Design writings from India

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Creating ChangeDesign writings from India

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

13 Writer’s Block Shreyas R Krishnan

21 The Little Things Anya Rangaswami

27 Design for India, Design for it’s Villages Mira Malhotra

35 Planning for Paradise Siddharth Nair

43 Striking a Chord with Design Ritesh Rathi & Mira Malhotra

51 When Shakti Met Cyborg, 2192 Benita Fernando

59 The Delhi BRT Ayesha Vemuri

69 Design in Indian Startups Gurpreet Bedi

75 What We Talk About When We Talk About Design Ruchita Madhok

83 The India Story Anubha Kakroo

91 Design is an Expensive Word Swati Janu

97 Innovation in Education Shreeya Kurien

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Foreword

Design is always an agent of change. And therein lies the beauty of design – it is as valid and potent when it changes housing for a underserved community as much as when it supports young startups to flourish. In this publication a dozen designers and writers have come together to share their view of design and its potency of creating change in India. Whether via the heroes of handcrafted textile revival or through music labels, India’s present and past is unravelled in these pages through its objects, motifs and designs. The Indian design story presented as a look at design through the lens of change. It is an absorbing read and illustrates worthily what Kyoorius and British Council set out to do last year – bring alive the stories of design. A big thank you to all the writers and their persistence and for bearing my nagging deadlines well. To William for his patience and energy (especially as he did three all day workshops in three cities in three days and was back in the UK on the fourth). To Shumi Bose from Blueprint, Patrick Burgoyne from Creative Review and Robert Wilson from Uncube for their enthusiasm in sharing their expertise through masterclasses. To Satya of Indian Type Foundry for sharing Pilcrow and Foro. To Kyoorius for partnering with us on this wonderful project. Here’s to many more.

Aanchal Sodhani British Council, India

To grow appreciation of design, British Council India has started multiple

initiatives in the area including design writing, curating and design festivals

in India to build a culture of capturing design stories–with a focus on socially

relevant design.

To know more visit britishcouncil.in/design

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Introduction

You know designers. When they get something new they like to turn it over in their hands, feel its weight, take it apart and see how it works. Design writing is just the same. It’s about finding something, taking it apart and looking at it from fresh angles. Some designers use writing to think through a process their working. Other people write design criticism, using writing as a way to evaluate what designers have achieved. But design writing is also a way to establish what design is. What it is right now in India in 2013 and what it can be in the future. This collection of articles came out of three amazing workshops I was lucky enough to take part in in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi in May this year run by The British Council with support from Kyoorius. The sixty plus people who came were from all sorts of disciplines; some were experienced journalists, others academics who were passionate about the subject. There were people from all the disciplines – graphic, textile, fashion, product, information, advertising – but despite their diversity, at each workshop the same message came through: We need to find a way tell the story of Indian design. This is the result. They are twelve remarkable stories about design Creating Change locally, nationally and in the world beyond. As you’d expect, they come at it from many angles. Some are about social change makers using design in conservation and education right now in India. Others are about how design is transforming India’s competitive landscape, whether from small business startups to the national airline IndiGo. A couple of stories look at the crucial opportunities – where design is really needed in urban planning and transport. Some shine a light on India’s rich but under-discussed design history. Others focus on how design is taking a dynamic role in India’s modern culture, from comics to music and even to design writing itself. But they all show design in a fresh and exciting light. Huge thanks to all the writers who took part in the workshops and in putting together this remarkable collection. It was a real eye-opener for me. There are, of course, still millions more design stories that deserve to be told. What’s yours?

William ShawFacilitator, Design Writing Workshops

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Writer’s BlockThe curious case of the Indian designer-writer

Writing about design may pose many challenges, but it most certainly has a greater part to play in the larger scheme of things.

Shreyas R Krishnan

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Original typewritten piece from The Other Side, a wall magazine at NID from the 80’s source: Sundar S

“Design writing” may seem to be new and sudden arrival in India, but it has always been around, albeit sporadically. Consider the many one-off efforts over the years by design students to bring out magazines. Most of them focused on writing about design, but they were all spaces for students to express themselves and share their interests and ideas.

The National Institute of Design, in particular, has seen generations of student-driven design magazines. SNID was the first in 1969, covering interviews, critiques and reviews. Subsequent magazines appeared with intervals of nearly a decade between each. SNID was followed by Bananas and The Other Side (a wall magazine) in the early 80’s, Studio in the 90’s, and Cut Here (a magazine on film by film & video students) and Voicebox in the early 2000s. The students of Srishti school of Art Design & Technology, Bangalore have bought out Cutlet –a mazagine/poster-zine. Chisel is an annual student print initiative from the Indian Institute of Crafts and Design, Jaipur.

With the exceptions of Cut Here (5 issues), The Other Side (few months) and Chisel (ongoing), none of these student magazines lasted for longer than two issues. Each were the efforts of one batch or group of people in schools at certain points in time. Once these people moved on, it was difficult for others to continue a vision that was not their own.

“We are not meaningful if we don’t question ourselves strongly”Rashmi Korjan, Designer And Educator

Open letter from editors to students, SNID Issue 2 Source: NID Archives, MP Ranjan

The discourse on design is of course larger than the scope of student magazines. But when it is common sense that a profession like design requires constant reflection, documentation and communication, why have there been only so many design students trying to write in all these decades?

