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

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

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 »

The Design Way: Dr Harold Nelson at NID, Ahmedabad

Thursday, December 25th, 2008

The Design Way: Dr Harold Nelson at NID, Ahmedabad

Prof M P Ranjan’s archives


Image: Dr Harold Nelson at NID and the poster for the mini conference at NID.

Dr Harold Nelson visited NID at our invitation and spent a couple of days on campus. His visit to India was unfortunately truncated due to the change of schedule for the CII NID Design Summit in Pune which was cancelled in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack. However we managed to pre-pone his visit to NID and during his stay we were able to organize a mini conference titled “Designing Designers: The Nelson Way.”

Most of my students are familiar with the book written by Dr Harold Nelson with Eric Stolterman, “The Design Way”, which is an amazing articulation of the various dimensions of design as we now know it to be today. Design for Nelson is an intentional activity that generates value. Design has changed and in order to explore the various dimensions of this change we decided to explore these dimensions in a mini conference for which we invited a panel of our teachers and juxtaposed it with the theme lecture by Dr Nelson.


Image: Harold Nelson delivers the theme lecture and the panelists at the mini conference (L to R) Dr Nelson, Suchitra Sheth, M P Ranjan, Shashank Mehta and Chakradhar Saswade.

The mini conference was called:
Designing Designers: The Nelson Way
NID in conversation with Dr. Harold Nelson

“Our ultimate desire is to encourage and promote a design culture… A design tradition requires the enabling presence of a design culture, one that defines conceptual expanses and boundaries, and provides a context for setting particular limits on any design project. Such a design culture acts as a catalyst in the formation of social crucibles essential for sustaining the intensity of design action.”

Panel Members:
Mr. Shashank Mehta, Mr. Chakradhar Saswade, Ms. Suchitra Seth, Prof. M. P. Ranjan


Image: Dr Harold Nelson with his models for Systems Assessment: from apposition and analysis, through critique and interventions leading to change through delibrate re-design, adding meaning and creating value.

One of the ways in which we are engaged in the development of a design culture in India is through our models for design education. One task of design education is the designing of designers themselves: building the character and competence for design. The other is the awareness, development and recognition of design competence in other streams of education and in society at large. Both of these are essential to the creation of an environment that can help us realise the potential of design action.

There are a variety of inputs and many possible approaches in each of these tasks. There are also perspectives that design education must take cognisance of: social development, sustainability and macro economics, among others. The panel discussed some of these issues, and their views on design education for a creative society set the tone for the Q & A session that followed.


Image: Dr Nelson with students at the NID’s Product Design studio.

This led up to the theme lecture by Dr Nelson after which we had lunch with a group of faculty colleagues at the NID Guest House. The post lunch session had Dr Nelson meeting the students in a huddle in the Product Design studio and a lively session went on late into the evening since the Nelsons, Harold and his daughter Autumn, were leaving for Delhi early the next morning.

Prof M P Ranjan’s archives

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

Posted in Chakradhar Saswade, Design Education, Design Way, Harold Nelson, Shashank Mehta, Suchitra Sheth, Systems Design | No Comments »

DCC2008 Theme Food: Design with participation and discourse

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Food, Inflation and innovation in India

Image: A macro view of the Food constituency as a system of related influences and opportunity areas, which is by no means a complete picture. Students from many parts of India will work together and fill in the gaps and unfold hidden possibilities with their experience and their imagination

The Design Concepts and Concerns course which is taught at NID helps our students take the macro-micro design exploration route in their study and journey through the various pressing design problems and opportunities that we find in the Indian economy and that which is affecting the people most at the time when the course is being conducted are chosen each year. Design is always to be understood in context with a particular setting if we are to derive any meaning from the activity otherwise the meaning will be provided by the observer and this may not be the intended approach of the designers, in which case it is usually back to the drawing board. This year we have chosen to focus on “Food and Inflation”, two major issues that threaten the continuance of the Government of India if it is these concerns are not managed well enough and the global cues are not very helpful either, what with oil hitting the 145 USD mark over the weekend and with experts talking of a 200 USD level by the year end before things may start to cool off a bit, if at all.

The Indian Government at the Centre, is led by the Congress Party, which is a historic cousin of the Indian National Congress that brought Independence to the country, and in this avatar it is having its own set of problems with its coalition partners, particularly on the contentious issue of signing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty with the USA and the international partner members which will give India some degree of energy security in the age of exploding oil prices. Energy is one of the key drivers of the Indian economy as it is the worlds and with rising oil prices all nations will have to address their energy security, especially if they are as dependent on imports as India is in its efforts to keep growth of the economy at a healthy 9 percent plus for the next few years. Here again it is not clear if going nuclear is the only way forward with a country that is endowed with plenty of sunshine and wind along its coastline, many possibilities could emerge if only we tried. Inflation kicking in at over 11 percent in the last week puts paid to all claims of sustained growth and in a democracy heading towards an impending election across the country the Government is pulling out all stops to help stem the inflation tide, particularly in the very sensitive food price front, which hits the common man in the street the most, and therefore would be a sore issue at the hustings. The search for stability is hard to find in a shaky coalition when the partners are unwilling to budge from the nuclear stand. During the last budget the Indian food situation came into sharp focus this year with many instances of farmer suicides in many parts of the country, especially in the Vidharbha region, and the Government made a magnanimous gesture of waiving all farm loans of small and marginal farmers and promised to support the banks through fiscal supports to provide them the safety net needed. This gesture ran into several tens of thousands of crores, and according to The Hindu, about Indian Rupees 60,000 crores (one crore is equal to ten million Rupees) when it was first announced in the budget speech by the Indian Finance Minister and later modified to a much higher sum, very generous indeed, but the problem that lies at the heart of this dilemma still remains unchanged.
“Loan waivers are at best temporary palliatives to the problems facing rural India. Regrettably, the powers that be and the powers that want to be have rarely been willing to confront the difficult and complex problems.”
A. Vaidyanathan

Image: A Vaidyanathan in The Hindu, Thursday, Mar 06, 2008. (Read on here)

I wonder what would be the impact if even a small portion of this humungous sum of money were invested in the area of innovation in the food and agriculture sectors with a slightly longer term view, rather than by just looking down the barrel of the next General Elections a few months away? The use of subsidies when there is a political and economic crisis is quite commonplace but making investments in basic innovations that can provide long term answers to wicked problems is not seen as a practical move in our land of five year terms of public office and short term politics. Can we continue in this strain for long with all the negative cues coming from the global warming front and the economic downturn that is raising its head from the rising oil prices and to top it all the social unrest unleashed due to pressures of change and transformation like the opposition to the SEZ’s at Nandigram and Singur where the local farmers are up in arms against the TATA Nano project?
The Hindu Business Line, Monday, Jan 21, 2008: Bengal verdict on Singur
The Hindu Business Line, Friday, Jan 11, 2008: Inclusive innovation


Image: University of Industrial Arts, Helsinki’s historic building, the tram that is a sustainable tradition of the city and the Rector, Yrjö Sotamaa speaks out in favour of innovation of a softer kind. (Read more here)

These are not simple problems but we do believe that the boundaries of these problems can be explored through the use of design rather than on the streets through negotiations between adversaries from opposite parties. Design can if given a chance can indeed find and show alternate models that could then be presented to all stake-holders for a negotiated settlement of the conflicts. This form of innovation and change is at the heart of the future of politics and many countries are now beginning to recognize this power of design visualization and a recent example is the Helsinki event that merged three major Universities to form the new Innovation University which has been christened the Aalto University after the great Finnish architect and designer, more about this in my previous post on this subject.

