Why design now?
As educators and creative practitioners, we are grateful to the Teacher Plus team for inviting us to curate this issue on ‘Design and Learning’. We have tussled with this idea for a while and are always excited when we are nudged to articulate it and discuss it. Our attempt with this issue is to share learning experiences of our diverse group of contributors. Like flowers adorning a garland, our curation too needs a thread that ties it all in, gives it context and purpose. And for that, let’s take two steps back and see how we got here.
Let us start with the post enlightenment, post industrial revolution practice of coercing educational learning for industrial purposes. Since the great exhibition of 1851 when colonized Indian crafts captured the imaginations of the colonizers, the intention of the British models of art education had two main objectives. Firstly, to develop the dexterous (Owen Jones’s 1856 text, The Grammar of Ornament as part of art education in India) skill amongst local population and secondly to preserve traditional forms of art of the colonies.
‘It was inevitable that the emergence of formalized art education in India was grounded in the philosophy of South Kensington Circle with a dual purpose of preserving India’s dying crafts and improving the quality of manufactured goods for the British market through the imposition of British methods of instruction.’[1]
Language (like English) and Art (craft of making) were taught similarly by colonizers in India. It was about applying a curricular model across the board to bring a certain common level of understanding between colonies and colonizers. Did matters of administration bring forth the prioritizing of capital and consequence?Whether this systemic thinking continues to influence our way of modelling art and design education in post-colonial India is a question to ponder. Formal art education in India dates back to 1798 when a British resident, Sir Charles Malet, established the first western art school in Pune. The school allowed local painters to assist visiting British artists, thereby picking up colonial techniques, tools, and tastes. The first art school in India was opened in 1839 and was known as the Calcutta Mechanics Institution. The Calcutta Mechanics Institution was renamed as Calcutta School of Art in 1854. The Madras Art School was established in 1850. Sir Jamshedji Jijibhai School of Art and Industry (Sir J.J. School of Art) in Bombay opened in 1856. In 1875 the Mayo school in Lahore opened. The colonial model of visual arts education clearly demarcated the boundaries of art, design, craft, and manufacturing of cultural artifacts. Author Ami Kantawala talks about the Calcutta Mechanics Institution opened by Fredrick Corbyn in 1839:
The school’s aim was to develop new sources of industrial occupation for the educated classes of the native population. Further, this could provide employment & introduce the idea of taste and refinement in the arts among the upper classes, thus, offering them the opportunity to invest in the arts at affordable prices (Rules of the Society for the Promotion of Industrial Art, Calcutta, 1856)’[2].
Even after independence, and with the emergence of Shantiniketan as a global center for the arts, global influence prevailed in the way we imagined art and design as educational propositions. In the backdrop of the 1951 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, where a range of cutting-edge design artifacts were opened to a newly independent republic, there was a consciousness brewing towards nationalizing the creative education sector. The acclaimed American designers Charles and Ray Eames were invited by the Government of India to outline a vision for an institution that could contribute to the growth of a young nation. The India Report by Charles and Ray Eames led to the inception of NIID, National Institution of Industrial Design, which later became NID, a premier design institute in the country for many years to come.
In the article, Excerpts from the India Report, parts from this seminal document show how design and its value was articulated. It sets the stage for what design education must achieve in India at that time and how it should define good design. One of the more remarkable ideas in the India report is how it highlights the role of the educational institution in nation building, with design being identified as a primary vehicle for that vision. After 70 odd years of its inception, India has many public and private institutes of higher education offering Bachelor of Design in various disciplines. The time is ripe to attempt another ground up exercise like the India Report – investigating what design means today for community and country, and what the role of education in helping us achieve that is. This is not to say that the India Report is not relevant today, it perhaps needs to be updated by considering the magnitude of change the world has undergone. George’s piece gives us a glimpse of the changing landscape of design. It permeates between how design is offered as a service and how it is taught. As a recent graduate of design his questions are pertinent for all those teaching and hope to teach design in any capacity. As design gets into the limelight and enters the classroom, we are evoking a future that we are not fully sure of. How will the stakeholders define design? Will it be the lota or is it going to be a beacon of innovation like it is for Pawan or New Media design as George puts it? Or will it continue to play its role in escalating consumer cycles in a rapidly degenerating ecology, creating a world that is entranced by its own image.
As design is evolving, we as educators have agency in defining it and there are certain developments that we need to address. For example, graphic design, until recently a domain of the design software specialist, has now been made accessible to a broad public. But that hasn’t led to an evolution in the quality and philosophy of design. Similarly, just because the mobile phone has made the video camera a normal feature in our lives, it hasn’t led to better cinema. Democratization of tools and skills hasn’t necessarily led to an improvement in the quality of the media. Design needs to seek beyond tools and technical skills and as educators, designers, and artists we need to play a role in defining what good design means. The India Report through the lota hints at good design, but it needs renewal and clarity before we bring it into our classrooms. Madan Meena in his piece points out that “The mushrooming design institutions need to look inward, then westward – into the great philosophies, cultures, religions, and practices that have evolved on this land. They need to cater to both the poor and the rich, the regional and the global, for today and the future; then only true sustainability will be a relevant subject of the design practice.” As we try to keep up with the magnitude of change and make sense of the many definitions of design, he brings our focus back to where we are, who we are, and how we have the agency to create our own definitions. It is an important reminder that even though design may sound specific and foreign, it is an integrated discipline and indigenous.