Older curricula at design schools provided limited outlets for writing through colloquiums, self studies and the documentation of crafts and projects. Despite these, writing and design were treated as separate activities. At some point, designers and design educators began placing greater value on creating and doing as compared to writing, articulating and documenting. The final product was more

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Design Thoughts are both journals of critical writing on design, with contributions from faculty and students alike. While the IDC website has a readily available archive of all its publications and journals, NID has been making its publications available at book fairs and at the institute itself, and is aiming at online purchasing options as well.

Modes of discourse are traditionally of four types–narration, description, argument and exposition. The current body of Indian design writing is skewed more towards narration or reportage than the other three, and this is also why there is a void in the body of writing on design as of now.

Early this year, Gurgaon based design studio Codesign brought out Dekho, a collection of conversation with designers. “It was born out of the lack of an Indian voice in design dialogues; the need for talking about those things that weren’t being talked about. Students and young designers in India are more clued in about designers abroad and their work. Indian design may be nascent, but we have iconic people and work being produced here now that weren’t being discussed at all”, says Mohor Ray Dahiya, co-founder of Codesign and editor of Dekho. The book is targeted at designers primarily, but would be an enlightening read for people from outside the field of design as well.

It is not just important for designers to write for each other, but there is also a great need to talk and write about design to non-designers and make them aware of the possibilities for design. While talking of design to a non-design audience, it is essential to neither talk down to them with excessive jargon, nor dumb down the content which often results in some amount of over-simplification of the concept of design, not distinguishing between design as a general activity and design as a learned skill and thought. The significant conversations we are having with this larger audience are also few and far between. The Economic Times, in the 90’s, featured the thrice-a-week ‘Artscape’, a national arts page where art critic Sadanand Menon wrote about and interviewed designers and artists. In 2000, The Hindu ran a series of

The vision for design itself has grown from an industry based activity to something much larger.Dinesh Korjan, Designer And Educator

Pages from The Hindu’s supplement detailing elements of its redesignsource: Hindu Archives

important than the process. Writing and conversations on design, by teachers and professionals, were limited and scarce and contained within the design community itself. Design thinker and educator MP Ranjan had been part of many attempts at publishing writings from NID, especially during his stint as chairman of NID’s publications department in the early 90’s. “When we did manage to bring out curated writings and produce them with very cost effective means, the form of the publication was questioned. There was more emphasis on the presentation of this body of work than in recognising the value of the work itself”.

Ironically, modern Indian design education’s journey began with Ray and Charles Eames’s India Report in 1958, possibly the first literature on design and its scope in India.

However, it is not that designers did not write or do not write at all. When there have been instances of valuable works of writing, even designers were in the dark at times. “Long before the India Design Council, Kumar Vyas had made documents detailing a National Design Council but there was no awareness about these early writings”, says S Sundar, furniture designer and president of the Association of Designers of India. In a classic case of ‘ask and it shall be given unto you’, research for this article yielded many such gems Gautam Sarabai’s 1972 ‘Internal Organisation, Structure & Culture’, also known as the Structure-Culture document where he lays out guidelines for NID’s education system; a documentation of NID’s curriculum and pedagogy between 1964 and 1969; ‘40 years of NID’ a brief unpublished documentation of NID’s history by Ashok Chatterjee and RK Bannerjee; and more recently the AIDI report which responds to the National Design Policy. All of these already existed as digitized copies online or with the people interviewed, which begs the question, why aren’t these accessible to more people?

One answer is the lack of adequate platforms for critical and thoughtful writing on design. Most designers and design practices now employ social media to share thoughts and work. DesignIndia, a forum started by Sudhir Sharma of Indi Design for Indian designers to connect online, has 2753 members and is constantly buzzing with thoughts, ideas, requirements and responses. The publishing industry here does not seem too keen on bringing out works written on designers, or by designers, unless it takes the form of a coffee table book. It is a constant loop, there isn’t enough existing writing on design to convince publishers of the need for publishing, and people aren’t writing because there are no platforms for it.

The publications departments of design schools, namely NID and the Industrial Design Centre at IIT-Bombay, have been consistent in bringing out many books on design. NID’s Research and Publication department is currently engaged in a book on the history of NID; possibly the first that will be published to take stock of events, people, design work, thoughts, ideologies in such detail. NID’s Trellis and IDC’s

“The effectiveness of the program will depend on the communication links established... through these devices the Institute will communicate to itself and to the nation.”India Report, Part 2 Section 2, ‘The Staff Or Faculty’

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articles on design, written by designers. The Hindu’s first 2005 redesigned edition came with a supplement which detailed and explained elements of the design, in a language simple enough for anyone to understand and still appreciate it. Local newspapers in Ahmedabad now routinely cover student and industry projects produced at NID. Mint regularly runs articles on design. The first few generations of designers in India were faced with the dreaded task of having to constantly having to explain themselves and their work and offer much justification for the need for ‘design’. Today, educational institutions across the country are looking at ways to introduce design and design thinking in to their curriculum. There is a greater awareness about design in the public mind, which demands a greater level of intelligent conversation and engagement.