We will not wait for the Government of India to change its policies about education and innovations in India but forge ahead instead with some basic explorations that can be done on our own in the classrooms at NID with the creative human capital that is available in the motivated students who have come to learn design at our school. In my paper titled “Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education” that I had presented at a peer reviewed design conference, EAD06 in Bremen, Germany in 2005, I have given an outline of the course called “Design Concepts and Concerns” that has been offered to NID students of all programmes over the past fifteen years. The blog that was set up last year to document this course in a contemporaneous manner can be seen at this link below and last year the theme was Water, which happens to be the most contentious issue across India and the world, which is getting worse by the day. Here we looked at the macro-micro design analysis of the context to understand the situation at a personal level of each student participant and then went on to build alternate models to address these issues through design imagination and innovative offerings. The course ended with a long list of design opportunities and some of these were selected by the groups of students to be visualized as scenarios that could make the imagined outcomes more visible and tangible for decision making processes that would be political and participatory, both people and the Government could be stake holders along a long chain of interest groups, al of whom could have an informed say in the matter that would affect all of us. Take a look at what they had to offer and give your comments and feedback for this year’s theme, FOOD & Inflation.

More at the Design Concepts and Concerns blog here.

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

Posted in Agriculture, Alvar Aalto, Design Concepts And Concerns, Design Education, Design Opportunities, Food, Helsinki Design Lab, Innovation, NID, TATA Group, UIAH Helsinki, Yrjö Sotamaa | 1 Comment »

Royal College of Art (RCA): Linkages with NID & Indian Design: Major Influences (Part 2/3)

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Influences in the formative years at NID and in India


Picture: NID Lawns and Building

The design world has been a rather small place with a lot of exchange of ideas and with a considerable movement of people and ideas across boundaries, even during and after the wars. We now know that Charles Eames visited Ulm and interacted with Max Bill at about the same time as Raynor Banham and Bruce Archer traveled from London to teach at the great German school. Archer was a researcher and teacher at the RCA at that time in the early fifties before the setting up of the NID in Ahmedabad. Eames wrote the India Report in 1958, exactly 50 years ago, and his contacts with teachers at Ulm and the RCA must have shaped his ideas about design for a country like India when he worked on the report that proposed the National Institute of Design as a way forward for India in a period of rapid transition. That Charles Eames may have been influenced by the Ulm and RCA teachers is not documented but from the sequence of events that led to the India Report we can conjecture that Eames connected with both these great institutions before he finalized the concept of a National Design Institute for India in 1958.

NID Documentation 1964-69 (download pdf 25 mb) lists two people from the RCA of having contributed to the programmes at NID in the formative years. P P Hancock, wood working expert from the RCA was involved in the setting up workshops and furniture traditions at NID who contributed to training NID staff alongside George Nakashima whose furniture was batch produced by the NID workshops and Arno Vottler who was assigned the task of formulating the Furniture Design education at NID of which I was a student in the first batch, joining in 1969.

Bob Gill, Lecturer in Advertising & Public Communication, RCA and a professional designer of repute was involved Family Planning workshop and contributed to graphic design thinking dealing with substance and meaning rather than just form. Social communication was already at the top of the NID agenda in the early 60’s but most of the projects that came from professional contracts dealt with symbols and logos for Indian corporate entities, and a great many of such projects were carried out by the NID graphic design teachers and students.

Maxwell Fry & Jane Drew, visited NID in the early years of my study at NID and I remember attending their lecture at NID auditorium. According to Christopher Frayling in his book, Professor Fry and Jack Pritchard were responsible for bringing Walter Gropuis to London in 1934 to explore the possibility of his contributing to RCA education in art and design which did not however fructify due to the politics of the times.
Jane Drew Wiki:
Maxwell Fry Wiki:

For me the other reminder of the RCA influence on NID was the Ark magazine, a student journal from the RCA, copies of which were available at NID library, and a wonderful influence on some of us who were eager to know more about the nature of design in our formative years at NID. I was then involved in editing the first student magazine at NID, called SNID (Students National Institute of Design) in 1969 and 1970 along with a few colleagues, and I believe the effort was directly motivated by the presence of the Ark in our library and through our discussions of the contributions through our “bakwas committee”, or informal chat group as it was fondly called, which sat for hours on end at the Old Madras Café just outside the NID main gate in Paldi, to discuss all matters NID and design in those heady days of learning and exchange. The other influence was the Design Methods course conducted by Prof Kumar Vyas which was modeled after the structure proposed by Bruce Archer in his papers titled “Systematic Method for Designers”, 1964, a rare copy of which is in the NID library.

Bruce Archer, one of the pioneers of Design Research and the Design Methods movement as a faculty at the RCA visited NID with a mission to deliver in person the Sir Misha Black Award to Mr. Ashoke Chatterjee for excellence in design education that was recognized at the National Institute of Design. Ashoke Chatterjee joined a long list of awardees and he has been active in his interactions with the RCA ever since and this has contributed to the strengthening of the relationship between the NID and the RCA.
Prof Bruce Archer Wiki:
Sir Misha Black Wiki:

Christopher Conford, Head of General Studies at RCA formulated a programme which was called Science & Liberal Arts programme at NID and the formulation was carried in an incisive report left behind after his brief visit to the Institute.

The other person of significance mentioned to me by Askoke Chatterjee in his recent communication was Frank Height who according to AC is “the most important remaining link with the great years of Misha Black and design education at RCA”. AC attended the Misha Black memorial Dinner in London in March 2008 for the award ceremony for this year.

Sir Christopher Freyling visited India in 2001 and participated in the CII NID Design Summit at Bangalore and followed it with a visit to NID, Ahmednabad to sign an MOU on an era of cooperation between NID and the RCA.


Picture: Prof John Chris Jones at the British Library in 2004

I was happy to meet John Chris Jones in London during my visit there in 2004. We met in the British Library which was the location suggested by him for a meeting that was set up over a round of email communications prior to my visit. I had written to John Chris many years earlier when a former student of mine who was studying at the RCA told me that he was the best person who could help us formulate new directions for the use of digital resources at the IICD Jaipur where I was officiating as the Director. Nagraj Seshadri had told me that JCJ was perhaps the only person in the late 90’s who had a deep understanding of the internet and could help us develop strategies for its use in the crafts sector in India. I wrote to him and shared our IICD reports with him but due to his involvement with the book, Internet and Everyone, at that time he was not able to participate with that effort. However he had been a strong influence as part of the Design Methods movement and his book on the subject and hid other books were much sought after at NID in the 70’s till date. Now many NID students regularly catch up with his writings on the web at his website called Softopia.
JCJ Softopia:
JCJ on wiki:
JCJ conversation on NextD:
JCJ Design Methods on wiki:

Jasper Morrison – Furniture Designer visited NID very briefly and I spent one evening with him at Ahmedabad over dinner at a friends home. He is one of the influential young minds that RCA has produced and his influence is very strong through his work as well as his exhibitions such as “Super Normal” which was curated with Naoto Fukasawa.
Super Normal at Vitra 2008:
Jasper and Naoto Dialogue:

The other contemporary influence from the RCA was that of James Dyson – Product Designer, particularly through his book “Against the Odds” which is widely read at NID and all the design schools around the world
Dyson.com:
Dyson on Dexigner:
Dyson on RCA pages:
James Dyson Foundation:
Dyson School:

The other significant alumni of the RCA from India include Uday Shankar – Choreographer and Dance and Dhruv Mistry – Sculpture.

This post is the second of three such posts where the first deals with the early years of RCA and the influences on world design and the third with contemporary influences and the creation of a new generation of international designers from India.

