What is Design?
In 1958 the Eames’s spent five months traveling in India, funded by the Ford Foundation, in order to produce a commissioned report on the future of Indian design. They visited factories and villages and met with artists, craftsmen, intellectuals, and government officials to familiarize themselves with Indian design traditions, especially those related to everyday objects. The Eames Report or The India Report (1958), which began with a passage from the Sanskrit philosophical text, the Bhagavad Gita, recommended “a sober investigation into those values and those qualities that Indians hold important to a good life.” says Ashoke Chatterjee, a leading figure in Indian design.
With this piece, we hope to take the readers back in time where design in education took shape and form for the first time. April 7, 1958, the Eames’s presented the India Report to the Government of India. The Eames Report defined the underlying spirit that would lead to the founding of NID and beginning of design education in India. The Report recommended a problem-solving design consciousness that linked learning with actual experience and suggested that the designer could be a bridge between tradition and modernity. The Report called upon future designers to re-examine the alternatives of growth available to the country at that time.
Excerpts from The India Report
We have been asked by the Government of India to recommend a program of training in the area of design which would serve as an aid to the small industries. We have been asked to state what India can do to resist the rapid deterioration of consumer goods within the country today.
In the light of the dramatic acceleration with which change is taking place in India and the seriousness of the basic problems involved, we recommend that without delay there be a sober investigation into those values and those qualities that Indians hold important to a good life, that there be a close scrutiny of those elements that go to make up a “Standard of Living”. We recommend that those who make this investigation be prepared to follow it with a restudy of the problems of environment and shelter, to look upon the detailed problems of services and objects as though they were being attacked for the first time; to restate solutions to these problems in theory and in actual prototype; to explore the evolving symbols of India.
One suspects that much benefit would be gained from starting this search at the small village level.
In order to insure the validity of such investigation and such restatement, it will be necessary to bring together and bring to bear on the question – all the disciplines that have developed in our time – sociology, engineering, philosophy, architecture, economics, communications, physics, psychology, history, painting, anthropology… anything to restate the questions of familiar problems in a fresh clear way. The task of translating the values inherent in these disciplines to appropriate concrete details will be difficult, painful and pricelessly rewarding. It cannot start too soon. The growing speed of production and training cries out for some sober unit of informed concern sufficiently insulated to act as a steering device in terms of direction, quality and ultimate values.
We recommend an institute of design, research and service which would also be an advanced training medium. It would be connected with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry but it should retain enough autonomy to protect its prime objective from bureaucratic disintegration.
We recommend a Board of Governors drawn from the broad field of disciplines mentioned above – these must be receptive, involvable people concerned with the future of India and the image she presents to herself and to the world.
We will describe in some detail the functions and organisation of this proposed institute – the faculty, the trainees, the proposed projects, service aspects and the physical plant. First we will give a general background of this concept – some form of which must be developed – as an immediate & practical necessity.
The reason for this urgency is quite apparent. The change India is undergoing is a change in kind not a change of degree. The medium that is producing this change is communication; not some influence of the West on the East. The phenomenon of communication is something that affects a world not a country.
The advanced complexities of communication were perhaps felt first in Europe, then West to America which was a fertile traditionless field. They then moved East and West gathering momentum and striking India with terrific impact – an impact that was made more violent because of India’s own complex of isolation, barriers of language, deep-rooted tradition.
The decisions that are made in a tradition-oriented society are apt to be unconscious decisions – in that each situation or action automatically calls for a specified reaction. Behaviour patterns are pre-programmed, pre-set.
It is in this climate that handicrafts flourish – changes take place by degrees – there are moments of violence but the security is in the status quo. The nature of a communication-oriented society is different by kind – not by degree. All decisions must be conscious decisions evaluating changing factors. In order to even approach the quality and values of a traditional society, a conscious effort must be made to relate every factor that might possibly have an effect. Security here lies in change and conscious selection and correction in relation to evolving needs. India stands to face the change with three great advantages :
First: She has a tradition and a philosophy familiar with the meaning of creative destruction.
Second: She need not make all the mistakes others have made in the transition.
Third: Her immediate problems are well defined : FOOD, SHELTER, DISTRIBUTION, POPULATION.
This last stated advantage is a great one. Such ever-present statements of need should block or counteract any self-conscious urge to be original. They should put consciousness of quality – selection of first things first – (investigation into what are the first things) on the basis of survival not caprice. Of all the objects we have seen and admired during our visit to India, the Lota, that simple vessel of everyday use, stands out as perhaps the greatest, the most beautiful. The village women have a process which, with the use of tamarind and ash, each day turns this brass into gold.
But how would one go about designing a Lota? First one would have to shut out all preconceived ideas on the subject and then begin to consider factor after factor:
Of course, no one man could have possibly designed the Lota. The number of combinations of factors to be considered gets to be astronomical – no one man designed the Lota but many men over many generations. Many individuals represented in their own way through something they may have added or may have removed or through some quality of which they were particularly aware.
The hope for and the reason for such an institute as we describe is that it will hasten the production of the “Lotas” of our time. By this we mean a hope that an attitude be generated that will appraise and solve the problems of our coming times with the same tremendous service, dignity and love that the Lota served its time.
The simplest problem of environment has a list of aspects that makes the list we have given for the Lota small by comparison. The roster of disciplines we have suggested can bring about measurable answers to some measurable aspects of the problem, but in addition they must provide the trainee with a questioning approach and a smell for appropriateness; a concern for quality which will help him through the immeasurable relationships.
In the face of the inevitable destruction of many cultural values – in the face of the immediate need for the nation to feed and shelter itself – a drive for quality takes on a real meaning. It is not a self- conscious effort to develop an aesthetic – it is a relentless search for quality that must be maintained if this new Republic is to survive.
- Mathur, S. (2011, May 29). Charles and Ray Eames in India. artjournal.collegeart.org. Retrieved December 2, 2024, from https://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=1735
- History of NID. (n.d.). https://www.nid.edu/about/history-of-nid
- Winton, A. G. (2007, August). Charles Eames (1907-1978) and Ray Eames (1913-1988). www.metmuseum.org. Retrieved December 2, 2024, from https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/eame/hd_eame.htm
Charles and Ray Eames were influential American designers who shaped mid-20th-century life through their architecture, furniture, textiles, photography, and corporate design.