What is needed today is a constant culture of writing for and about design. Unlike architecture, cinema and art, there is no body of writing that tells a greater story, nor is there a thoroughly documented and archived history. It has to start with the design education system, which ideally creates an environment that encourages and fosters the idea that designers both students and teachers can and should write. NID’s curriculum review has now brought back the writing of colloquiums by students. As a step towards creating a system that supports writing, a new course in research methodology has also been introduced.

History cannot exist in the absence of a documented past and present. Design writing not only plays a crucial role in documenting and archiving the work that we do, but also needs to go above and beyond that and document design thinking and critical thoughts on design. Designers need to write for themselves, for other designers and for people at large. Avinash Rajagopal, a graduate of NID, Ahmedabad, is one of the few designers who now writes full time, as an editor at Metropolis magazine. “A culture of writing gives us a sense of history, helping us understand our own work and locating it in the larger context. It allows us to be critical of our own work, builds professional worth and most definitely helps in educating ourselves and society at large”, he says.

The pen is mighty, and it’s time we put it to better use.

Source: Covers of NID documents courtesy NID Research and Publications and MP Ranjan, Chisel cover courtesy Sangitha Shroff, Cutlet cover courtesy Divya Gaitonde

Shreyas R KrishnanShreyas is an illustrator and graphic designer from Bangalore, India. She is a print junkie and loves mythology, multiple narratives and recording life around her in her many visual journals. She believes in the sharing and exchanging of knowledge and is passionate about women’s studies and issues, the stories that people tell, culture and the idea of nationality.

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What happens when designers try to put a smile on your face? Designing for happiness can transform not only the products themselves, but your whole experience of them.

The Little Things Creating happiness with Design

Anya Rangaswami

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My cab pulled up at the airport and I hurriedly paid the fare while a bunch of cars honked behind me. I looked at the snaking line moving slowly towards the entrance gates. I was late and I was stressed. As I impatiently made my way into the airport, a row of bright blue signs guided me to the IndiGo check in counter. As I stood in line tapping my foot in frustration at the passengers in front of me, hoping desperately that I’d make it in time, a strategically positioned board promised me it would take 6 minutes to check in from that point. Ok, not so bad. The tapping stopped as the queue inched forward. It took a little over five minutes and I was done. I smiled to myself.

This was just a tiny part of the IndiGo experience. One small sign with cleverly worded copy, but essentially, a insightful design intervention. Which is what IndiGo seems to be all about. Clever, friendly tongue in cheek and incredibly reliable. When, in 2006, IndiGo entered the market, low cost travel was all about getting from point A to point B as cheaply as possible, but IndiGo turned that around. It promised that low cost did not mean a low quality experience.

Travel, although enjoyable, is often stressful. A new breed of Indians has taken to flying, something a large majority of us are under confident about. A lot of airlines seem to pay little attention to anything except on board travel, but with IndiGo, every brand touchpoint seems to put a smile on your face. You alight the aircraft walking up stairs that read ‘Here Comes the Hot Stepper.’ On board, the inflight magazine reads, “Hello 6E”, the airsickness bag, in bold white type on blue tells you to ‘Get Well Soon.’ It’s my guess that a lot of these little things are overlooked by many travellers. But as Don Norman, in his TED talk on Design and Happiness put it, sometimes, design is full of nuances that are “really simple and subtle but a lot of you haven’t noticed. But your subconscious kind of notices it and it’s pleasant”– which made me think, do pleasant things work better? In the chaos of airports, amidst the sea of frenzied travellers, do these little things help to calm passengers down? With their intelligent use of design and a clever play on language, are people who fly IndiGo less stressed and perhaps even happier than other travellers?

It’s screamingly obvious that Wieden+ Kennedy, the agency responsible for creating the IndiGo brand put a great deal of thought into every brand touchpoint. Not afraid to do what no one else had done, they defined the modern Indian brand-fresh, smart and simple. Targeting the Great Indian Middle Class, a demographic so varied and so complicated isn’t easy and a lot of brands seem to be afraid to take a chance with design for fear of excluding some people. IndiGo didn’t seem to worry about that. When asked about the thinking behind the IndiGo brand strategy, Sarah Jane Fotheringham of Wieden + Kennedy said, “ (The IndiGo brand) broadly targets the Indian middle class. We don’t dumb down and presume the audience is stupid. Sometimes messaging targets certain people and not everyone will get

“In stressful situations, can design that makes people smile calm them down,causing them to deal with situations better?”

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the references, and that’s ok. But those that do get it, talk about it, and appreciate that the messages tap into a deeper cultural understanding.”

This strategy and the insight into the minds of the Indian middle class consumer seems to play out through every brand touchpoint supported by intelligent, well crafted design. Most of the food on sale onboard the aircraft is sold in packaging that is both beautifully designed as well as reusable. Bright coloured rectangular tins of cashew nuts (Nut Cases) round cookie tins as well as oversized boxes with matchbox graphics make for wonderful collectables. Great attention to detail on elements that are usually overlooked, like the sandwiches that come in boxes with different little stories printed on each face of the box show a great deal of thought. As Sarah put it, “There’s a lot of time on board the flight where people are looking for something to do. If we can make passengers smile or help them pass time, then why not?”