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

Posted in Art, Ashoke Chatterjee, Bauhaus, Charles Eames, Christopher Freyling, Design Council UK, Design Education, Design Research, Hfg Ulm, IICD Jaipur, John Chris Jones, Kumar Vyas, Royal College Of Art | No Comments »

Royal College of Art (RCA): Linkages with NID & Indian Design: Early Years (Part 1/3)

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Royal College of Art, London and its significance to the world of design


Picture: Prof M P Ranjan in his office at NID. Pic by Darrag Murphy and Gisele Raulik

I have written about the strong linkages between the German design schools of the Bauhaus and the HfG Ulm with their education philosophy and teaching methods at the National Institute of Design earlier. I have outlined these influences in some detail in my paper that was presented at the DETM conference at NID in March 2005. The paper and presentation can be downloaded from here. (Paper pdf 69 kb) (Presentation Show pdf 2.5 mb)

While these two German schools have had a huge influence on world design, especially in the educational space, we will need to look at the influences of the Royal College of Art (RCA, London) in the shaping of world design as we know it today and in particular I will use this occasion to look at the influences of the RCA on Indian design education and research.


Picture: The great London Taxi (left) and The Royal College of Art on the web.

According to the RCA communication, I quote:

“The Royal College of Art is a very special kind of ideas factory.

It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university institution of art and design which specialises in teaching and research, offering MA, MPhil and PhD degrees across the disciplines of fine art, applied art, design, communications and humanities.

Over 850 masters and doctoral students drawn from all around the world interact with a teaching staff of over 100 professionals, all being leading art and design practitioners in their own right. It is therefore one of the most concentrated communities of artists and designers to be found anywhere on the planet.

Along with an impressive roll call of visiting professors, lecturers and advisors, students are given first-class opportunities for major collaborations with cultural and industrial partners. It all adds up to a creative environment that’s unrivalled elsewhere.”

UnQuote.

Historically, the events that led to the construction of the Crystal Palace in 1850 in London and the conduct of the Great Exhibition of 1951 launched the industrial revolution and also set the stage for the entry for design as a major partner with industry of the day. The British Government took cognizance of this influence and decided to invest in design and art education to help the process of assimilation of these new ideas into industry so that British industry continued to hold a leadership position in world trade with the use of these special skill sets.

The Royal College of Art was set up in 1837 as the Government School of Design with the charter of training designers for the industry as a national responsibility. The history of the great school has been captured and made accessible through the book “The Royal College of Art: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Art and Design”, by Christopher Frayling, Barry & Jenkins, London, 1987. I will not repeat what the book does admirably, that of documenting the illustrious students, Professors and administrators of the school but try and explore the connections between this great school and the NID, which was the first design school set up by the Government of India.

In the two following posts I will expand on the major influences during the formative years of Indian design movement and in another post deal with the contemporary influences with exchange and collaborative between the RCA and Indian design schools, particularly the NID. The second post deals with the formative years of Indian design while the third post with the contemporary exchanges and the creation of new generation of international designers from India.

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

Posted in Bauhaus, Christopher Freyling, Crystal Palace, Design Education, Design Fields, Great Exhibition, Hfg Ulm, History Of Design, London, Royal College Of Art | 1 Comment »

Service Design for India: Change in Design & Management Schools needed

Monday, April 14th, 2008


Image: A page from the booklet “Design for Services” launched by SEE Design Network of Design Wales, Cardiff. Full pdf files can be downloaded from the links below.

Service Design for India: Change in Design & Management Schools needed

Service Design is an emerging discipline that lies between the various fields of Design and Management. It is the cusp of both these major disciplines, which in India have rarely met or exchanged expertise in an educational setting. Design schools do not teach management in depth nor do management schools teach about design, leave alone design management. We have thousands of management schools in India when the pressing need is for the creation of experts who can innovate great services across a huge number of sectors of our economy. In my view design is needed critically in as many as 230 sectors of our economy and I have written about these in the past.

Across the world many management schools have started embracing design and innovation as a core offering to their students and in this the charge is led by the Rotmans School of Management, Toronto and a less known school in Scandinavia called the KaosPilot, both of which have been covered in previous posts on this blog. In the 80’s the London School of Business had produced a book on Design Management and at both the Stanford University, USA and the University of Industrial Arts, Helsinki, there have been concerted efforts to bring together Design, Technology and Management through a planned series of projects that bring together faculty and students from all these disciplines in a transdisciplinary format. The Design Council, London had spearheaded an initiative called RED where a series of innovative design and management exchanges had led to the development of some very interesting new services, all designed by keeping users in mind. The Design Wales too has been working with SME’s and local businesses to assist them to refine their service offerings and their booklet on service design is a very refined offering that can be downloaded as a pdf file. (see link below)

Several unusual experiments have been taking place in this space and the work done at the Mayo Clinic, USA is one that stands out in using the IDEO methodology to improve the service offerings of the medical establishment and their hospital chain, which has been covered in an earlier post on this blog. This year the KaosPilot school from Sweden has deputed 35 of their students to spend their “Outpost” session of three months in the field at Mumbai, and they are in the city till the end of May 2008 to explore the creation of new and compelling services that can build local entrepreneurship in a number of areas of service offerings from transportation to health systems. The Welllingker School of Management in Mumbai has started a masters programme in Design Management and NID Ahmedabad has a programme on offer called Strategic Design Management, but these are very little for a huge country like India and many of the other management schools should consider offering such programmes if we are to make headway in improving our services with the use of design and innovation, all managed by expert hands that are trained to do the job. The National Design Policy must take this into account when we try and take design forward in India.

There are many online resources that provide insights into service design and its emerging boundaries and some of these are listed below for immediate access:

1. Design Council, UK: Service Design

2. Rotmans School of Management, Toronto: Integrative Thinking

3. KaosPilot, Denmark: Design of New Businesses

4. Service Design: Wikipedia: Definition and links

5. Service Design Research: Rich Collection of Papers

6. ServiceDesign.org: Resources hosted by live/work UK

7. Design Wales, Cardiff: SEE Design Journals

8. SEE Design, Design Wales, Cardiff: Service Design booklet Download pdf files links: Part 1: Part 2:

9. Design Management Institute

10. Domus Academy – Business Design Department

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

Posted in Design Education, Design Management, IDEO, IIMA, KaosPilot, NID, National Design Policy, Rotmans School Of Management, Sectors Of Economy, Stanford University, UIAH Helsinki, Wellingkar School | 4 Comments »

Making of a design entrepreneur: Learning from peers

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

Image: Pankaj Varma and Julie Bose talking to Foundations students about their business experience of setting up a new brand called “Namo”, a series of Devotional Accessories as a design offering in the Indian marketplace.

Learning about business processes and business models has a two fold role in the making of a designer in India. The knowledge will hold them in good stead when they actually start practicing design and some of them will become entrepreneurs in their own right, by getting involved in start-up businesses using their design skills and entrepreneurial urge just as many of our graduates have done in the past. Many of such businesses have grown over the past ten or fifteen years and in my recent reflections in conversation with colleagues and students in the DCC class at NID we have identified several classes of such businesses that have been set up by our young designers who have graduated from our institute. The second aspect of business is the understanding of the channel through which the design solutions developed during the design journey are delivered to the public in an extremely competitive space of the marketplace. Many a time great design solutions get sidelined due to some other factors that are usually beyond the control of the manufacturer, promoter or even the product creator. These could be factors in the legal space, the financial strategies employed or even in the layers of branding and positioning that may have been adopted by the marketing team. It is clear that even these offerings can be designed and explored to both reduce risk as well as to respond to current aspirations of users as well as conditions in the market that may call for a revision of the offering in line with the time and place in which it is being made.
Image: The Namo design collection launched by designer entrepreneurs Pankaj Verma and Julie Bose

Making of a design entrepreneur: Learning from peers
I have asked the Foundation students explore the field by contacting our graduates in the field in order to find role models for themselves to emulate when their time is ripe for action in the field. India has been a particularly hostile territory for young design aspirants since we have had a protected economy for so many years and design and the risk that it entails was far from the minds of the trader manufacturers who managed our industrial empires as well as the Government that was more interested in control through standards and laws and taxation and special privileges and subsidies rather innovation and market excellence. In my presentation at the Conference on Design Support at Design Wales in 2004 I had the occasion to reflect on the Indian Design landscape and offer a number of categories for design businesses in India. This conference paper (pdf 39kb) and visual presentation (pdf 573kb) show the categories and these can be downloaded from my website at the links provided here. In order to give our students a framework to do their own research about their peers in the design business in India I offer a broad set of categories below which is in no way exhaustive but can give them a head start to look at this space and fill in the details for themselves as we go forward with their education.

