• Introduction
• Overview
• Expert Speak
• Photo Gallery
  

INDIAN DESIGN EDGE: AN OVERVIEW

Change necessitates Design and Design interprets change. The 21st century has ushered in, several new dimensions and waves of change. India has come to the centre stage now waking up from its slumber, in the background of sectoral successes and emergence of youth power. The Service sector has played a key role, having become the largest contributing factor in the Indian Economy. Design and Innovation are the new enabling forces that can unleash the power and potential of a country like India which has a civilisational heritage of nearly 5000 years. In a century where ideas matter, it is necessary to realise the significance of Design and the creative industries as the new engines of growth and sustainability. This New Tome is an attempt to trace and touch upon the evolution and growth of Indian Design while unveiling the connections which make it possible for Design to add and realise value and to epitomise brands in the new age economy.

Design establishes eyeball share through emotional connections and this leads to mind space and thereafter to market share and dominance in the competitive landscape. Culture, Craft and Design thus form a great recipe for maintaining roots and values in the rapidly globalising world while Management, Science / Technology along with Design provide the Golden Triangle for wealth creation and quality of life. The initial chapters in the book examine these linkages while placing Crafts as the foundation for Design Innovation from the point of view of skills, materials, techniques and innate human creativity and people centricity.

There is a large number of people in a vast country like India with tremendous amount of creativity and some of the grassroots innovations exemplify this. The innovation and creativity of the ‘bottom of the pyramid' is an important factor in the coming years, as India is not only a huge market in the making but also a reservoir of tacit knowledge and Design power.

Today, the context defines and redefines Designs. Moreover, Designs conceptualise the products and systems and arbiters culture and emotions. The human centricity of Designs has become the central focus of new Design thinking. It is not only about marrying Technology and Design or humanising Technology but also about ensuring that Designs are in conformity with the inner-core of the customers. More than ‘Design' as noun ‘Designing' as verb focuses on the processes than just outcomes. Processes are critical in this regard as they determine the outcomes. Form, function, image are now converging with the help of technologies to offer ‘experiences' through products and services. The economies are becoming focused on creative industries as in UK , with great amount of emphasis being placed on Design-led industries and group of creative industries. “The Rise of the Creative Class” has led to new concepts like Creative Cities, Design Capital etc. and the economies are being described as ‘innovation economy', ‘creative economy' and the like by trying to capture that fleeting “zing” which provides a different texture and character to the emerging ecosystems of innovation and Design.

In a nutshell, in creative economies the ideas rule the roost, and the litmus test is to see how fast ideas are converted to products and services enabling them to reach the market place in the shortest possible time which determines the success. ‘Creative destruction' has become the norm of the day and those who Design change and interpret change with the help of new products, systems and ideas are bound to reap disproportionate benefits in this era.

India has been rather content within a protected economy to allow creativity, innovations and original Designs to go by. Even the most precious heritage of handlooms and handicrafts have languished in India . At an individual level, people have been creative but at the societal level there has been collective failure to protect Indian ideas and discoveries in the global arena. It is rather strange that India's very own ideas of yoga, herbal treatments, and hundreds of culture specific products and recipes have been taken to create wealth elsewhere while India has remained a spectator espousing ‘used apple policy' through reverse engineering and screw driver technologies.

There has been a general apathetic attitude towards spaces, environments, architecture, roads, infrastructure, gardens, museums, etc. and their likely impact on quality of life. The visual culture has deteriorated in India and cities have become concrete jungles with hardly any aesthetic appeal and ambience, with the exception of a few. Can India discover the ‘Design Edge', and become a “Creative Manufacturer”, rather than a “Factory to the World” which is China 's positioning? In garments, can India move from being a ‘Tailor to the West' to a ‘Brand Creator for the West'. How come a smaller country like Italy which had no Design schools till 1985 is able to have 27% of the world's luxury labels and several dozens of world beating brands with high aesthetics and Design. How come Korea which was known for slipshod products till mid 80's turned the table to have today world beating brands like LG and Samsung'?

How is it that small countries like Sweden have been able to realise top Designed products and brands like SAAB, Volvo, Ericsson and IKEA and Finland create great mass brands like Nokia?

Is there a way of moving forward an ‘Indian idiom in Design'? How do we decode the Design identity and enable industry to compete on ‘Design Edge'? Why did the presence of National Institute of Design since 1961 not receive the sufficient patronage of the Government and Industry to multiply and scale up Design Education in the country through IIMs and IIT, though these national institutes were all set up as post independent India 's iconic institutions, almost at the same time?