With design growing in India, with more designers daring to do things differently, off late, a charming aspect of design seems to have emerged in India, one that IndiGo airlines seems to epitomise–the power of design to put a smile on your face. And there are other brands that seem to be doing this too! The online book retailer, Flipkart, sends along a lovely bookmark with every purchase, with clever, funny ‘Reasons to Use This Bookmark’ in a drive to keep the printed book alive and popular, while at the same time, charming every book lover into loyalty towards their brand. The online clothing store Bhane, ships their products out in cylindrical boxes made of recycled material, with the garment wrapped in tissue, tied together with a beautifully designed tape measure.

Using design to make people happy seems to be a fairly substantial brand strategy. Delighting a customer is not only a good brand differentiator, it is a clever way to increase brand loyalty, something that today, with the increasing number of choices people have is harder to come by.

But that’s about brands. What about people? In stressful situations, can design that makes people smile calm them down, causing them to deal with situations better? IndiGo has proven that the strategy works at airports. What about other places where people are often stressed? Hospitals, banks… could these sectors benefit from thoughtful, human-centric design? The question for designers should be, can their work transform not only brands and products, but the wider experience of them?

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Anya RangaswamiAnya Rangaswami is a graphic designer who after spending four years in Ahmedabad, Melbourne, Delhi and then two wonderful, peaceful years working in Bangalore, chose to move to the not-so-peaceful city of Bombay where she currently freelances out of. When not holed up in front of her computer, she can usually be found wandering around on city streets or browsing though bookstore or grocery store aisles. She’s the person you see sitting by herself in a coffee shop with books, notepads, pens and earphones arranged at right angles to one another on her table. You can interrupt her though, if you want to talk about design, brands, Indian aesthetic and identity, books, sexuality or art. But be prepared for a long conversation.

Design for India Design for its Villages

Defining what Indian Design is, may well mean tackling the most worthwhile yet most challenging problem we face: communicating to rural audiences.

Mira Malhotra

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To be literal or spell things out to anyone, must mean they aren’t that bright, correct? But it’s the same as taking a trip to a foreign land, you just have to acquaint yourself with their language. Says Aarthi Parthasarathy, film maker, who works with The Kabir Project, which brings folk music to urban and rural audiences: “The villagers we have encountered are smart and understand complex philosophy and poetry or The Kabir Project would not have been successful so far.”

Krupa Kongera, Srishti alumnus and former senior project manager of ‘IT for Change’ speaks of the roadblocks she faced when developing communication for villagers. One is the fluctuating literacy rate, and one can see a good bit of disparity between the sexes here. Probably cause more for the campaign for women empowerment she participated in, bringing information technology tools to women in the Mahiti Manthana (Knowledge Churning) scheme. Besides, she says they can be shifting communities. Residents of villages can change and move because of in-fighting and brawls, a common occurrence, and we already know many rural migrants move to cities in search of work and a better life. Partly because of exposure to cellphones and urban culture, some liberties can be taken when designing communication, however, it is only through repeated testing that we can understand how much liberty we have. Krupa advocates repeated testing first and foremost, only because she claims you can never assume you know anything for sure about the audience.

The Design Process

In these cases, the medium influences the final content so much that excluding the designer from the get-go is reprehensible. Instead, content development, research and user testing stages merge with the design development. It becomes the highest imperative to know your community, but it takes months sometimes to get that level of comfort or ease. NGOs can provide gender and caste ‘sensitisation’ training to shorten the gap, even to designers, if they’re open-minded. In short, the communication is unlikely to succeed with the typical client-designer roles in action.

Smriti Chanchani gives us insightful advice after working for several months developing material for Going to School in New Delhi, an organization that inspires slumkids to stay in school. “It helps if you can knock out a few drawings really fast and get your initial mistakes and misconceptions out of the way at the very beginning.”

So are there any basic rules to make functional images that this audience understands? There are definitely no set of hard and fast rules, but we do know we need to have a thorough knowledge of their costumes and posturing. Most of these communities identify with the costume of their people exclusively and assign great meaning to gestures. If the costume isn’t accurate, they’ll assume the message is not for them. At the National Institute of Design, Graphic Design Faculty, Professor Tarun Deep Girdher knows this from experience, starting

Smriti uses a photographic approach combined with illustration in this spread from the Bijali book for GTS.

“What is Indian design?” is a question we have all been asking, in conferences, workshops, design schools, everywhere there is a discussion on design. Indians and non-Indians alike have been seeking out an answer, to identify it and put it in a box for quick reference. “Kitsch?” someone says. Few want to be defined by our faux pas. “Hand painted type?” Awkward silences.

The Indian design dilemma is far too complicated for an easy answer. We’re a smattering of different geographies, topographies, climes, cultures, languages, religions and costumes. We’re wedged between the modern and the traditional, with an additional weight of being a post-colonial society, heavily influenced by the West. All our government textbooks ever really taught about India as a whole was the oft heard ‘Unity in Diversity’. Perhaps the argument for Indian design can resolve much the same way, by adopting a design sensibility to make peace with that diversity, addressing it, rather than easily packaging it.

The urban community in major metropolitan cities, though made up of people from several states is still homogenous. They’re in touch with what’s happening globally and in developed countries. And so, they’re easy to communicate to. It’s usually worth the time and effort for most, because it’s commercially viable. On the other end, are rural communities and slum-dwellers, having been for the most part of their life, isolated from urban India, and from fellow rural communities. They are least encountered by us designers, who most likely come from cities and towns. When we aim at developmental communication, vital to the ignorant masses when it comes to issues of health, safety and finances, for them it can even become a matter of life and death. Designing for these communities then becomes designing for the greater good of India, and that’s a great definition for Indian design. But it’s not without its challenges.

