ready Fund (NDBI-VRF). Three startups were funded today with seed money to kick-start their design based enterprises, the first in a long series of such investments that are planned by the NDBI with the support of the DIPP as reported by the NDBI CEO Mahesh Krovvidi at the inaugural function this morning. Mahesh reported that so far 13 startups have been given support with funds from the DST and a new phase has begun with support from the DIPP. Plans are afoot to launch more centres to incubate design business in Pune, Delhi, Hyderabad, Guwahati and Bangalore to include 400 designers within 100 startups and which could provide direct employment to over 1000 design and support staff over the next 5 years. Reliance Venture Fund has already supported one startup that is has a patented product offering and is already doing a road show in the US to generate new business for its products with a grant of Rupees 1.5 crores. 17 startups are already lined up for the new centre at Bangalore for which the NID Rajajinagar site will be mobilized as the next major venue for the incubator.


Image02: Ajay Shankar and Renu Sharma visit NID exhibits showcasing potential projects done by NID students and faculty at the campus along with meetings with NID and NDBI management teams.

Pradyumna Vyas speaking at the function called this event a historic milestone and he requested the chief guest to release the first NDBI Quarterly Newsletter and Renu Sharma released the book of profiles of the NDBI startups which was followed by the handing over of the first grant cheques to the three selected incubates to receive the first ever offerings under the present scheme of the Government of India for design businesses with this DIPP support to the NDBI. The NDBI Newsletter gives several examples of new business initiatives started by the incubates as well as the proposals that are in line for future funding. There is a buzz on the NID campus and many students have offered their products to be showcased as part of this new and exciting development. The Government seems to be finally loosening its purse strings when it comes to design and design supports in India.


Image03: Images of the simple event at the NID Auditorium for felicitating the first batch of Design Business Incubatees supported by the DIPP fund.

The Secretary DIPP, Ajay Shankar IAS, spoke at some length about the changing perceptions about design in India and he mentioned the encounter that he had with the NDBI exhibit in Bangalore two years ago when he had mooted the idea of an incubator fund to take the collection of new and innovative items that were on display in the Design Idea Fair that was held on the sidelines of the CII NID National Design Summit of 2007. He spoke of a change towards a green society where sustainable innovations would have a place and urged the NDBI incubates to forge a path forward on two fronts, that of innovation and on the other hand the path of design with branding. He recalled a meeting of a highly respected economics forum where the founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, was honored much to his surprise, when he saw an entrepreneur being given a platform for the promotion of good design, which by his admission was an unusual event. He urged the young entrepreneurs to read the story of the worlds richest man’s, Ingvar Kamprad’s, path to success in building an 80 billion dollar enterprise on a simple mission of bringing good design to the masses in his book “Leading By Design: The IKEA Story”. He also recalled an early exposure to design and entrepreneurship when he was a student in the USA when he saw a Professor from the MIT incubate a company based on his research work on sound quality of speakers and he retold the story of the Bose Corporation that had a premium on all its products by virtue of its quality.


Image04: Visit of the visitors and incubates to the NIDUS store at NID followed by the meet with incubates at the NDBI premises.

The entourage moved from the NID Auditorium to the NIDUS shop on the NID campus and then on to the NDBI to meet the young entrepreneurs and see their current offerings after which we assembled at the NID Board room for a session with the NID faculty. This was a highly unusual event and each faculty member present introduced themselves and gave a brief statement about what design meant to them and what they had on their mind for the future of their discipline in the days ahead. In all this was a most satisfying session and I have requested NID to share the video tape of this event with our students and our alumni at an early date. This kind of vision sharing has happened internally over the years but rarely have we seen it in the presence of the Secretary and Joint Secretary of the DIPP who handle the finances of the Institute as well as the policy perspectives for design in India. I hope that this will have long implications for the future of design in India just as the ripples from the design incubation that has finally happened at NID today with Government support for the first time in the history of the Institute and in the history of design in India. In all 37 faculty members were present at this meeting along with the NID Director, Pradyumna Vyas and Mahesh Krovvidi of NDBI. Unfortunately six faculty colleagues from Paldi and Gandhinagar were missed here today and we also missed the Bangalore colleagues who could not make it to this important event at the Paldi campus.


