Imagine. Create. Belong: Design and Crafts Education in India

Copyright and Published by Cosmopolitan’s Valia C.L. College of Commerce and Valia L.C. College of Arts, D.N.Nagar, Andheri (W), on Interdisciplinary National Conference on the theme ‘Vision India-The Road Ahead’.
Not to replicated, copied or published under any form or version.

Abstract

Approach to design education in India in the 21^st century must reflect the emergence of innovation and knowledge economy and convergence of media, communication and information, while keeping in roots in design values such as harmony, ethics, consumer delight, quality, functionality, visual culture and aesthetics. Design education in India, led by the Bauhaus and Ulm schools, catered to the ‘Developing India’ agenda. As things change today, what becomes the role of design education and design institutions? With the imperative to change and redefine their courses, Indian design education also has to change its mindset about itself and the way business perceive design. For what is a daunting task ahead, the paper proposes a 7 point vision. In creating a vision for design education and creating a newer definition for design, the paper actively acknowledges the human and cultural aspect that it encompasses. In breaking barriers with behavioral sciences and making them allied components of design education, designers shall be able to perceive and create ‘right’ solutions for humanity. Government policies play a major role in the development of design education. The paper also adds to the long due demand of a dedicated ministry for creative and cultural industries, by the design academia fraternity.

Imagine. Create. Belong:
Design and Crafts Education in India

I would not teach them the alphabet till they have had an elementary knowledge of history, geography, mental arithmetic and the art (say) of spinning. Through these three I should develop their intelligence. Question may be asked how intelligence can be developed through the takli (Spindle used in spinning with the fingers without the use of the spinning wheel) or the spinning wheel. It can to a marvelous degree if it is not taught merely mechanically. When you tell a child the reason for each process, when you explain the mechanism of the takli or the wheel, when you give him the history of cotton and its connection with civilization itself and take him to the village field where it is grown, and teach him to count the rounds he spins and the method of finding the evenness and strength of his yarn, you hold his interest and simultaneously train his hands, his eyes and his mind. I should give six months to this primary training. The child is probably now ready for learning how to read the alphabet, and when he is able to do so rapidly, he is ready to learn simple drawing, and when he has learnt to draw geometrical figures and the figures of the birds etc., he will draw, not scrawl the figures of the alphabet. I can recall the days of my childhood when I was being taught the alphabet. I know what a drag it was. Nobody cared why my intellect was rusting. I consider writing a fine art. We kill it by imposing the alphabet on little children and making it the beginning of learning. Thus we do violence to the art of writing and stunt the growth of the child when we seek to teach him the alphabet before his time.

-          Mahatma Gandhi on basic education[1]

Formal education in India lays very little emphasis on the abilities of converting materials with skills and dexterous abilities that were common place in all our villages across India. We do see these places of excellent development in those places where “development and modern education” have not yet arrived; however, and we label them as uneducated and illiterate. Thus we have failed to acknowledge their deep understanding of the local materials and the ability of their culture to develop a deep grasp of traditional wisdom of the ages that had been passed on through the generations. In the creation of design as a specialized activity, we have removed design from the realm of our everyday activities. Do we need to correct this, at all? If yes, then how?

The key lies in Gandhiji’s quote on education above- in the imperative to redesign education to bring the design agenda closer to society. If we are able to give design back to society through its rightful integration with education, it will be a very forceful tool for accelerated economic development. It will also create a very competitive economy with sustainable advantages, while at the same time fulfilling consumer needs with creative products and services that the people regard as their own.

In this context, the paper asks the following questions:

Can and will design education inform general education in the early years of schooling in India?

How can crafts and design be integrated into the process of schooling to make society both skillful and thoughtful?

How do we feature traditional skills in the pedagogic radar of the country? How can traditional skills and knowledge be factored into mainstream education as course content, and into existing curricula at education institutes specializing in ‘cultural and/or creative industries’? 

Will such intervention succeed in restoring dignity to traditional skills?

From technology being the prime driver of change will we learn to place human abilities and needs at the heart of national action?

Will we learn to place design before technology and let integrated design thought determine priorities and what needs to be developed?

