What do you think when you think of the word “designer”? Uber-luxury brands, expensive couture, fancy watches, sunglasses and other accessories and recently, Armani-designed homes in posh south Mumbai?
Well, scratch that thought. Because the concept of design in India is changing, as it descends into the public sphere, becoming less abstract, more inclusive and thus much more meaningful in an everyday context.
Good design always did navigate the delicate balance of form and function with a certain ingenuity and flair. But design innovators in India today have lost their earlier diffidence and are combining aesthetics and utility with an even greater conviction and confidence — and gaining acceptance from the unlikeliest of quarters, even as design itself becomes more accessible to the “other” 99 per cent.
It will still take time for the word “designer” to shrug off its elite tag, but in the last three months, I’ve attended at least five independent events that have approached design innovation with the seriousness it deserves.
Beginning with the tentative, experimental approach of the UnBox Festival in February at the British Council, Max Mueller Bhavan and other cultural spaces in New Delhi, to the definitive two-day India Design Forum in March which concluded an ongoing Design Week, to the most recent — and most innovative and practical — Design! Public conclave. Design innovation seems to have become the hottest buzzword. And its about time.
Design is embedded in our genetic code. Europe and America recognise designers as innovators to the nth degree, less so India. But if we’re able to foster what design evangelist Aditya Dev Sood calls an “innovation-enabling culture,” design innovation is all set to become the next gamechanger. With the conversations around design growing and becoming more nuanced, it’s easy to believe Sood when he says societies can be seeded with a culture of creativity and innovation through the establishment of consortiums, partnerships and alliances.
However, these must go beyond the Indian concept of jugaad, a term that broadly suggests expedient, ingenious solutions in a resource-constrained setting, but lacking clear-cut,enduring processes. The best example of how design thinking and innovation can transform a country’s socio-economic fabric is demonstrated by Kabir and Preeti Vajpeyi’s non-profit, Vinyas, in the depths of rural India. Vinyas’ extraordinary design practice uses a collaborative philosophy to redesign government schools in a playful, child-friendly and cost-effective manner, using buildings as learning aids.
In a context where learning aids are in short supply, Vinyas uses colourful stairs that count (they’re numbered), doors that measure angles (they swing open to reveal angular degrees at their base, thus teaching geometry), windows that act as copiers (you can trace maps through them) and classroom furniture that teach weights and measures through intuitive estimation (2 kg chairs, 5kg tables).
Schools have mystery walls, tangram tiles, puzzles and games inbuilt into the floor, mud maps, sundials and planetary poles which act as semiotic devices where information is embedded and revealed through a two-way communication rather than the the drone of the teacher's lecture or text books.
Walls, floors and desks are made of writable surfaces for children to express themselves, playgrounds are made of recycled tyres and even nature gets to play teacher through riotous planting of native plants around treehouses. Rain-water harvested water flows through cleverly designed gutters and is used to float paper boats.
Vinyas' Building as a Learning Aid (BaLA) keeps a child's curiosity and spirit of inquiry alive by embedding learning within its buildings, blurring boundaries between formal and informal learning. It has 150 such open-source design ideas that can be easily implemented.
With the help of engineers, educators, designers, local and central authorities and the local community— an example of crowdsourcing at its most basic level — Vinyas transformed how government schools are designed, reshaped and enhanced. And by involving the architecture of the building itself as a resource in the teaching and learning process Vinyas transformed the educational experience of children and their wider community. The best part is the outcome of such an innovative approach: enrollment and more importantly, retention of children at government-run BaLA schools has gone up sharply, with some parents even moving their children in from private schools.
Louder conversations on design innovation are great. What will be even better is when ideation converts to implementation and is amplified by policy, catapulting India into the category of truly innovative societies where "designer" becomes an inclusive word.
Jyoti Pande Lavakare is a Delhi-based writer