Image05: Meeting with NID Faculty at the NID Board Room facing the lawns. A stimulating session.

While the thoughts are active about the new role for design in India through the incubation possibilities we need to look back at the past fifty years of NID’s efforts to build a profession in India and we now see hope that there may be a thaw in the attitude of Government to the fledgling discipline that has been so under funded and ill-supported when compared to the investments that have been made in the science, technology and management sectors in India. The incubation supports for the technology sectors have been in place in many sectors and the faculty too of those sectors are provided supports and a status that design teachers are yet to see in India today. This too I hope will change in the years ahead and we come out of this long thaw with these changes in National Policy particularly with the implementation of the National Design Policy in the days ahead. I must not forget to mention the hundreds of NID graduates who have managed to incubate their design businesses over the years in a very harsh and unforgiving political, governmental, industrial and business environment in India and have come out with flying colours and it may be an appropriate moment now when NID approaches its 50th year of existence to map out their journeys too for all our policy makers to see and appreciate that design is like a potent seed that needs to be nurtured if it is to flower and bring wealth to our nation and this map will also be a beacon for many young designers to follow.

Prof M P Ranjan

Prof. M P Ranjan is a design educator from India’s National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad.

Posted in Ajay Shankar, Bose Speakers, Design Incubation, Ingvar Kamprad, Mahesh Krovvidi, NDBI, Pradyumna Vyas, Renu Sharma | 1 Comment »

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

July 8th, 2009 by cithra

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

Prof. M P Ranjan is a design educator from India’s National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad.

Posted in Ashoke Chatterjee, Bamboo And Cane Crafts, Bamboo Boards And Beyond, Bamboo Initiatives, Beyond Grassroots, Deep Design, Design Education, History Of Design | No Comments »

Gajanan Upadhayay: A new monograph and exhibition of furniture designs

June 20th, 2009 by cithra

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

Prof. M P Ranjan is a design educator from India’s National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad.

Posted in Furniture Design, Gajanan Upadhayaya, Hans Gugelot, Jean Prouve, Louis I Kahn, NID, Royal Danish Academy Of Arts, TDW Furniture | 8 Comments »

Katlamara Multiplied : Seeds of Design in Tripura

May 28th, 2009 by cithra

Katlamara, Mantala, Sankhela and beyond: Seeds of Design sown in Tripura

Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

NID and CFBI-NID team consisting of C S Susanth, Subroto Sarkar and Ranjit Debbarma with Prof M P Ranjan conducted a workshop in Bangalore for the IL&FS supported team of craftemen from Sankhala cluster between 17 & 30 September 2009. A new range of products were designed and introduced which the designers felt would be attractive for local markets in Agartala, hence the product range included a number of versions of the local favorite called “Alna” – a cloth rack that is ubiquitous in Eastern and Northeastern India, however these are always made from wood. However this time we decided to use a modular knock-down all bamboo chair as the vehicle for production training and through which the Katlamara and Sankhala craftmen could be introduced to quality control concepts from raw material to end product using good practices and a well designed workflow and management system. This training workshop was conducted from 18 May to 28th May 2009 and full size drawings of the chair design were distributed to both workshop participants as well as other entrepreneurs and craftsmen at Agartala, Nalchar and to the students at BCDI. The design strategy included elements of the micro-macro design approaches that we have been advocating over the years through the Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID to include detail design, product design, tool design, process design, brand building and the macro economic strategies of farm to market with many embedded links that makes the whole both complex and potentially viable in the face of multiple challenges in the area of design for rural development in India today. The IL&FS team is headed by Sharmishta Mohapatra who is supported by S Metoulebi at Agartala and Kirat Debbarma at Katlamara and Sankhela clusters.


Image01: What was a small farm over a couple of acres near Katlamara has now grown to cover 20 hectares of Kanakais bamboo located at Mantala about 5 km from Katlamara. The promise for growth of the bamboo products market gives the farmer in Manna Roy the courage to expand when all others around him are planting rubber. Only time will tell who will take the cake and eat it too.