In an attempt to answer, the paper proposes the following 7 point  model:

-          A new Vision Statement: 21st century design education needs to be able to apply design and develop strategies to solve actual issues and not just look at ‘good form’. Design education has already begun to strive towards becoming a more reflective ‘issue-based’ faculty. It must keep continuously striving for more socially inclusive, locally/ glocally/ globally relevant solutions. It must move from ‘human-centric design’ to ‘life-centric design’. Design should/ will and does seek to discover and assess structural, organizational, functional, expressive and economic relationships, with the task of:

•     Enhancing global sustainability and environmental protection (global ethics)

•     Giving benefits and freedom to the entire human community, individual and collective

•     Final users, producers and market protagonists (social ethics)

•     Supporting cultural diversity despite the globalization of the world (cultural ethics)

•     Giving products, services and systems, those forms that are expressive of (semiology) and coherent with (aesthetics) their proper complexity

-          Change in the definition of Design: Gone are the days when design focused on creating products. Today, design also engages itself with organizational structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. As design begins to include many aspects of behavioral sciences under its purview, design schools will have to include these complex issues, about the interlocking complexities of human and social behavior, about the behavioral sciences, technology, and business. The old skills of drawing and sketching, forming and molding must be supplemented and in some cases, replaced, by skills in programming, interaction, and human cognition. To give an example, in any standard 4 years graphic design course, there isn’t any meaningful exposure to the fine arts, literature, science, history, politics, or such other disciplines. While this dis-qualification really seems plausible while seeking a job as a beginner, because his/ her technical skills are only required by any organization. But 5- 10 years down the road (when every designer wants to set up his/ her design studio), how can s/he plan an annual report without some knowledge of each sector? Layout a book without any interest in story telling? Yes, we all learn while on our jobs, but it can be an added advantage to include social and behavioral sciences in design curricula.

-          Gap between Culture and Design: Modern design education in India, borrowing itself from Western models of design education, is essentially value-free: in today’s global scenario, every problem has a purely visual solution that exists outside any cultural context. Global brands do not change their identity for every country they venture into, but they shall change their marketing and advertising tools. As consumers, we have to learn to spell out their names, pronounce it the right way (names of every store written in Marathi in Maharashtra), learn to use them, and make our own associations with them. Sometimes, we make these products our own (smartphones), while sometimes they don’t appeal to us (tractors). The point here is that design, as it creates newer products and experiences, it still has to bridge the gap between design and culture. Today, many design institutions focus more on technology and computer literacy. But the imperative to expose their students to a meaningful range of culture is not found. It is not surprising that the graduates continue to speak in languages that only their classmates understand. And designers, more and more, will end up talking to themselves. In his essay Une pensée finie, Jean Luc Nancy states the dramatic sense of loss, loss of meaning in the world of things, proposing as a possible strategy for action, the rapprochement with stones and roads, passions and desires, with the maximum aperture, the maximum energy, setting in motion design and relational devices capable of tracing alternative ways of producing meaning[2].

-          Integrating other faculties with Design: While Service design, interaction design, and experience design require minimal skills in drawing, knowledge of materials, or manufacturing, they do require knowledge of the social sciences, of story construction, of back-stage operations, and of interaction. With our classically trained industrial designers, the search for forms and styling and intelligent use of materials will never go away. But we need a new breed of designers- who must know about science and technology, about people and society, about appropriate methods of validation of concepts and proposals. They must incorporate knowledge of political issues and business methods, operations, and marketing. Design education has to now belong to schools of science and engineering, while retaining its alliances with schools of art and architecture and move into the We need new kinds of designers, people who can work across disciplines, who understand human beings, business, and technology and the appropriate means of validating claims. We need a new form of design education; we need to establish new ones that are appropriate to the unique requirements of the applied requirements of design. This must be done, without losing the wonderful, delightful components of design. The artistic side of design is critical: to provide objects, interactions and services that delight as well as inform that are joyful. Designers do need to know more about science and engineering, but without becoming scientists or engineers[3].

-          Matching Industry and Curriculum: It is known that the government has allowed for many more NIDs (National Institute of Design) and NIFTs (National Institute  of Fashion Technology) in order to propagate design education in the country. Without going into any statistical claims and based on my pedagogical/ industry work experience, I can very comfortably claim that the gap between design education and industry demands is obviously huge. In a scenario where the textile industry has suffered a great setback in the past years, how does one justify the growth of the fashion and textile design educational institutions in the country? Where will all the graduates (or diploma holders) find employment? There is clearly a lot of discontent amongst these students who have invested several years and many lakhs of rupees only to find out afterwards that there is little chance of finding work in their chosen profession, or, if there is, they will obviously be underpaid and underutilized. The mismatch between design businesses and design educators regarding the importance of business skills and industry knowledge is another area of potential conflict. The over-supply of design students is matched by the over-supply of design-related degree programs. Whereas some designers see this as a plus, i.e. they can pick and choose the best graduates; many others see this as a waste of potential and a dilution of the designer stock, resulting in a situation of mediocrity and a ‘can’t see the wheat for the chaff’. Therefore, it is important for all parties to ‘come clean’ about the situation, admit to the problems, advise students of the likely outcome of studying subjects in these areas, and offer alternative creative career paths.