Design schools and their curriculum has been focused on the creation of skilled personal for industry but many of our products, our graduates from the design programmes, end up being self employed and very happy indeed in that self appointed space. The journey may be traumatic for some or just as easy for others, but the lessons of the street food vendors that was explored by the DCC class would I am sure give our young aspiring designers some insights about how they too can survive in a hostile business environment which is not too supportive of design and the design activity in India has been just that over the past fifty years since the modern design movement started at Ahmedabad with the writing of the Eames India Report in 1958 (pdf 359kb). Perhaps this has something to do with the nature of design itself and only time will tell. The National Design Policy too is perhaps barking up the wrong tree and trying to create designers to serve industry masters, but are they ready to listen? We need to look at other models where designers can work directly with people who need their support and the policy frameworks could be moulded to facilitate such a direction. Here I would draw the attention of my students to the experiments in the Northeast of England where the Design Council UK has carried out the DOTT07 initiatives with John Thackara of Doors of Perception fame as the design leader. Their book, publications link and online documentation pdf (5454kb) of this live one year long initiative is very exciting indeed and could be a model for decentralised design action in India as well. Design schools may need to reexamine their curriculum to ensure that entrepreneurship is included in their mandate and this may bode well for design profession in India going forward.

The broad categories that we identified for design action in India are listed below:
1. Design Consulting Offices (DCO’s) (a few names in each category)
Design Directions: Satish Gokhale and Falguni Patel (Product & Graphic Design)
Ray & Kesavan: Sujata Kesavan (Graphic Design & Branding)
Incubis: Amit Gulati and Sabyasachi Paldas (Product Design, Architecture and Branding)
Korjan Design Studio: Dinesh and Rashmi Korjan (Product Design)
Elephant Design: Sudhir Sharma and colleagues from NID (Graphic, Branding, Exhibition etc)
Idiom Design Studio: Sonia Manchanda, Jacob Mathew et al (Branding, Graphics, Retail)
Design Workshop: Devashis Bhattacharya (Graphics, Branding & Exhibitions)
Icarus Design: George Mathews (Product Design)
Whisper Design: Niladri Mukherjee (Product Design and Branding)
Lopez Design: Tony Lopez (Graphics, Branding)
Lokus Design: Chandrashekar Badve, Molond Risaildar & Siddharth Kabra (Design, Architecture and Branding)

2. Designer Producers (DPO’s)
Quetzel: Sandeep Mukherjee and Sarita Fernandez (Furniture and Architectural Accessories)
Dovetail: Sunder S and John Mathew: (Furniture and Architectural Accessories)
Bodhi: Mala and Pradeep Sinha (Textile and Fashion products)
Designwise: Mukul Goel (Hand Crafted Metal artifacts and accessories)
Namo: Pankaj Verma and Julie Bose (Devotional Accessories)
Curiosity Workshop: Mala and Bela Shodhan (Soft Toys and Furnishings)

3. Designer Producer with Retail outlets (DPR’s)
Abraham & Thakore: David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore (Textile and Fashion products)
Tulsi: Neeru Kumar (Textile and Home Furnishing)
Bandhej: Archana Shah (Textile, Fashion and Accessories)
The Design Store: S Sunder, John Matthew, Jacob Matthew & Anand Aurora (Furniture & Accessories)

4. Interior Design and Exhibit Design services (IED’s)
Design Habit: Amardeep Behl: (Exhibition Design)
Design Core & Design Laboratory: Vikram Sardesai and Surya Gowda (Exhibition Design)

5. Design Research Services (DRS’s)
Onio Design: Mahoj Kotari (Product Design and Trend Research)
Variations Art Gallery & Freedom Tree Design: Latika Puri Khosla (Colour Research Services)
Sonic Rim: Uday Dandavate (People oriented Trend Research)

6. Design Led Institutions / NGO Activists (DLI’s)
Riverside School: Kiran Bir Sethi (Primary and Secondary School)
Khumbam: K B Jinan (Craft Based Production of Terracota Murals)
Industree: Neelam Chibber (Grass based village and artisanal initiatives)
Daily Dump: Poonam Bir Kasturi (Organic Waste management system)
Vikalp Design: Laxmi Murthy (Communication for Rural Health)

7.Interaction and Interface Design (IID’s)
Codesign: Rajesh Dahiya (Interface Design and Graphics)
Edot Solutions: Sanjay Sarkar (Information Design Software)

8. Corporate Design Intrapreneurs (CDI’s)
Atmosphere & Himatsingka Design Studio: Jayshree Poddar (Silk Furnishing)

I am sure that we can think of many more such initiatives and see that these are not exhaustive in any way. However, with the creation of the Design Business Incubation Centre at NID with support from the DST perhaps more alternatives will be explored in the days ahead. Perhaps the practicing designers in India can share their experiences and disclose closely held business strategies to design students so that it would encourage several of them to think of taking the entrepreneurial route when the time is right. Data on their business turnover and what they do and how they operate is rarely available since the whole area of design journalism is so poorly operated and structured in India today. I hope that this too will change in the days ahead.

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

Posted in CII-NID Design Summit, Charles Eames, Creative Economy, Daily Dump, Design Activism, Design Concepts And Concerns, Design Council UK, Design Education, Design Opportunities, Design Policy | 2 Comments »

Rockytoys Revisited: Design Strategies for a Small Scale Industry

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

Image 01: A Systems Collection of Big and Small Wheeler Toys that I designed in 1974 for my father’s factory in Madras.
When I got back to Madras in May 1974 after five years at NID I found that my father had reinvented his business to have a lower dependence on the wooden toy section and a greater share of his turnover (and margins) coming from the flush doors and furniture manufacturing business. I had returned to my home and our factory after having completed my PG Course in Furniture Design at NID (1969 – 1972) and having served on the Faculty there for two years (1972 -1974) during which time I had a fair amount of experience in both teaching and in professional projects through the NID’s Design Office. The wooden toy section was much depleted in number of workers and many items were being made solely for the retail shop in the city and some still popular items were being made in larger numbers for the school market as well as for supply to trade dealers across the South. I was in a pretty depressed state when I got back home since my departure from NID was not of my choice and I had hung around in Ahmedabad for a couple of months till my money had run out and I was compelled to return to Madras as a confused young man. I did hang around the factory to try and capture the earlier enthusiasm but now no one there would listen to the new fangled ideas that this young designer had and offered through which he promised he would help change the face of the industry. No one had heard about design and the message was lost in the din of the machines and the need to complete the pending orders on hand.