For example, take visual literacy. Given that many associations between visual symbols and their meanings are totally arbitrary (arrows, tick marks, word balloons) and built through repeated exposure, can we really communicate in the very same way to a rural audience unawares? Still further, comes the challenge of India’s illiterate population, the largest in the world, mainly residents of villages, where facilities for basic education are inconsistent. To speak to them we’d have to speak solely through carefully crafted images. With an urban audience’s accustomisation to the written word, designers having to speak solely through images is another issue. What should have been our primary mode of communication, in reality was somewhat ignored in design school. Images were talked of as being purely aesthetic, too subjective, too artistic even, and functional, precise typography was favoured instead.

Despite our own lack of visual literacy in this regard, misconceptions that rural people, or even just illiterate people are not smart because they may be uneducated is a dangerous assumption.

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Lakshmi, who accidentally fell into this line of work, claims that most communication is top down, designer to audience, and is a one way flow of information, that gives way to a one-size-fits-all solution, a sure method for failure with this audience. Instead, she advocates feeding the content to groups within the community, who in turn give their own interpretations and drawings in the visual language they understand. She later uses the same images to communicate back to the community at large, often using field testing to get the desired outcome. Single artists can be employed from rural areas to help clarify the images with the designer as well, and this serves to be a more hassle-free method.

Use of Facilitators and TeachersAs mentioned before, a way to make up for the lack of the written word is with pre-recorded audio but can also be done with the use of a facilitator. This is great when the community wants to ask questions or seek clarifications. Media is often used, with the facilitator alongside, and this can also influence how the material is received by the user. Here other tricks of the trade can be developed. Lakshmi includes hidden pockets or flaps within her print matter, when discussing a topic like safe sex. Content under the flap is revealed briefly by the facilitator, and at the appropriate juncture, hidden again before it can become inflammatory or rejected by the audience.

Use of Folk ArtA method to use the communities’ own visual language that can prove very effective is to take inspiration from their own folk arts and crafts. Drawings and even crafts can be used as devices–for example kaavads can help narrate stories. The story-telling kaavad, a cupboard that has several doors, which on opening describes a single scene from a narrative is effective to make the story entertaining and involving and also focus attention. “Look at the visual styles of the various artifacts produced by local rural communities–whether it’s Madhubani or Pattachitra–they are all rendered in flat colours and with a lack of perspective, giving greater emphasis to the gesture/ action/ narrative within the frame. For example a jeep shown with two wheels in the foreground view (correct as per the western school of one-point perspective) is perceived as a faulty jeep, as there are only two wheels shown. So, one draws all the four wheels under the chassis. Similarly an outline of a bucket indicates an empty bucket. However one shown with water (making the bucket look like ‘transparent’) is perceived as one with water inside it.” says Tarun Deep, faculty of NID, whose work exemplifies ‘draw what you know’ rather than ‘draw what you see’ approach. He goes on to describe from experience how working with villagers can be quite devastating to a designer who is taught form, perspective, shading and colour as per the western modality, and having prior knowledge of eastern folk art forms is a great advantage in this regard.

with his diploma project on teaching self-governance in villages: “Details in the visuals are ‘read’ and ‘decoded’ – for example the kind of roof (thatched / tin / cemented) shown can reveal a lot about the financial status.“ He uses other devices, such as showing hand gestures with fingers held up, to replace typographic numerals, as seen in his work for a project on health.

An option to bypass the difficult subjective realm of image-making with independence from typography, a route most of us designers like to escape, is to go the information technology route, combining these images, perhaps moving, with audio to make up for the verbal clarification as advocated by IT for Change. This can be pre-recorded and goes well with India’s unique oral tradition. Krupa says that by providing this kind of media the literacy issue may even cease to be a problem in the first place, provided the equipment can be sourced and supplied to these areas.

Participatory DesignTo truly build successful communication materials, the design process must be participatory both for the designer and audience. Several designers who work with this audience follow a democratic process, though their techniques vary. The most basic of these is repeated user-testing with visits to the field. This way one’s own freedom of creative expression can meet with the functional aspect of communicating, and further, it’s easier on one’s schedule. Although, this is not without the requisite sensitization training first. Lakshmi Murthy, originally a ceramics designer, founded the landmark Vikalp Design in Udaipur. A unique communication design studio, it is dedicated to this kind of design, evident from her statement on it’s website: “Communication is serious business”. Since 1988 she has developed appropriate visuals in material for non-literate communities in Rajasthan. Her own way to meet this functional aspect is her trademark ‘visual dictionary’ method.

Tarun Deep Girdher’s carefully crafted illustrations show how a rural audience’s perception is vastly different from our own

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something about this gap. Landor India, the Indian counterpart of the large global branding design firm, recently launched a kit called Masti Clean, as a solution to train slumkids on hygiene.