-          A Ministry for Creative and Cultural Industries: The role of design and the creative industry and cultural contribution with which it is associated, is a key economic issue. As the future growth of the Indian economy depends increasingly on our strengths in creativity, innovation and ideas, one of the most basic imperative steps is a holistic approach to culture and creativity bringing the traditional and modern, the arts, crafts and design led industries together under a single banner. Rajeev Sethi, M P Ranjan, Jatin Bhat[4] and other scholars have spent a large part of their lives asking for a single point ministry for a holistic development for the creative and cultural industries. Apart from other issues, it is important to point out here that major design institutions (NID, NIFT) fall under different ministries asserting their own agendas; or are either autonomous (Indian Institute of Crafts and design [IICD], Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, et al), thereby diluting the actual emphasis of design education. As a result, the graduates can never share a symbiotic relationship with each other; at the most, one is subservient to the other. Associated with this is the lack of well trained teachers.

-          Traditional Skills and Indigenous knowledge: Indian Crafts can’t be ignored in any discussion on design. Design curriculum includes learning with crafts and there are dedicated institutions (IICD) that combine crafts and design skills in their curriculum. They also teach kids of artisan families. In an attempt to impart design education in the western Bauhaus and Ulm tradition, the focus on transforming Indian traditional skills as a form of knowledge episteme has never been found. Thus Indian design education deals with two forms of knowledges- knowledges that fail to intersect and complement each other. As juxtapositions, they can, at best, run parallel to each other. Thus, an Indian designer, in his use of crafts, is lost between remaining faithful to the craft and catering to the market- the impact of which can be seen in the products. On another level, even though an artisan teaches his/ her child the craft and associated cultural traditions (child labor laws find themselves at odds with the traditional system of buniyadi shiksha where children in artisanal families learn their trade over years of assisting their elders.  Where does pedagogy end and child labor begin?), they remain illiterate and a statistic on the list of those who are unemployed. Such are the anomalies of our economic and educational system which has still not planned for the integration of hand skills and intellectual skills in a harmonious and mutually beneficial manner.

      In this context, we may well ask whether any meeting points can be created for both these forms of learning so that they are treated with equal respect. As Jaya Jaitly writes, “eventually, education is about providing and equalizing opportunities for the widest section of society. When the artisan is proud to remain an artisan and yet can afford to send his children for higher education, confident in the knowledge that they will return to add value to their traditional knowledge, use the computer to e-market, speak English to communicate with foreign buyers and yet add creatively everyday to the vast body of knowledge which was handed down to him by his forefathers, the craft sector will have come into its own in every sense of the word. To enable them to do so with ease is the challenge facing those of us who consider ourselves well educated.”[5]

The belief of this paper is that the future of design is all pervading, as it caters to all sectors of the economy, blurring all divisions and specializations. As in the words of A Balasubramaniam, “School and professional education has to be enriched with design thinking… Imagination will become paramount and creativity will be the key to solving world’s problems. To remain significant in the future, educational institutions will have to focus on creating this talent. Find new ways of delivery. Go online. Make students collaborate. Be geography-agnostic. Or else, be prepared to become history.”[6]

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[1] Gandhi, M. K., Basic Education (Buniyadi Shiksha). http://www.mkgandhi.org/edugandhi/basic.htm, January 1, 2015

[2] Abitare, Redazine. Cited (March 2012).  Who is (the) designer and what the designer can do. Website: http://www.abitare.it/en/design/who-is-the-designer-and-what-the-designer-can-do. January 2, 2015

[3] A more complex rendering of the design education model is given by Alain Findeli here: ‘If we further accept the fact that the canonical, linear, causal, and instrumental model is no longer adequate to describe the complexity of the design process, we are invited to adopt a new model whose theoretical framework is inspired by systems science, complexity theory, and practical philosophy. In the new model, instead of science and technology, I would prefer perception and action, the first term referring to the concept of visual intelligence, and the second indicating that a technological act always is a moral act. As for the reflective relationship between perception and action, I consider it governed not by deductive logics, but by a logic based on aesthetics.’ Findeli, Alain (February 2001). Rethinking Design Education for the 21st Century: Theoretical, Methodological, and Ethical Discussion. Website: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/07479360152103796 January 2, 2015

[4] Some links for further reading: National Design Policy (approved by Government of India) - http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=24647, February 2007
Design for India Blog (M P Ranjan)- http://design-for-india.blogspot.in/
India-OECD Collaborative Workshop on Education and Innovation, http://www.oecd.org/india/EDU-CERI-CD(2012)12.pdf. May 2012

[5] Jaitly Jaya (February 2007). Crafting an education for the educated. Website: http://www.india-seminar.com/2007/570/570_jaya_jaitly.htm January 2, 2015

[6] Balasubramaniam A (November 2014). Back to the future of Design. Website: https://designdesh.wordpress.com/tag/bala/, January 2, 2015