After a couple of months of trying I decided to try my luck elsewhere and started hanging out with a school friend who now worked as an accounts manager in a local advertising agency and spent a good deal of time in tea stalls, restaurants, cinemas and in the bus or train while commuting from home to city and back. I was however given the responsibility of reaching our shop in the evening and returning home with the sales proceeds of the day after closing the accounts and tallying all the bills, very boring indeed, but great education in business discipline. Late in the evenings and far into the night, I started sketching and building concepts of how the toy section could be revitalized at our factory. I had access to data of sales records for the past few years from the retail shop and also the costing data from the factory about each of the items that I thought could be redesigned or improved. The advertising agency however started giving me contract tasks to design logo’s, brochures and then an exhibition for some of their clients in the pharmaceutical and surgical instruments industry which helped start a fairly healthy cash flow and I worked out of my bedroom at night while continuing my lazy and serendipitous wanderings through the city by day. I read many books and visited bookstores and libraries regularly, which was the most visible activity as far as my family was concerned. My father, M V Gopalan, was indeed quite concerned at the state of his “unemployed” vagabond son – who sported a black beard and argued at the drop of a hat – since he did not know much about my activities during the day or late at night when the midnight lamp stayed lit in my room while I read or sketched, according to my mood.

Image 02: Big Wheeler Jeep Toy and Full Body Truck made up of modular components that are interchangable to facilitate inventory control in production.
We had a heart to heart talk some three months into my enforced stay at Madras and he offered to let me build some prototypes of my new sketches for toys, not because he had changed his business strategy to expand the toy activity which was then being cross subsidized by the furniture and doors business, but to get me back to what he could relate to as productive work. I had chosen to first work on the wheeled toy range since the factory had a list of almost 40 different wheeled wooden toys on offer and they were quite popular with the boys who visited our shop and the school buyers in particular always had a few on their purchase wish list. However when I looked at the production data I found that each of these had evolved at different times without any effort to coordinate the components and there were bins and bins of different size wheels stuffed into large metal drums that were used to store the components near the wood turning centre in the factory. When the turners ran out of work more wheels were made and stuffed into more drums, the right hand did not know what the left was doing. The same was true of the other components that were made on the jig-saw and the cross-cut saw centre, each managed and operated by a specialist craftsman who had to be kept busy by the factory manager. The documentation for these toys was in the form of plywood templates, sets of which were hung with a metal wire from the roof in the toy assembly section near the paint shop. These templates were dusted and brought down each time a new batch of toys were to be made and the quantities were decided by the manager, usually in divisions or multiples of dozens, depending on past performance in the market.

Image 03: Existing Big Jeep made of 25 pieces of wood, plywood and metal parts and the new design Jeep Toy in simplified construction and better finish from the factory album of 1974.
I started with the existing Jeep car, my favorite as a child, which was offered in two sizes, big and small. Each Jeep was made up from over 25 pieces of wood and plywood pieces that were cut according to the template and then assembled with glue and nails before being painted and decorated with lines and trims. The quality of construction and finish were fairly crude and the pricing was unsustainably low. However, I found that barely 10 pieces were sold in the previous year; hence it was not a significant loss. The sale price of the big Jeep toy was Rs 17.50 in 1974 and according to my calculation the cost of production was Rs. 25 at least. I decided that my design strategy would be to reduce complexity of assembly, rationalize wheels across a number of toys, use the machine cut precision to improve quality and use spray painted components to make quality improvement in finish and avoid multiple colours and lines on a single component to de-skill the finishing stage and the use of a metal bush bearing for the wheel assembly to make the product durable for rough play as the existing one had weak wheels that made the product less attractive and to avoid nails for the assembly of components. These strategies came out of my conviction from having played with these toys as well as from information about user complaints particularly from schools about the wheels, which is the key functional component in this toy.

My new Jeep toy was made of 15 pieces of solid wood planks, no plywood was used since it tended to fray in use, and the whole assembly was spray painted before assembly to get a great finish and precise joints lines. The breakthrough in the wheels assembly came from our doors business since the bearings were made of the redundant aluminum extrusion sections from tower bolts that were left over items when the flush doors were supplied with the upper stopper removed for use with holes drilled in the door frame. This was available in plenty and could be purchased by weight and therefore cost effective as well. A matching metal shaft was used and these were anchored firmly into the wooden wheels through squared ends that were forged by heating on a hot coal fire before being used for the wheel assembly. The extruded bush bearing had pre drilled holes for receiving screws top be mounted on the chassis that was a long wooden plate that extended from the front to the back of the vehicle. All wooden components were made of uniform thickness and these are cut in modular sizes affording reuse in other vehicle types in the series thereby reducing component level variety. The cost of the finished Jeep with a canopy that could be sat on by a child was Rs. 20 and we priced the toy at Rs 45 for retail. The other products in this range were the three types of Trucks – Platform, Half-body and Full-body – each priced at Rs 35, Rs. 45 and Rs. 60 respectively.

Image 04: Small Wheeler Truck System seen in the three colour schemes that I standardised for the range of toys.
The range was offered in three colour variants of Orange-Red, Yellow-Green and Blue-Green combinations all standardized to the available enamel paint range of a reputed brand so that the earlier lack of colour standards could be avoided during manufacture. All these steps ensured that the quality of the end product was sharply better and the market lapped up these products that day the first batch was taken to the shop for sale. It made a record that day. It was an amazing experience for me to be at the Rockytoys shop when my mother and I started arranging the show window and sales of the product started immediately. They literally flew off the shelf and the first batch of 12 Jeeps and 18 Trucks were sold out on day one at unheard of prices, and this represented over two years sales of the existing range. Design had made a huge difference at this small-scale industry and this market success continued for many years thereafter. Several hundred toy Jeeps and Trucks rolled out of the factory and the shop and I remember when it was launched at Bangalore, the toyshop on Brigade Road had stacked up their shop window with this range during the Christmas season in 1975. For me it was a truly wonderful sight to see my products on sale in Bangalore as well as to get positive feedback from schools such as The School in Madras who had used my products. I wonder if some of the kids who had then played with my toys will get in touch through the new connectivity provided by the web, only time will tell.

Image 05: Range of new colour schemes applied to existing toys and this was extended top all products made by the factory.
My status at the factory changed dramatically overnight and the shop floor workers and managers looked at me with a new interest but could not yet understand how this drama actually worked. Design was like some magic, and the designer, the wielder of the magic wand was much respected and consulted for all kinds of problems and many products could be changed in quick succession and several opportunities were explored in the two years that I spent at Madras before I finally returned to NID and rejoined the Faculty in June of 1976. I will share some of these experiences as well as the insights about design and its use for small industry in the days ahead. Design is a very gratifying occupation and I do wish more young people in India would enter this profession and that many more industries would use the discipline to help build quality products, particularly in the small-scale sector. My father no longer had his earlier concerns about me but he agreed with me when time came for me to return to NID as a faculty member at a fraction of the salary that I had been earning at Madras from my freelance design consultant work as well as from my contract work at the advertising agency that continued alongside my work for my father’s factory, which was by the way unpaid labour, if I do not count the food and lodging that I had from my home, and the access to the free telephone which was critical for my design business in those days.

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

Posted in Creative Economy, Design Education, Design For Development, M V Gopalan, Macro Micro Design Strategy, Modern Agencies, NID, Rockytoys | No Comments »

The TATA Nano Debate Rages on: A Call for Design Activism

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

As an outcome of the three posts on this blog about the TATA Nano launch at the Auto Expo 2008 we have had several comments made on the arguments here that would be of interest to both design students and professionals when taken together. I am therefore reproducing these in the order in which the comments have come in as one composite post before closing this particular thread.

I had wanted to make a major post on the new iBus that was exhibited at the Auto Expo but the Industrial Designers who contributed to the creation of the product are still restrained from making specific comments about the product due to confidentiality agreement with their client Ashok Leyland, Chennai, other tan confirming that they have contributed to the Industrial Design for the product. Congratulations, Abhikalp Design , Indore for the launch of their product, one of the few indigenous Industrial Design offerings that have reached market in India. We will get back to this product at a later date.

Now let us look at the comments that the TATA Nano posts have generated on this blog.