A creative director from Landor Associates, Mumbai, Ektaa Aggarwal was already on the board of directors of an NGO Aashansh, that provides education to street children. The firm created the kit by working with these children, but didn’t stop there, making sure they reinforced the message by building it into their curriculum, with sustained engagement on the topic of hygiene practices. This project was not initiated by a client and was an independent initiative, and that generates an altogether different experience as Ektaa says “When

you don’t have a client in the middle, it takes longer to collect sources but at the same time we’ve been on the ground and we’ve had complete creative control, to figure out what the problem areas are, and in terms of priortieis, there are multiple problems, what are the things you want to tackle first?” The low budget kit includes characters like Sabun Safai and [nail] Cutter Pari (fairy), along with the actual tools: a toothbrush, toothpaste tube, nail-cutter, soap and anti-lice kit all housed within a tough cardboard box which, emptied, can be used as a desk. They raised money for the kit on Indie Gogo and are now looking to raise awareness of their ‘one dollar kit’ amongst corporates and advocating that they use it in their CSR programmes. This process, independent of a client brief is a beautiful way that we designers can pick up on a need, design for it with minimum resources and then find the requisite funding and backing for it. In this case, addressing the abnormally high statistic (2 million Indian children die of diarrhoeal disease every year, according to WHO.) was worthy enough a cause, and the sustained engagement backed with the communication material makes sure the street children have better hygienic practices for life. If implemented well, this can reduce diarrhoeal morbidity by 40% with an immeasurable snowball effect on generations to come.

Some other designers in this domain have had their reservations with sharing this information with corporates. What if they use the techniques to sell aerated drinks, junk and fast food in villages? After all, isn’t that going against our original intentions? The truth is, while this risk does exist, the awareness about these kind of design practices

Masti Clean Hygiene Kit by Landor, India

Design to Enable Expression and Preserve Folk TraditionsNot all communication with this audience needs to deal with issues of health, sanitation and self-governance though. Some are about keeping a folk tradition alive. Others concern themselves with giving a voice and mode of expression to these audiences to really understand

issues. The Kabir project aims to preserve folk music and India’s oral tradition. Started in 2003, they explore how 15th century poet Kabir’s work intersects with ideas of cultural identity, secularism, nationalism, religion, death, impermanence, folk and oral knowledge systems. Aarthi Parthasarathy who works on their films, says they package their music for both rural and urban audiences with Compact Discs (used surprisingly quite regularly because of the popularity of Bollywood pirated VCDs), and a booklet containing the poetry. Not unlike a music CD with a lyric booklet, the illiterate audiences can rely on the audio, while literate audiences can also read the poetry. Their festivals too, called Kabir Yatras, have been received well, sometimes attracting 10,000 people or more at a time.

A very powerful project called World Comics India, now having counterparts in several countries, brings what they call comics journalism and grassroot comics campaigns to the fore. Founder Sharad Sharma runs a one man organization employing volunteers to teach comic making workshops in remote and disturbed areas. Using basic materials like pens, pencils, paper and cheap methods of reproduction like photocopying, their reach is wide. Having conducted over 1000 workshops, they claim to have trained over 30000 people in the art of simple comics making. From voting rights, to failing sex ratios, children and adults have used their newly acquired comic-making skills to fight injustices and make demands, many times even independently from NGOs.

A Role for CorporatesSo far we have worked out stuff that mostly NGOs or cultural bodies choose to disseminate. What about the major Corporates, with their Corporate Social Responsibility programmes that they spend billions on every year? They may rarely consider designers in their endeavour for change. However large design firms are sitting up and doing

The lyrics booklet spreads for ‘Pakistan mein Kabir’, along with audio CD. Design by Smriti Chanchani.

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Mira MalhotraMira Malhotra is a graphic designer, visual artist and design writer graduated from the National Institute of Design. Based out of Mumbai, her work explores issues at the intersection of design and culture.

inside the design fraternity itself is already quite low. Pragya Mishra worked with Doosra Dashak under the guidance of Tarun Deep Girdher to develop educational booklets for her diploma project and was surprised to see, as she says ”...the noticeable disconnect between the need of the audience and visual communicators in the development sector.” Even to those of us aware of it, it can be daunting, because we probably got into design in the first place as an opportunity to be creative, to express, to make objects of beauty. It can be difficult to drop the idea of our own aesthetic sensibility and judgment to dedicate ourselves solely to the cause of communication design. Plus, the hours of research and testing could definitely put some people off.

But could this be what Indian design needs to prove itself? Or rather, grow up to? At the turn of the 20th century, Gandhi said “The soul of India lives in its villages” and according to the 2011 census of India, 68.84% of Indians (around 833.1 million people) still live in villages, making his words just as relevant today. India faces one of the biggest challenges to becoming a developed nation because of the issues felt in her rural spaces. Solving the problems in our villages could well mean solving the problems in our urban spaces, the overcrowding, the slums. Despite sounding selfish, it has benefits for both parties. It is after all the problems in the villages that make migrants out of villagers in hope of a better life, only, unfortunately, to find none. With the amount of awareness being generated about design less as an aesthetic device but as a tool for social change, we could blame the TED Talks for this, design could have a massive part to play here. And if it solves the problem even partially, we could be the most successful story, not to mention, most successful design story in the world. What greater definition for Indian design could there be?

Planning for Paradise

The National Conservation Foundation works with the local tribesmen of Seijosa, Arunachal Pradesh to help prevent the habitat loss and hunting of several species of endangered hornbills. Their methods are surprisingly similar to the ideals of human-centered design, Siddharth Nair sets out to learn more.