Strategy and Design have remained disconnected and Design mostly used to come in only at the end of the chain, being reduced to form and colour changes or packaging and aesthetics. Some graphics were added in good measure at best. Today, Design precedes product creation through research of complexities of consumer's softer issues, not just as Marketing Research but as ‘ethnographic' or ‘psycho-aesthetic research' etc. The culture specificity of the Korean products indicate the ability of Design to bring forth emotion, culture and values by encoding these factors in Designs. Today, the boundaries are blurring between products and services and experience. Earlier products used to be designed by a group of Designers and domain experts as they were technology enabled. Today services are Technology enabled and they need to be designed more or less like products. Spaces, products, images and services are all merging seamlessly and converging to become experiences often delivered through hand held devices on the move. Design has a major challenge, as it has been shown through the examples of Apple's, incredible holistic ‘Designing Process' which combine the product and an eco system around the products including retail systems to create a great leap forward in Designing Experiences for the users. This has been a paradigm shift and a ‘Strategic Success by Design'.

Many sectors hold keys to India 's emergence as a Design power. The skills, traditions and encoding of culture in the textiles and crafts of India cannot be overlooked to create new lifestyles and luxury goods for tomorrow. Similarly, India is exploding with ‘mobility'. Transportation, automobiles and mobility devices will call for tremendous Design interventions as the future unfolds. Design for media and entertainment along with the engines of growth of Bollywood films and animation require today, a gamut of Designers for better content, Design and delivery.

There is a talent crunch and the Indian Design scene is a speaking example, of the ‘National Design Deficit'. The number of Designers, required in tandem with the number of technologists fall far below the requirements. The Design education in India led by NID over the last 5 decades needs to now change gears and that too fast enough to create a critical mass of quality Designers with generic Design capabilities and in-depth domain expertise. NID's repositioning and transformational turnaround in the beginning of the 21st century is an inspiring case study, as the institute emerges as one of the top Design Schools in the World as reported by Businessweek USA consecutively in 2006 and 2007.

As national inspiration of Design, NID has pitched hard for the first National Design Policy of India which was announced in February 2007. The policy creates a direction and environment for accelerating growth of Design-led industries and Design practices including expansion of Design education.

The first National Design Policy is a landmark document, though still sketchy and it is purposeful as it leaves enough room for adding flesh and blood by the stakeholders. The reaction in the past few months after the policy has been announced from the countries around the world has been one of great enthusiasm. It has also galvanised India 's fragmented Design community. There is a great anticipation about unfolding strategies of branding Indian Design and promoting a Design movement. Indian Design is looking to the future and there is a greater commitment from industry to use Design strategically by setting up its own Design studios and hiring more Indian and international Designers as evident from Tata Motors, Titan Industries, Mahindra and Mahindra and other handful of companies who are rapidly realising the value of Design and Innovation.

The Indian Design practice is changing rapidly. Many small Design Studios are growing at a hectic pace to achieve critical mass and size. Some of them are in the mode of mergers and acquisitions. Some have become 200 Designers strong Design factories. A vision for Design leadership is being now envisaged by the Design community through many local initiatives in Pune, Goa , Mumbai, Bangalore etc.

From the days of iconic Designers and elitism, Design is entering a period of democracy, which I have termed as “Design Democracy”. The best exemplar of Democratic Design is Service Design and there are numerous examples for empowerment of consumers, by Service Design. The digital devices and mobiles in India have ushered in a period of greater interactivity and empowerment of choice. This is a time for making Indian Design stand up and count.

Dr Darlie Koshy's career has followed India 's tryst with destiny in more ways than one. Going for MBA in the mid 70's was probably ahead of its time. Joining in the traditional sector of handlooms and then broadening the scope through yarn, textiles and garments over the next 2 decades, apart from reflecting the importance of such sectors in those days but also unfold a creative journey from ‘tradition to modernity' for Dr. Koshy. Making a detour from that journey to join the early stirrings on the horizons of India's fashion industry by going to FIT, New York in 1987 then being a part of founding faculty of NIFT was probably a very “differentiating” step in his career driven by the innate creative urge.

Taking the leadership role as Director of NID since 2000 brought many new dimensions to his own personality and career. Moving away from his earlier two books on Textiles and Fashion industry to this new book with a Strategic Design slant is a reflection of the times. The time is for defining new contexts and opportunities and seizing them.

India has always been caught between the positions to take, “whether to be a leader or a follower” and the Design Industry is no different. Earlier the compulsions of protected market and the absence of the “1980s and 1990s new value generations” made it impossible to take the leadership Charter forward. Today, Indian youth is confident and are willing to take bold strides. India 's huge population has become more of an asset than a liability. The success in IT and Services Sector has spawned a new found confidence in the new genre of entrepreneurs. Through this path-breaking book exciting visions for Design Leadership to make “Designed in India , Made for the World” are unveiled.

Dr. Koshy is hopeful that the efforts through this book in demystifying Design to make it understood by larger cross sections of people in India and across the world will be rewarded through your valuable feedback and suggestions.