Soo… 11 January, 2008 1:45 PM
hi ranjan, i was reading an interview of Nandan Nilekani where he and his wife were in the process of setting up thinktanks in India (quite like what you suggest in the last para of this post). I don’t know whether it would be a part of Infosys or a separate body, but maybe there could be some collaboration with that. just a thought!

prof M P Ranjan 11 January, 2008 2:45 PM
Thanks Soo … I am advocating the use of design and scenario visualisation as a social procedure that can make the consequences of any major infrastructure investment visible to the lay man before it is acted upon by governments and industry even if they have the money and the power to do so. This will encourage true democratic processes and it may take a while to move things but once we get an understanding the movement forward would be quite dramatic and the consequences at the social and the ecological level both visible as well as manageable. We could go one step further and say that we could have laws in place that makes such visualisations and community sharing mandatory and time sensitive so that situations such as the Shingur and Nandigram conflicts as well as the Narmada issue that has been contentious.

In all these cases we have only had political activists opposing or supporting the scheme, whatever they may have been intended to achieve. However with design visualisation and scenario building with imagination so that all of us can see and feel the finer aspects of what could be the possible outcomes and then move forward with conviction.

murli said… 12 January, 2008 11:18 PM
I agree with every argument against the proliferation of automobiles in the world. The practical reality is that unless one has the power to change the political order such that reliable, comfortable public transport becomes the norm, it is sheer hypocrisy to drive around in automobiles while instructing others not to. Try to spend a day as a woman carrying a small child standing in 45 degree/95% humidity weather at a bus stand along with 50 others waiting for a bus that may not arrive, and which is already over-crowded when it does and thus may never stop; and one is required to take two or three such buses to get to work or school. Then the Nano is a godsend. Infosys founder Narayanamurthy was powerless to bring about positive urban change in his hometown of Bangalore — and here’s a man with the money, ideas and intelligence to make it happen.
I salute Ratan Tata because he is doing the best he can for the problems faced by a significant proportion of Indians. 
Since neither political will nor intent exists to create a transportation infrastructure, and since nothing short of a revolution is going to effect significant political change the alternative is to fill the streets with cars until somebody somewhere in power is forced to do something. That is the unfortunate reality in India — not doing something until there is no alternative left. And this change in public infrastructure may happen just about the time when Maoist groups have succeeded in controlling every district in India (penetration exceeds 50% today).
Not a very positive perspective perhaps, but definitely a realistic one. And design is about reality, right?

prof. m p ranjan said… 13 January, 2008 11:00 PM
Dear Murli. I have argued here that “The Political Way” and the “Design Way” are both about methods for dealing with reality and the complex issues at hand. The first we are all familiar with in the Indian democracy and this seems to be the preferred way in India whenever there is a major problem that confounds all of us. Run to the politician or take to the streets and this is bound to lead to conflict and not solution, although we do get some kind of patched up truce, I cannot call it anything but ‘jugaad”, which was celebrated by India Today magazine as a unique Indian realisation, with pride, I believe. 
The free market is not going to solve such complex problems unless we are able to invest our imagination in creating the material and service alternatives and models that will give us a future that has value for each one of us. This blog is about design for India and the “Design Way” which is not as yet fully understood in India. Design is seen as the icing on the cake, the aesthetic layer, and not as the value of the core offering which some of us think it should be providing and we do have the tools and processes and the expertise that can make it happen. Alternatives can be “Designed” which cannot be negotiated by “Political Debate” alone.
This is what I am advocating and the Government of India and our Indian industry as well as the great leaders like Rattan Tata should take heed of this possibility and invest in design at the systems level to make the desirable alternatives happen within our lifetimes.

murli said… 13 January, 2008 11:20 PM
Dear Ranjan, I don’t see The Political Way and The Design Way as distinct. The Design Way is to include every significant stakeholder in the process, and therefore should include politics. The neutral meaning of ‘politics’ is getting things done through dialogue among people. And isn’t that how it should be? Colloquially, the term has a very negative connotation typically implying one-upmanship, greed, backstabbing, hidden agendas, quid-pro-quos, and the like. 
Also, I don’t see distinction between Free Market and Collective Social Planning (or whatever) — there is no pure political/economic/social system in the world. Even the putative Free Market that exists in the US is hugely influenced through governmental involvement — with the participation, and often lobbying of corporate groups. Just a few examples: the Interstate system, the Internet, Social Security, Affirmative Action, etc. India’s major problem has been excessive bureaucratic meddling at every level. Planning is far too important a process to be left entirely to bureaucrats, politicians and so-called ‘intellectuals’: I say ’so-called’ because of their typical disconnect from reality. Mr. N R Narayanamurthy of Infosys took great personal interest in trying to improve the infrastructure of Bangalore. Didn’t help. His Bangalore Action Task Force with eminent personalities on board was disbanded. As I mentioned, the ‘authorities’ refused to give him time of day. I have no doubt in mind that Mr. Ratan Tata is himself involved in many such initiatives. Indeed, his next dream is to ensure clean drinking water for the people of India. Not all industrialists are money-grubbing capitalists. The Western experience (as well our own Indian history) has shown that the achievement of great wealth leads to great philanthropy, Bill Gates being a shining current example. if some day, an efficient public transportation infrastructure is created (including safe lanes for pedestrians and bicycles), I will stop using my car. I have need only to go somewhere, and have no emotional attachment to a vehicle. And day in, day out, I see ordinary people suffer from lack of reasonable transportation. I think even the Tatas of this country are powerless before the festering sore that our political system has become. So they are compelled to go directly to the people. If you, Dr. Ranjan, in your influential position, are able to make a dent in this diseased fabric of our polity, you deserve something of a Bharat Ratna for it! Regards, murli

prof. m p ranjan said… 14 January, 2008 12:19 AM,
Dear Murli. I am neither “Doctor” nor a “Bharat Ratna” aspirant. However I am interested in getting design understood in India and have it used by all professions and not just by designers. Design for me is a broad human field with the ability and tools to realise human intentions and build value for a sustainable future. 
Politics in the broad sense is also dealing with these actions but it is understood differently as a negotiated process of change and the use of design in building alternate scenarios that are both tangible as well as testable makes the “Design Way” one that can help offer a number of possible scenarios and from which we can build a future for ourselves using all the political will that is available. I am making another post with some examples about scenarios that design can offer to make the definition a little more clear.

anuganguly said… 14 January, 2008 12:40 AM
we’ve already reached a stage where the average speed of a car on calcutta roads is 12 kmph and the max. speed of a bicycle is 14 kpmh. the math is easy.
thank god for the tata nano. its given us the need to think urgently about how badly we need to re-evaluate our attention to the transportation system. 
there’s a reason why our taxes arent going into maintaining buses, why all taxis and buses are not fined for fuming, why bus drivers are still paid on a commission basis, forcing them to drive at reckless speeds. are we putting enough effort to pressurizing our local media and governments to stop pocketing the money of our land and put it where it belongs? does all this sound naively idealistic? good. because the WILL to effect change has always been the only force behind anything thats EVER happened in the universe.

anuganguly said… 14 January, 2008 12:50 AM
Dear Ranjan, I was just reminded of this:
In an interview in 1997, Miuccia Prada, fashion designer, articulated the conflicting emotions inherent in feminist discussion of fashion and design in general, “even in my political phase I loved fashion, but people made me feel ashamed of it…I don’t see a contradiction between beauty and politics: politics is man trying to live better; aesthetics is man trying to improve the quality of life.”