“Good Design” – is like a fertile seed that is a product of human imagination and supported by deep convictions of experience from explorations that could be spread over the land to generate huge value for all stakeholders. Only when it is nurtured and cultivated does this seed generate value and produce a farm or a forest which is a manifestation of the seeds potency and this nascent value is quite invisible till it is eventually realised on the ground, a bit like the chicken and egg dilemma. This is why we as designers have to struggle to make our visions and convictions accessible and visible to politicians, administrators and industrialists – all those who need our services – and this will always be the case for good design. I believe this will be the case since these design actions are located at the leading edge of the future that we wish to build and these design intentions and the early actions that require support continue to remain invisible till these have sufficiently matured and manifested themselves in visible signs that are tangible and perceptible to onlookers. Even then many attributes and intentional relationships will remain invisible since these would need to be explained before they can be understood to be an outcome of our intentional thought and a product of the design process itself and not an inevitable happening.


Image02: This time, the ‘design seed’, is the newly designed bamboo arm chair that can be made from four major frames and two tie frames, all pinned together with pre-drilled bamboo dowels. No metal nails or screws here so all materials are from the rural farm and with the use of simple jigs and fixtures these frames can be drilled precisely for post-transport assembly at the point of use by the eventual buyer. This opens up the possibility for low complexity knock-down furniture that can be made locally and then shipped easily to all Indian destinations at a low cost. The designed seed that can transform the local economy and its inhabitants over the long term. Can we support and nurture this strategy?

In 1988 J L Naik and I had discussed this particular view of design as a concept for the proposed Eames Award Trophy and last month Naik gifted me a picture that he had taken of a seed that would be dispersed by wind with the fine fibres attached that can carry it far from the source tree in order to find fertile grounds in order to germinate at an appropriate time and climate. This is nature’s strategy which works if sufficient seeds are produced that are viable and we too will need to work with those who appreciate our actions and wait for the climate to turn in order to realise our intentional missions. I am attaching below a picture that I had taken of Naik with his photo gift that I did use in a blog post earlier this month.


Image03: This design story is not about the chair but about the people who make and the bamboo products and they need to learn to do costing, learn the technology, and educate their children as well as make a reasonable living all at the same time. This is what the design schemes need to address in the face of all cards being stacked against the producers for so many years. Can the winds change and bring fresh perspectives to the remote land?

In Tripura this time we are trying to excite many producer groups in and around Katlamara where we started our major efforts several years ago with an outpouring of design offerings and this time Susanth and I are holding back our creative juices to make just one product in a systematic manner from raw material to end product using a well thought up process design through all the stages of production with the use of good practices that are articulated and captured in the form of jigs and fixtures which is the stress that we are making this time at the two centres of training in Tripura – Katlamara being one and the other a new centre of Sankhala, about 5 km from Katlamara. Both these groups are being placed in competition with each other, one at Katlamara with a wage compensation training scheme under the IL&FS programme and the other at Sankhela with piece rate offer only. The piece rate group at Sankhala seems to be more motivated, let us see how it develops as the year rolls forward from here.


Image04: Both groups cooperate to book a shared Jeep Taxi that transports ten craftsmen and fifteen new chairs from Katlamara and Sankhala to the rubberwood factory in Nagicherra to make use of their good quality spray painting facility. Lack of power and a compressor at both locations can be offset with a small investment in a micro-generator and a small compressor, all affordable if Government policy is swayed in that direction.

Like the metaphorical design seed that I have been talking about in the previous paragraphs I have been distributing full size drawings of the bamboo chair that I had designed specifically for production in rural settings using solid bamboo culms and poles of small diameter to many other potential producers – Sanjay Das from Nalchar, the other one is Bhola Nath Bhowmik of Agartala, son of the late Rathi Ranjan Bhowmik (who passed away recently) – Others who have shown interest are the Tripura Rubber Wood Development Corporation at Nagicherra near Agartala that is showing interest in development initiatives in bamboo cultivation and furniture production due to the interest of one of their senior techno-managers, Madhumita Nath whom we met at their factory. These chairs were showncased at NID at a number of exhibitions as well as in New Delhi at the Northeast Trade Fair and later in Germany at exhibitions in Berlin and Stuttgart through exhibitions organised by IFA. These experiences have given us the conviction that the market will accept these design offerings and we therefore have decided to transfer the designs to the field for use by our local craftsmen at Katlamara and Sankhela.