We are from the Srishti Manipal Institution of Art, Design and Technology, an Institute of higher education founded by Geetha Narayanan in 1996. Srishti offers a curriculum of creative learning that integrates art, design, and technology, and offers its students a vast amount of control in charting their unique pathways of learning. We do not view our students as passive recipients of the best practices in the field of art and design, but as active practitioners and collaborators in the ongoing dialectic between artistic practice and society. This approach of a ‘living curriculum’ has allowed us to constantly de-canonise our pedagogical methodologies and strive towards reinventing the role of institutional spaces in facilitating a better future. At Srishti, the venue for learning experiences seamlessly transitions from a classroom, to a lab, to a studio, to a workshop, to an atelier, and other simulations. The role of the teacher too must similarly expand and accommodate the responsibilities of sometimes being a mentor, tutor, facilitator, project manager, guide, or curator.
When we became ‘Knowledge Partners’ for the Visual Arts stream at the Dr. B R Ambedkar Schools of Specialised Excellence (ASoSE) of the Government of Delhi, we were acutely aware of the challenges our pedagogical methodologies would pose to conventional ideas regarding the classroom and the teacher. As Parvati recounts in her reflective piece, Design in Education: How to Make it Happen, “In the two years I worked on the ASoSE project, I had multiple conversations with art teachers across the schools. Many had common reservations regarding curriculum content and teaching methods that were being introduced at the time. My own approach to visual art and design had changed as I tried to contextualize the learning objectives of the curriculum to the students.” As suggested in the account, our role was to create a curriculum for the arts, engage in its implementation with the teachers from the government school system, define the admission parameters, and administer the assessment of the curriculum. As educators from an art-oriented and design-affirmative community, we strongly felt the need to argue for the inclusion of design principles in the arts curriculum. Our understanding of learning engages with the world as a construct, unpeeling and understanding every layer of it, observing it as a throbbing mass of systems, networks, and media. This practice, when the world comes inside a classroom, is evident in Kriti Sood’s practice as LAND, when she says, “LAND was established to enable some sort of a symbiotic ecosystem, where learning with a transdisciplinary methodology can become possible; where we don’t look at an artwork only for its skill, but also the concepts, thoughts, and aesthetics, and see it as a way to evoke different languages, nuances, and dialogue within learning systems.”
In facilitating learning experiences with our students, we create this ‘symbiotic ecosystem where our practice influences our pedagogy, which in turn influences our practice. Unlike school education, which is guided by frozen knowledge forms like books and guides, Srishti doesn’t have any textbooks. In our studios, we attempt at pointing towards the future that our students will graduate into, constantly updating, questioning, and analyzing. What have we prepared them for? What’s next for them? How will they shape the world around them? How will they be shaped by it? As Manu Neelakandan says in the conclusion to his article, “Upon closer look we can see ample evidence of design, design thinking, and creative ideas positively influencing how we think, respond, behave, and perceive things, events, and people around us.” The all-pervasive nature of design and the evident role it plays in everyday life offers immense possibility in the way art and design education can become not just a specialized higher education niche, but a core foundational area of learning at the school level. Creativity is the fuel that is turning the wheel of time, and as educators who are sitting with the future inside their classrooms, we need to be agents of this change.
Dear Reader, Designer, Educator, Administrator, Artist we put this issue together as groundwork for what it would mean for design to come into the classroom. It has taken us 52 years to come up with a comprehensive New Education Policy 2020, and it will take a few years more before we can operationalize it, considering the scale of educational operations in India. To imagine change in education, to propose it, to communicate it, to implement it, becomes an exercise of scale. It makes change daunting. Can we invent ways to engage with scale that are empowering and not intimidating? Can we design systems that are culturally integrated, ground up, place based and in conversation with the orbit our world spins around in? As Sandeep Rai wonders “What if we redesigned a new wave of schools to be microcosms of the India, we all want to see – not of the one that exists today? And what if our schools acted as institutions that ushered in this new era, instead of merely playing catch up? What if our kids, in the process, showed us what that new era could be in its fullest, most unadulterated potential?”
We believe the educator leads change in education and we hope that with this issue you will know what to change, how, when, and why. We would like to leave you with the inspiring words of Kiran Bir Sethi, designer, educator, entrepreneur, and Founder Principal Riverside school, Ahmedabad, “While there is much to say about competencies and skill for the work we do, there is an equal need for stamina to continue to do our work. This is where the design process has its greatest impact – it makes you comfortable in uncertainty, tells you that you are not alone in this journey, and it not only gives you courage, but also keeps the sparks of optimism and joy alive within you.”
We would like to thank Shalini and Usha from Teacher Plus for getting us onboard to edit this issue. Our deepest gratitude to our contributors Manu Neelakandan, Parvati AS, Pawan Pagaria, Kriti Sood, Sandeep Rai, Kiran Bir Sethi, George Panicker, and Dr. Madan Meena. Thanks to Ankita Dey and Anjani Reddy, who worked with us and designed/shaped many of the articles. A special mention to Aman Gupta, Anand Vijayan, and Stuti Dalal for helping shape this note.
Siddhi Gupta
Amitabh Kumar
[1 & 2] Ami Kantawala (2012) Art Education in Colonial India: Implementation and Imposition, Studies in Art Education, 53:3, 208-222, DOI: 10.1080/00393541.2012.11518864