murli said… 14 January, 2008 11:36 AM,
Dear Ranjan, it might surprise you to learn that I too am interested “getting design understood in India and have it used by all professions and not just by designers,” although I am not formally a ‘designer’ myself in the way that it is usually understood in lay — or even design — circles. I have no desire to be adversarial — indeed, I am absolutely thrilled that India has people such as yourself, something that one could only dream of a couple of decades ago. Bringing about such changes in India is a huge undertaking, and it really doesn’t help to criticise someone (Ratan Tata, in this instance) who is genuinely trying to tackle a problem in the only way he is permitted. Let a thousand flowers, bloom, I would say — let each person try to work with the system to solve problems and eventually, society will be the better for it. The Nano may be a short term solution until the infrastructure improves. That’s no reason, however to look down upon it. As John Maynard Keynes once famously remarked, “In the long run, we’re all dead.”
I eagerly look forward to your next post where you lay out some scenarios.
Regards, Murli.

murli said… 15 January, 2008 11:34 PM
Ranjan, Ratan Tata is fulfilling his dharma as businessman/industrialist in providing solutions that people need and want. If there isn’t really a market for the Nano, then few will buy it and the problem will take care of itself without any socialistic meddling. If there is indeed a need for the Nano and yet you would like to finesse the problem of people buying it then you must do at least two things:
1. Work with cities to plan future development in such a manner that most transportation can be done on foot or through public transportation.
2. Approach the public directly and educate them on the need to avoid personal transportation like the Nano.
If you are unsuccessful at either of the above, then let the Nano solve people’s problems. I don’t think we should begrudge anyone the right to offer solutions to people’s problems at all. 
I am sceptical about any short term improvement in the infrastructure in India. The story behind the lack of good public transportation outside of New York and few other cities is that the auto and oil corporations lobbied (code word for bribed) Congressmen to kill public transportation there. In Bangalore, the powerful autorickshaw lobby has prevented the improvement of public transportation for decades. Politics — including dirty politics — is a reality in the US and in India (and elsewhere). One cannot avoid incorporating politics into any systems view of design and development. No point in railing against reality; it is what it is. And I think Gandhiji would have agreed. 
Kill the Nano if you must, but kill it in the marketplace by providing people with an alternative they would be loath to refuse.
Regards, Murli

prof. m p ranjan said… 16 January, 2008 12:06 PM
Dear Murli. I somehow expect our business leaders to be statesmen as well as philanthrophists, which the TATA group has always represented for me, unlike many other business groups in India, from whom I do not expect anything but black profits. I will therefore continue to expect Ratan Tata to look at the larger picture while continuing his business interests in India as well as around the world. 
Global warming and social equity kind of problems are man-made and the men making these are to be held responsible in my view even if new laws are to be drafted to enforce these positions. I have been advised by a friend to read the book “Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives” by Edwin Black. I am sure it will be an instructive read but my gut sense tells me that in the case of known threats we cannot leave things to market forces as Adam Smith has had all of us believe nor can we take the Malthusian stand that these are inevitable. Economics needs to be redefined and innovation too needs to be placed in perspective and they too carry responsibility and we are trying to build responsible designers even if industry is only asking for competent ones. I am not advocating either communism or socialism here and we need to seriously look at a new path that is sensitive and informed innovation as political drivers going forward. I hope our politicians are listening
Regards, Ranjan

murli said… 17 January, 2008 1:10 AM
Dear Ranjan, from all our exchanges so far, I see no disagreement in our goals. You and I see eye to eye in regard to a goal of creating a earth-friendly and sustainable socio-economic architecture of which the transportation infrastructure is one key component. You suggest that it is irresponsible for corporations — particular reputed ones – to introduce solutions that are not sustainable, even if there is a market demand for it. An implication of your argument is that the population at large is better off living in their state of sufferance until a sustainable infrastructure in put in place. And further, it is the responsibility and duty of corporations to work toward those sort of solutions. I agree that corporations should demonstrate responsibility, but they should not shirk from providing solutions that might appear a short term fix. Let’s take a few other things that some people consider ‘bad’ — alcohol, tobacco, junk food, and pornography. Is the solution to ban the manufacture of those things or to educate people to avoid them? Your counterargument might be that while the morals of the above items might be debatable there can be no two views on whether promoting the use of fossil fuels and traffic congestion is morally or even ecologically acceptable. 
Such a view as at least borderline patronising to the population at large – the view that We Know What is Good For You Better Than You Do, So Hang Around Until a Better Fix Is Found. 
This might just be the right place to initiate a people’s movement that pressures the political and administrative machinery to do something. Or perhaps the People’s Movement could pressurise Corporations. It isn’t, in my view the responsibility of corporations to assume the role of Knights In Shining Armor. They have enough on their plate to worry about. 
And if you would like to get a People’s Movement going, I’m ready to sign on.
Regards, Murli

murli said… 17 January, 2008 2:04 PM
Dear Ranjan, since my last post, I’ve been thinking about the idea of a People’s Design Movement. Is there such a thing already in India? If so, I’d love to know about it. NGOs and activism is a big thing in India. Is there such a thing as Design activism. My specialty, if you will is innovation — mindset, skills, processes and culture. I see design as innovation, and innovation as fundamental to design. 
I like the idea of Innovation and Design Activism. Or Innovation-Design Education-Activism (I-D E-A) whose purpose is to not only build design/innovation awareness but also to provide skills and tools to people at large: schools, villages, neighborhood groups, govt departments, universities, corporations, etc. 
Our once beautiful and harmonious-with-nature human settlements have metamorphosed into the ugly, festering sores that pass for Indian cities (save for isolated pockets). The ugliness also reflects the sense of alienation that urban denizens have with respect to each other. The sense of community and interdependence has all but vanished. Each home has become a fortress outside of which whatever happens, one scarcely cares about. Rebuilding community goes hand in hand with fostering good design. And this cannot be achieved by appealing to the good sense of industrialists — it has to emerge from the grassroots. Regards, Murli

prof. m p ranjan said… 17 January, 2008 3:38 PM
Dear Murli, The closest thing to design activism that I know of is the Khadi movement by Gandhi and his followers and now it has all but run out of steam although much lip service is given to grassroots innovation and the falvour of the moment is to celebrate science and technology in a pretty sloppy way and justify poor quality since it is handled at the grassroots with a jholawallah culture that is adopted by the practitioners. Strong criticism, but I am afraid that this is how I see it today. There is a bandwagon effect that is spawned by the availability of easy funds from uncritical science and technology support programmes in India and a huge investment climate exists where a very large number of state sponsored labs and training programmes as well as awards and grant in aid schemes are managed by the state and central government agencies which are science biased and which is rarely assessed for what they are worth since the sacred cow of Indian science and technology establishments may not be questioned and the stake holders and vested interests protect this space with the threat that without such standards and test procedures the R & D driven knowledge streams would dry up to the peril of the leadership that India may have in a number of related areas. This grassroots kind of science action is very widely dispersed in a number of areas and good work has been done in some of these sectors. However I am yet to see one where design thinking and design action is at the heart of such innovation efforts and as a result the application of the principles do not end up as compelling new services and products, with very few exceptions.
We cannot equate science and technology innovation to that provided by design innovation although many would like to argue that they are the one and the same thing. While the aim of science is the production of new knowledge the role of design is to offer people centric solutions in the current reality and this may or may not represent new knowledge, but it has to work for the stake holders as well as for the environment and the larger systems within which it is embedded.
The best international example that I can think of is the ongoing efforts in the Northeast of England with the DOTT07 project that is being handled by the Design Council UK under the leadership of John Thackara and his team. John has tried to bring these ideas to India as part of his “Doors of Perception – East” initiatives as well as the regular events held in Amsterdam over the past ten years and the team involved has grown in size as well as credibility through the “Doors” conferences and the people that they were able to attract for action on the ground. The other group who has made good progress is the Politechnico di Milano group headed by Thomas Maldonado and Ezio Manzini on the whole front of sustainability. They have used what we could call design activism and awareness building at the youth level across the world as opposed to the political activism in the field that is represented by the action and style of the groups such as GreenPeace and the Ruckus Society who deal with environmental issues and others like Free Trade and Human Rights activist groups that deal with social equity issues by direct research and voluntary support action in the field. These do not necessarily have elements of innovation attached although they could do a lot if they did include this as a part of their offering.
What we perhaps need are multi-disciplinary panels of experts who can adopt and use design innovation as a way forward and through their creative prototyping actions show the way forward for major investments to be made and here industry could be a very viable area of action if they are led by visionaries and this is not a far fetched dream, very possible in the emerging creative era. 
Thank you for your comments that have provoked me to elaborate on my ideas about economics and design action. I am not likely to set up an activist venture myself at this stage in my career but will be happy to advise and interact with young groups that would like to take these ideas forward. Many of our students are already doing this and I propose to write about their work in the days ahead so that they gain the visibility which is today being ignored due to the print and TV media glare on fashion and glamour type of design action at the cost of exploring real work that is happening at the grassroots level.