Image05: The closing exhibit was organized at the BCDI in Agartala much to the joy of the BCDI students and next day three collections were put up on show – The Bangalore Collection from the previous workshop, the Sankhala and Katlamara batch production of knock-down chairs and the new set of bamboo items from the rubberwood factory. The knock-down chairs were taken to the local courier bookong centres to get estimates for air shipment rates to Kolkatta, New Delhi, Bangalore and Ahmedabad. Will this supply chain get rooted and help a local forest grow? Only time will tell.

We hope to see all of them adopting the strategies that we are advocating at Katlamara. This one chair is the seed of a much larger strategy of getting good production systems in place that can be applied to all the designs that we have in our rapidly growing archive of design offerings. I am attaching a series of pictures that are selected thumbnails of the last few days, one picture from each day, take a look, and I will be using these to tell the story more fully on this blog later this month. The two groups have produced ten chairs each using the production jigs that were introduced to them and the results are very encouraging indeed. Today, exactly ten days after we introduced the new designs to the two groups we brought the chairs to the BCDI campus at Agartala for an informal exhibition of the products of both our workshops with the IL&FS team. The products that were developed at Bangalore during the workshop at IPIRTI and NID Bangalore as well as these new batch produced chairs were placed on display at the BCDI which is another link in our micro-macro design strategy being the educational component of the larger plan for the bamboo sector as a whole. The students of BCDI were excited and they represent the future of the craft in the days ahead. Local officials from the Tripura Government came by and the trainees too had a chance to interact with all the visitors in a stage of high expectation and finally the film crew from the NMBA interviewed me at the BCDI exhibit venue and I hope our message reaches the cloistered heights of the National Mission’s headquarters in New Delhi.

Download “Katlamara Chalo” poster 2MB pdf
Download IL&FS Bangalore_NID IPIRTI Workshop Report 5.1 MB pdf.
Download “Katlamara Chalo Book as pdf 46.5 MB size”
Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

Prof. M P Ranjan is a design educator from India’s National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad.

Posted in IL And FS, Katlamara Chalo, Macro Micro Design Strategy, Sankhela, Tripura Bamboo Mission | 3 Comments »

NID at Crossroads: Leadership Lost and Regained

May 7th, 2009 by cithra

NID at Crossroads: Leadership Lost and Regained

Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan
The National Institute of Design (NID) was conceived 50 years ago through the Eames India Report (1958) that was commissioned by the then Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. We are once again at a crossroad having inducted a new Director at NID, this time from the ranks of the NID Faculty, and it is time to introspect and try and regain leadership in a nation that is in the midst of rapid change. There is new hope that the Director, Professor Pradyumna Vyas will be able to open new initiatives as well as cement all the valuable traditions that were rudely disrupted through the number game which came at the cost of both content and quality. Design needs to grow its footprint in India but this has to be done in the spirit of Eames and not at any cost. The challenges are huge and this got me thinking and my offering was a list of 50 agenda points that could be the subject of open discussion, debate and rapid action in the days ahead. I shared this list with my faculty colleagues at NID and with the Directors’ call to our alumni and the design professionals in India through his mail to the DesignIndia list on yahoogroups we have set the stage for a sharing of ideas and to build consensus for the path forward from here. My list is quoted below as a container that needs to filled and fleshed out in detail in the days ahead.

Image 01: Historic images of NID designed Logos for Indian Corporates at Paldi Campus and Pradyumna Vyas being welcomed as the new Director NID by a faculty from IILM, Gurgaon at an NID Alumni meet in New Delhi last week.