Siddharth Nair

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As my bus pulls into the final stop, (my destination is a further 6 kilometres from here, down roads accessible only by foot or motor-bike) I am stunned by the beauty of the surrounding countryside. On our way here, the forest had been growing thicker and the air more dense with every mile-marker on the road. Now, the forest has turned into a splash of lush green, it’s many trees and plants blending into each other in a riot of different hues as I gaze into the distance. The air is cloying and thick, the humidity lending it volume and the cacophony of insect, bird and animal calls giving it weight.

The primary reason that this project has been so successful, and the reason that it has so completely captured my imagination, is that it has been a joint initiative from the very beginning between the Nyishi people of the region, the Arunachal Pradesh Forest Department and the NCF.

While here, I will be meeting with Amruta Rane, project co-ordinator for the program and NCF biologist, as well as members of the Ghora Aabhe, the council of village elders formed as a governing body for the area and as a means to enable better communicationwith the local government and assist the Forest Department in wildlife protection efforts. A project like this is almost certain to fail if it doesn’t have the co-operation of the locals, especially in Pakke, where the locals are tribesmen who have depended on and subsisted directly on the rainforest for centuries. Designing for behaviour change is one of the most challenging aspects of the user-centred design process, and it is particularly hard when the behaviour you are addressing is the cornerstone of a people’s history and tradition. What is unique about Pakke and the work being done here is that, not only are the Nyishi cooperating with the NCF’s efforts, they have become active participants in the process, throwing themselves headlong into the ideals of conservation.

A House of CardsHornbills play a vital role in the forest eco-system. While they are omnivores, eating anything from lizards and small snakes to insects, fruit is the chief ingredient in their diet. They consume the pulp or flesh of the fruit and regurgitate the seeds, in the process spreading them far and wide over the forest. Without this vital seed dispersal, many plants would become endangered themselves, their seeds confined to a narrow area and competing for the same resources.

In the wild, hornbills have few natural predators. Aside from the odd marten that breaks into the nest to eat eggs and young, or monitor lizards that compete with the birds for nest sites, man is the only real threat to these birds. This threat manifests in two ways: deforestation, leading to reduced nesting sites for the birds, who are notoriously picky breeders and hunting, the birds’ beaks are the centrepiece of traditional Nyishi headdress. This headdress, with great ceremonial significance, has equally great commercial value, leading to over-hunting of the birds at a scale beyond what the current population can sustain.

I’m sitting on top of an Arunachal State Transport bus, being tossed this way and that as it crashes, creaking like a door hinge from an 80’s Bollywood movie, through gaping pot-holes and thorny bushes planted squarely in the middle of a ‘road’. Imagine clinging on to an enraged rodeo bull, one that apart from being able to stomp, gore or kick you to death, could also toss you into coils of high-voltage power lines strung callously along and across the road and it might give you a sense of what the experience is like.

But why would anyone that considers themselves mostly sane, risk it all in this foolish fashion? Well, it all starts with a bird.

Seijosa is a small cluster of villages in the East Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh, in the Eastern Himalaya. Stretching beside the Pakke River, the area is home to twelve small villages, peopled mostly by members of the region’s Nyishi tribe. The Pakke Tiger Reserve, one of the last strongholds for some of India’s most endangered species of plants, birds and wildlife, lies to the East of the river. The region is densely forested, receiving over 2500 millimetres of rainfall annually. The region is also important as being one of the last bastions for four endangered species of hornbills.

I first heard about Pakke in a magazine article about Aparajita Datta, a biologist working with the Nature Conservation Foundation. The NCF, a non-profit based in Mysore, works in several regions and habitats including Himachal Pradesh, the Andaman Islands and Arunachal Pradesh, where Aparajita was an early pioneer of their work. The Whitley Fund for Nature had recognized Aparajita Datta and the NCF with the Whitley Award, both, a recognition of their work so far and a grant enabling further objectives in the region.

Though the magazine article was short and didn’t go into too much detail, a few lines caught my eye. They described how the NCF were working hand-in-hand with local people to build a strategy that would be sustainable in the long term, an exemplar of the user-centred design approach.

I have spent the last two years working at one of India’s leading design consultancies–our work primarily involves conducting user-studies and research ‘in the field’ to provide insights and workable strategies that improve the end-user’s experience of the product or service that will be the end deliverable of the project, a practice known as ‘User-Centred Design’. As such, I am struck by how the description of the methods and strategies being used by the NCF in Seijosa resonate in principle and in execution with the ideals of user-centred design. Even more so because the project is being run entirely by people with no professional training in design or exposure to the increasing rhetoric surrounding design-thinking and user-centred methodologies that are fast becoming major buzz-words in the design world. Armed with a few hours worth of research trawled from papers and articles published online, I set off for Arunachal Pradesh to meet the team of people who have been working on the project.

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the Wildlife Trust of India providing substitute fiberglass beaks as a way to curb hunting proved fairly effective. The mindset of the local people had undergone a slow change. This was strengthened through the concerted actions of the Forest Department and the Ghora Aabhe society, a council of village leaders, formed in 2006 as an authority to represent the people of Seijosa in dealings with the Government, as well as more recently, that of the NCF. People had been convinced to stop hunting these birds (and several other animals that play vital roles in the delicate ecosystem).