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

Posted in Design Activism, Design Education, Design For Development, Infosys, National Design Policy, Politics, Poverty, Ratan Tata, Social Equity, Systems Design, TATA Group | 2 Comments »

Systems Design: The NID Way

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Image: Systems Design: The NID Way _ a Four stage model for dealing with complex situations. (click image to enlarge)
There is a lot of interest around the world for models of design action that can be both responsive to complexity as well as be effective as a vehicle for social transformation which is much needed in the era of massive change and an era of massive concerns for global warming and social equity. Take a look at the attached model that I have called the Design Systems Model – the NID Way. There are four parts at which the work can start but these would need to be explored across all of these as we progress and each provides new insights that help us take the decisions to go forward and each uses a different designer ability and sensibility but we need to be flexible to move from one to the next in quick succession if we are to be able to use this model with telling effect. I have been using this model in my classes for design students at NID ever since it was first articulated in 2001 as part of my presentation to the National Design Summit in Bangalore in my lecture called “Cactus Flower Blooms in the Desert: Reflections on Design and Innovation in India”. You can download the full text paper from here (Design Summit_txt_MPR2001.pdf file size 128 kb) and the two part visual presentation from here below:
(DesignSummit_pic1_MPR2001.pdf file size 3.6 MB and DesignSummit_pic2_MPR2001.pdf file size 4.6 MB)

To support this process of design one would need to find a user or user group and here one can have several alternatives and these could be explored as scenarios of application and come concepts could be developed in order to see how the business side of each offering can be supported. These are all simultaneous processes and iterative processes and not to be seen as being done one after the other. However as we move forward our conviction about what is the correct direction will get better and better till we take some final decisions that can be supported and justified and tested through investments in prototypes and field trials. Try it and see, it is what I teach at NID and I call it the NID way since all students from all our disciplines at NID are introduced to this form of thinking and it does set them apart from the other schools in the world in their approach to design thinking. This is not easy but you can try and get into this way of working and thinking at each stage and you will need to support this process with visual documentation that can be re-examined in the next iteration and recorded as new ideas emerge and are captured on The Design Journey. The key effort would be to see if one can spell out possible outcomes in each of the four areas and discuss it with colleagues and partners in the field with a sharing of the supporting sketches and visual evidence of use situations along with a description of macro and micro details of the imagined situations.

I decided to make this post since I was asked by a student from a school in Nasik to advise her on her project directions from a distance. The advise that I gave her formed the seed of this post and it is perhaps a way of sharing our know-how with a wider audience in India and elsewhere since the design culture needs to spread quite rapidly if we are to meet the challenges of the massive change that is inexorably bearing down on all of us. I am reminded of a great book that gave me my first insights about the nature of design when I first started looking at design theory in a formal sense as a student at NID in the late sixties and early seventies. “What is a Designer: education and practice” by Norman Potter was a fantastic introduction to the emerging concept of design theory for me and it was published by Studio Vista in 1969 as part of a wonderful series of introductory books on design which found its way to the NID library in those days. I was given a task of reading a book as part of a course titled “Rhetoric” where each student had to select one book which they would read and then present to the rest of the class in an open session at the institute. The book that I had chosen was another from the Studio Vista series called “Transport Design by Corin Huges Stanton. After reading this book my attention was drawn to the rest of the series of very smartly designed books which were not intimidating to the novice and this led me to a wonderful journey of research and discovery, all on my own.

I must thank my teacher Prof. Kumar Vyas for having offered this assignment as part of our programme at NID. Kumar as we all call him is now retired from NID but very active in teaching at a number of design schools and he is presently the Chairman of the Governing Council of the new school, the MIT Institute of Design, Pune. I wonder if Rhetoric was also offered at the Ulm school of design in the sixties or if it was created at NID as part of our own experiments in design education, we will need to do some research to check this fact, but in any case it is a great assignment. However several of my student colleagues failed to either read their designated book nor make their presentation which was a great loss for all of us. I was to learn later over several; years of being a teacher at NID that this was a normal behaviour for our design students as well as our teachers who showed an uncanny contempt for both reading and writing that I quite fail to understand to this day, but I have realized that this is the accepted way in many design schools, at least till now, very sad indeed. At NID this has resulted in very few of our courses being documented and discussed in a critical framework of academic discourse although some extremely interesting design education experiments have been conducted here we unfortunately do not have the benefit of the critical documentation which will permit us to carry out an in depth analysis and evaluation of the validity and impact of these explorations.

Design education is fortunately changing and the deep seated contempt for reading and writing seems to be melting away slowly with the “wikipedisation” of our research but along with this we also seem to be loosing our contact with material exploration and free-hand drawing that were at the heart of design education in the pre-computer era. I wonder when we will finds the balance between the Arts and Crafts style of thought and action and the other extreme of the Science and Technology centric approaches and discover a middle path that is truly the “Design Way” as described by the great book with the same title by Harold Nelson and Eric Stolterman. At NID our beautiful wood and metal workshops were all but destroyed to make way for the new IT enabled visualization and modeling facility called the “Design Vision Centre” and the distancing of the hand with the promise that the mind is faster to the market is a deep change that only time will show what could be the long term consequences to design education at NID. I do not believe that this is an “either – or” situation, where one can easily replace the other, since if we look at the model of the Systems Design – the NID Way, one will see that we will need to be flexible to move from one mode to another in a seamless manner if we are to make the disruptive innovations that are needed in the face of massive change that we are experiencing today. If we are to ward of the massive disruptive revolutions of a political nature which are sure to follow in the wake of massive change that is not met with an adequate and sensitive effort and if we do not in this process manage to invent the alternatives to meet the challenges ahead. Design is therefore a critical resource for human society and this was my core argument when responding to the lecture made at NID auditorium by two design teachers from the Konstfack University, Repartment of Interdisciplinary Studies, Sweden yesterday when they spoke about trends in society and the lessons that they see from Charles Eames and his India Report of 1958. I will elaborate on this discussion in another post since I intend to explore these ideas as we go forward in developing our understanding of design today. In the context of the current model, Systems Design – the NID Way, it is sufficient to see that these explorations in the real world are paralleled by inplorations in the imagination of the designer and all the four stages are explored – implored to arrive at the insights that lead to deep conviction, and it is this conviction that would give us the courage and determination to create a desirable future for all of us. This journey is described in the paper titled Design Journey: Styles and modes of thought and actions in design” which can be downloaded from this link here (pdf file size 270 kb)

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

Posted in Definition Of Design, Design Concepts And Concerns, Design Education, Design Thinking, Design Way, Eric Stolterman, Harold Nelson, Hfg Ulm, Konstfack, Kumar Vyas, NID Way, Systems Design | No Comments »

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