When I look back at the various stages of development of the idea and mission of NID over the past 50 years since the Eames India Report of 1958 (download pdf file 359 kb) I believe we have reached a crossroad and need to make active choices at this stage for which a deep application of mind is called for and this task cannot be left to the Government of India (DIPP) and the Governing Council of NID for it is not their role nor would they be adequate to this task if it did not have the full involvement of the Indian design community, the NID Alumni and the NID community. I recall the many stages of crisis at NID through its history, some of which I have outlined in my blog post on the past Executive Directors and Directors at the Institute. (blog post link) Each stage however saw focused intellectual action that resulted in a small report that helped guide the actions of the Institute, its Faculty and its Students. The early years of NID are known through the published
64-69 Report Documentation NID 1964 – 1969 which has been available for some time as a pdf file (link pdf file 25 mb) which must have been based on an internal report prepared by Gira and Gautam with Kumar Vyas titled report 63-69 that has now become available to all of us (pdf file 112 kb) after being kept a closely guarded secret for some unknown reason all these years. The first significant institution building offering was by Gautam and Gira Sarabhai who gave us the NID Structure Culture Document (download pdf file 360 kb) as a basis for sophisticated behavior and Institution building norms that guided the difficult period when Vice Admiral Soman left NID while raising many challenges for the NID Management and the Government of India. This was followed by the Thaper Committee Report (download pdf file 780 kb) that was led by Romesh Thaper and brought in change at NID with the arrival of Ashoke Chatterjee as the Execitive Director in 1975. The next intellectual significant offering was in 1979 with the drafting of the UNIDO-ICSID Ahmedabad Declaration and the Major Recommendations (download pdf file 11.1 mb) followed by the first of a series of Forward Plans (copies not available) instituted by Ashoke Chatterjee with Faculty involvement. AC’s influence continued well into the period when Vinay Jha came to NID and long after with Vikas Satwalekar at the helm. In 1989 we got the Dr Kamla Chowdhry committee report that spelt out the action plans with mission and goals in their “Future Planning and Forward Plans” report (download pdf file 5.5 mb). There are many internal reports that are still unpublished like the minutes of the fifty plus Faculty Forum meetings that are still confidential in the age of RTI and transparency of good governance. I hope this will change and those discussions too will be open to public gaze at some time soon particularly since we need to bring our alumni into the Governing Council and into the India Design Council, both of which need to have the wisdom of our design practitioners and its internal faculty and student body to guide the future actions in the days ahead.

Image 02: Jayant L Naik with his picture of the “Dandilion” or “Silk Cotton” seed that he gifted to me in memory of our joint concept proposal for the Eames India Award Trophy that was being discussed in the late 80’s. In our concept, design offerings for India in the Eames spirit were like these seeds that are created with deep intentions of reproduction and growth and then set loose to be germinated through nature’s processes at a specific location at a suitable and fertile place and time to produce long lasting value for the earth and its species. Think about this view of design…

I have been thinking about this “Seed” metaphor for Design for India ever since I came in touch with John Chris Jones’ book “Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures” way back in the 70’s. Over the years I have realized that “Design” is indeed like a seed that needs to be carefully nurtured and cultivated before it yields value, real perennial value, which is why I prefer to use an agri-horticultural metaphor for design as opposed to an business-industrial metaphor of speed and strategy which is usually bandied about. Here below, I present the first list of 50 suggested action areas for NID in the changed context of Indian design landscape and invite NID alumni and the Indian design professionals to contribute to shaping the NID of the future. The call is for suggestions and discussions for the course of action to be initiated and followed so that in our eagerness to change and grow we do not throw out the baby with the bathwater! This list is not categorized nor is it prioritized and I invite our stakeholders and well-wishers to contribute to help streamline its acceptance and implementation with some degree of success.

Quote: List of 50 suggestions given to Chairman Education at NID and to the Director NID for their consideration and appropriate action in the days ahead.

Design for India – Leadership Lost & Regained

Wish List NID 2010 – 2012

Prof. M P Ranjan
National Institute of Design

001. Faculty Recruitment Multiplier Programme (for all design schools).
Urgently restructure Faculty Development Programme and make it National Focussed, outward looking and better structured to meet larger goals of national importance
002. FDC Revamp – Programmes + Infrastructure at Gandhinagar.
To achieve this use Gandhinagar campus as a platform for launch of this new programme
003. Faculty Training – New Centre & Programmes.
Build linkages worldwide for design trainers who can help faculty development and research support programmes for existing faculty.
004. Adjunct Faculty & Visiting Faculty – Contact / Exposure.
Expand faculty base in a systematic and sustained manner by signing MOU’s with Adjunct Faculty and Visiting Faculty at an Institutional level and monitor their contributions.
005. Faculty Publication – Education / Academic – Evaluation Criteria – Publish Courses.
Initiate faculty-publishing platform and include this in the faculty evaluation programme
006. Gandhinagar Campus – Modular Structure – Abandon Current Plans.
Stop all further construction at Gandhinagar based on old plans since they do not work and have proved to be poorly conceived. Fast track the redesign of a modular building based on NID Paldi campus that is tried and tested format for a design school. Change architects if necessary.
007. Document NID Education – Foundation + Others.
Initiate immediate documentation of all NID education programmes and get a team in place to carry this out and all faculty shall contribute each of their courses so that at the end of two years all courses are published in a basic form and in another two years all courses are covered in a revised and more detailed format.
008. Website & Intranet Revamp.
Complete revamp of website administration and put together a competent team with faculty committees to manage web content and make policies to make it happen.
009. Faculty Status Review – parity with IIM / IIT.
Initiate dialogue with Government and Governing Council for a review of Faculty status in the country on par with IIT and IIM.
010. KMC Document Archive in PDF + Share.
Initiate the process of converting all NID craft documents, diploma documents and project documents into pdf format along with policies to make them available on the web in a Creative Commons and Open Source format.
011. KMC Prototype Restore (Pompidou Centre).
Initiate process of research and assessment to restore all prototypes in the KMC collection with the assistance of experts and inside research teams.
012. KMC Books Multi Copy List / Multi Centre.
Prepare a list of critical books for design education and initiate processes for getting multiple copies or for local print editions that can make these critical resources available freely inside India to support the spread of design education in India.
013. NID Design Workshop Revamp – 21st Century WS.
Plan and identify a range of machines and hand tools that are available today to build and operate a high quality model building workshop suitable for a world class design school of the 21st century.
014. Design Workshop + Craftsmen Integration.
Initiate processes that will bring high quality craftsmen to the NID studios either full time or part time to support education at the Institute.
015. Faculty Incubation + Liberalisation.
Liberalise norms for faculty consulting and unshackle NID faculty after 50 years of restrictive controls that have proved to be counter productive and build a platform for the incubation of many new initiatives in a design rich environment where teachers and students can build the industry of the future.
016. KMC Photo Archive Digitise & Share.
Strengthen systems and supports in the KMC and NID Photo Department and liberalise the access and use of NID archives and provide digital access to all NID resources since they are a product of public funding.
017. KMC Diploma Projects Digitise & Share.
Initiate methods to collect all future diploma and craft documents in digital format with some uniform guidelines for sharing these as and when they are ready and can be made available for public review and use.
018. Course Documentation and Digital Archive.
Initiate processes for the production and sharing of all course documentations so that these become the defacto standard for teaching across the country and encourage other schools to do so themselves.
019. Curriculum Review & Publication.
Commission systematic review of all courses and curriculum and publish findings and other products
020. National Design Leadership Programme.
Initiate public participation in design action at the local level to build Design Cities of the future
021. NID Alumni in NID GC and IDC.
Advocate the inclusion of NID Alumni on NID Governing Council as well as National Bodies such as India Design Council.
022. Design Thinkers Forum: Cross Institutional Body.
Create a National Think Tank for Design Issues across all Institutes for Academic as well as Professional excellence.
023. Localised Curriculum for Regional Design Schools.
Identify and Build local agendas for local action in Regional Design Centres and Schools.
024. Sector Focused Institutes (IICD & BCDI Models).
Sector specific feasibility studies for new Design Institutes to be undertaken with specific parent Ministries to ensure decentralized funding and nurturing of each sector in design need.
025. Migrate out of DIPP towards Other Ministries (Multiply)
NID is too dependent on DIPP, which has shown limited vision for Design use in India. Other Ministries to be tapped for expanding the user base for design with financial supports from each such Ministry.
026. Develop Design Agenda for Lok Sabha Constituencies.
Design for public good to be explored in cooperation with Lok Sabha MP in each constituency using the discretionary funds available with each MP.
027. Design Library for Schools x 10,000 by 2010.
(Rs 100 crores value – Digitise and deliver in Rs. 1 crore). Build resources for school level action in design education and projects of local relevance.
028. Clean NID Administration – Transparent and Efficient by 2010.
Bring Transparency to all NID Administrative and Accounts actions and make all Administrators accountable and effective with supports and training.
029. Revive Consultative Processes at NID – Document and Share.
NID has a unique tradition of Consultative Processes, which needs to be revitalized and made more visible through Documentation and Public Sharing.
030. Discipline Specific Publications – Multiply.
Design deals with huge variety and this calls for decentralized Publication Programme at the Discipline Level to reach partner agencies in each sector.
031. FAB Lab / Model Lab / Innovation Lab – Multiply.
NID facilities for prototyping and model making have been decimated and are outdated. These need to made best of class and replicated at each centre with education programmes.
032. Alumni Association and Corpus Fund (Alumni Corpus).
Partnership with NID Alumni to be revived with active moves from NID towards the building of linkages and a corpus fund for activities.
033. Industry Association for Design Partnership (CII ++ / Industry Corpus).
Partnership with Indian large, medium and small industries to be revived with active moves from NID towards the building of linkages and a corpus fund for activities with support from appropriate Ministries.
034. 10,000 School Contact Programme – Teacher Registry Online).
Use internet access and build an active school contact programme by offering curriculum and training supports online to a large number of schools – target 10,000 by 2012.
035. T1 Internet for all Users at NID and Web 2.0 Standards for Communication.
Build high quality Internet platform for NID teachers and students for design research and action and use this platform for other value rich activities.
036. Full Transparent Accounts – Full Disclosure Norms.
Adopt new policies for Full Transparency in all Administrative activities and Accounts and build on the RTI principles adopted by Government of India and go further like Infosys.
037. Copy-Left Movement for all Student Projects – Share & Promote.
Participate in Open Source Movement by making all NID student and Faculty Research accessible to all sectors of our society.
038. Co-Create / Co-Incubate / Collaborate – Outreach Policies.
Develop and institute Outreach Policies that encourage and incubate innovative action in hundreds of initiatives across numerous sectors.
039. 230 Sector Survey & Monitor Design Opportunities.
Initiate series of Brainstorming and interaction platforms that can help build a massive Design Opportunity database, which can be categorized, prioritized and action programmed in cooperation with stakeholders.
040. 230 Sector Partner Agencies with Shared Strategies.
Active participation programmes with Partner agencies across 230 sectors of our economy
041. Rooster of Visiting Faculty & Active Contact Programme.
Database of Design Teachers for NID and other schools with focus on their interests and capabilities and the qualifications may be as a backdrop. Encourage documentation of a portfolio of course work and access of these online.
042. Faculty Resource Mapping.
Continue the effort with NID Fulltime faculty and build an archive of interests and capabilities and not just listing of qualifications. Encourage growth and maturation through participation in training and conferences etc.
043. Research Agenda Mapping for Design Action.
Identify and map out areas of priority and need as well as sources of funding for each such area.
044. Sector Specific Strategies & Partnerships.
Sector specific think tank sessions to draw up lists of active partner agencies, individuals and activities that can be sustained by NID Faculty in small buddy teams with common interests.
045. Ministry Specific Budget claims and Action programmes.
Action plans for each Ministry to be managed by active contact with the specific Ministry and an identified champion from within NID Faculty.
046. Policy Level Involvement of NID Faculty.
Encourage NID Faculty to be outspoken on areas of National Policy and support their research in these areas of declared interest to achieve national visibility and credibility through their sustained work.
047. NID Faculty on Planning Commission.
Policy Level involvement to be extended to being included in the Planning Processes at the level of the Planning Commission in a number of sectors where NID faculty have real expertise.
048. Faculty Forum: Discuss / Dialogue / Debate – Document & Share.
Policy shift from being secretive to being open especially in the think tank sessions within the Faculty Forum which should once again become a platform for dialogue, discussion and debate on matters of Institutional action and this should be shared as a source of inspiration for students and other agencies.
049. Design Opportunity Mapping of 230 Sectors & Ministries: Brainstorm / Document / Publish / Advocate.
Build a massive database of National and Regional sector and category specific design opportunities as imagined by NID Faculty and Students and Publish the same a san agenda for action by the National and Regional leaders and politicians. These can be revisited in some chosen frequency, say once every five years, or before each round of National and Regional elections.
050. Celebrate 50 Years of the Eames India Report and 100th Birth year of Charles Eames from 2009 to end of 2010 – Bring 20 great designers and conduct electives with Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation support. Rope in Government of India and CII if needed
Revisit the spirit of Eames Report and do what the Founding Fathers of NID did in the first decade by bringing in the best designers from India and overseas back to our campuses and get students and faculty to use this exchange to build new capabilities and share these in a major celebratory exhibition at the end of the programme and do this through the web as well.
More to come…
UnQuote.

Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

Prof. M P Ranjan is a design educator from India’s National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad.

Posted in Ashoke Chatterjee, Charles Eames, DIPP, Gautam Sarabhai, Gira Sarabhai, Kamla Chowdury, Pradyumna Vyas, Romesh Thapar, UNIDO-ICSID, Vice Admiral Soman, Vinay Jha, Wish List | 10 Comments »

Significant Landmark: 100,000 page views

April 28th, 2009 by cithra

Design for India on One Lakh hits

Design for India_Prof M P Ranjan


Image 01: Google Analytics data on blog traffic to the Design for India blog with source and volume of traffic.

The blog traffic on ‘Design for India” has crossed a significant landmark with the clocking up of 100,000 page views a couple of days ago. This has been accomplished by 58,500 visits from 45,000 visitors from 106 countries and over 4,900 cities across the world.

In India we have had over 32,000 visits from 119 cities with Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai topping the list of visits and visitors. The next country is the USA with 11,600 visits from 52 States and 2300 cities joining the list. The United Kingdon comes in third with 2,500 visits from 358 cities. Canada, Australia, Germany, France and Italy take the next five places on the list.

Design for India_Prof M P Ranjan

Prof. M P Ranjan is a design educator from India’s National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad.

Posted in Blog Traffic, Design Council UK, France, Germany, Google Analytics, India, Italy, Page Views, USA | 4 Comments »

What is Design? : A lecture for school teachers

April 27th, 2009 by cithra

What is Design? : A lecture for school teachers

Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan


Image 01: Thumbnails of slides used for the “What is Design?” lecture dealing with Dimensions, Processes and Applications.

“What is Design?”, will be a perennial topic since design is and will always be a moving target whenever we attempt a definition since it is always rooted in the present time and can only be understood and appreciated in the context of the “particular” place or location and a “general” description will need to take that into account as well. Each age will need to take stock of the definition and as we evolve so will design and hopefully our design ability. Design is one of our basic abilities, which we have used in more and more sophisticated ways as we evolved and enhanced our human sensibilities and capabilities. In the period of slow transformation through craft based processes of trial and error many of these sensibilities were refined and we could fall back on traditions to find our way forward.


Image 02: Thumbnails of the second part of the lecture dealing with design concepts and models that lead to our current definition of design as a basic human activity and this calls for a greater focus for the subject in our school education in the days ahead.

However in the post-industrial era reach and impact of our senses and abilities have been considerably enhanced by our multitude of tools and our externalized knowledge processes that we now have the capability of changing and impacting nature in dramatic ways, many of them undesirable, and our economic and social frameworks lag behind by a huge magnitude, that we are on the brink of failure as a species. Design becomes all the more important in this scenario and we will need to temper our dependence on science and art which has helped us evolve very rapidly over the past 600 years since the Renaissance if we are to face the crisis that this dependence is to be addressed.

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Podcast
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Code to embed podcast of lecture sent by Satya Murthy using MP3 file provided by me.

I had the occasion to speak to a group of school teachers as part of our programmes at NID and I prepared a lecture that was delivered to this group at NID the other day. The recording of the lecture is available here as a podcast at the link above which is of one and a half hour duration and the 2.5 MB pdf file of the slides used lecture can be downloaded from here at the links below along with an MP3 file of the lecture which too is available for download as a 45 MB file

Link to download the Podcast with images

What is Design? : Dimensions, Processes and Applications (pdf file 2.3 mb download)
What is Design? : Dimensions, Processes and Applications (MP3 voice file 43.8 mb download)
Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

Prof. M P Ranjan is a design educator from India’s National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad.

Posted in Art, Definition Of Design, Design Inside Education, Homunculus, Orders Of Design, Podcast, Science And Technology | No Comments »

Directors at NID: A Time to Reflect

April 23rd, 2009 by cithra

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

Prof. M P Ranjan is a design educator from India’s National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad.

Posted in Ashoke Chatterjee, Charles Eames, Dr. Darlie O Koshy, Gautam Sarabhai, Gira Sarabhai, Kumar Vyas, Pradyumna Vyas, Ravi Matthai, Ray Eames, Vice Admiral Soman, Vikas Satwalekar, Vinay Jha, Yash Pal | 22 Comments »

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