Since one of the primary motives for hunting is financial, the NCF’s first step was to provide an alternate source of income for those who were still hunting or cutting down trees in the area, reducing the number of viable nest sites. The hunters, already used to finding the birds and tracking them, were given a monetary incentive to become protectors of the hornbills and their nest trees. This simple move rapidly established two main objectives, it enforced a connect in the minds of the tribesmen that the birds could continue to provide revenue without the need for hunting them. A dead bird is worth at most 5000 to 6,000 rupees. However, the NCF would pay a sum of 3,500 rupees for help locating new nest sites, monitoring the birds’ habits and to incentivize the hunters to prevent and report logging or other human activity that might harm the birds.

The second value that this move brought to the table was to establish the legitimacy of both the NCF and the Ghora Aabhe in the minds of the villagers. Executing a program that showed the locals a viable commercial alternative to hunting and logging activities gave them confidence that the two bodies could be relied upon to look out for the best of the people.

For and Of the PeopleIt is worth digressing here for a moment to mention the tremendous value that a representative body like the Ghora Aabhe brings to a project of this nature. Once a rule is agreed upon between the NCF, Forest Department and the Ghora Aabhe Society, the GAS takes upon itself the responsibility to ensure that the information about the new rule is disseminated efficiently throughout the area. Members of the Ghora Aabhe are also valuable as enforcers of the law. As respected members within the Nyishi society, they are quick to hear about any infractions and resolve conflicts and enforce compliance as needed, something the police or forestry department, with limited resources was struggling to accomplish.

Protecting with PeopleSo far, 12 Nyishi hunters from the 9 villages in Seijosa, have joined the NCF as nest protectors and observers monitoring the various hornbill species in the jungle. And the program continues to grow. Here’s how it works:

Tajek, a new initiate to the Hornbill protection program trains his binoculars on a Great Hornbill nest

The Nyishi have always depended on the forest directly for much of their sustenance, traditions that, in themselves, are not at odds with a sustainable balance between people and the forest. Unfortunately, when those traditions become commercialised, they can dramatically impact the stability of the system as a whole. Killing a single hornbill to make a piece of ceremonial headgear that will be used for the lifetime of its wearer (and, indeed can often go on to become a family heirloom) can hardly impact the ecosystem. However, when birds are killed by the dozens or even the hundreds, using modern, increasingly accurate rifles, the results can be catastrophic.

The NCF ApproachI meet Amruta at her house in Darlong, one of the larger villages in the area with about twenty households. Her eyes twinkle with pride as she tells me about the various methods and systems the NCF has been using to help address the challenges faced by the hornbills.

The NCF’s involvement in the Seijosa region began in late 2003. Aparajita, having completed her thesis on three of the ‘sympatric’ (species co-existing in a common geographic region) hornbills in the year 2000, returned to continue her nest monitoring efforts. Aparajita began informally working with the local tribesmen to help her gather data and monitor hornbill nests and roost sites.

Until recently, conservation programs world-over have rarely taken the route of including the local population into the strategy of their programs or of customizing conservation programs and strategies to work inclusively with the locals. “There is a failure to acknowledge that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is flawed and unrealistic” Aparajita writes in her 2007 paper Protecting with People in Namdapha: threatened forests, forgotten people, referring to her experience with previous projects in the region.

Seijosa’s small population, with strong existing familial and dynastic bonds is an ideal place to test this new approach to conservation. The strong relationships between the community members mean that once the elders and heads of the villages were convinced, the rest of the populace would follow.

“ Humans are part of the ecosystem too” says Amruta, “any long term plan that does not involve them or take their needs into account cannot be sustainable”.

When the project began, the most pressing need was to halt the degradation of the forest habitat of the birds and ensure the protection of their nest trees in the Reserved Forest areas outside the Pakke Tiger Reserve. The earlier threat of hunting of the birds for their beaks and feathers had reduced in the area since 2003 due to the efforts of the Forest Department. Bans prohibiting the hunting of the birds were strictly enforced and a program by the Forest Department and

Pahi Tachang, Hornbill hunter turned protector with mushrooms harvested from the Jungle. While all plants and animals in the reserve are protected, the Nyishi still look to the forests around the reserve for some of their sustenance

A Nyishi tribesman wears the traditional headdress, made from the beak and feathers of a Great Hornbill.

Jaya Rane

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Looking AheadThe NCF, along with the Ghora Aabhe and Arunachal Pradesh Forest Department are in the process of developing a Hornbill Celebration Day, a festival to celebrate the birds and their habitat. This festival will further develop the possibilities of eco-tourism as a sustainable, forest-friendly revenue stream for the locals.

A tree-nursery program is also being planned that will, by replenishing the trees that are cut for local use, aim to halt the encroachment of humans into the forest and also add to the number of trees that can serve as viable nest sites for the hornbills.

Hornbill Protectors mark a Bhelo tree where a Great Hornbill breeding pair is currently nesting.

Design as a Process, not a Deliverable I remember being in my final year of design school when I read Bruce Nussbaum’s influential 2009 essay “Is Design too important to be Left only to Designers”. In it, he makes a case for the immense potential of design as a process that can be applied in myriad contexts and scenarios to create products and services that meet the real needs of the user.

This notion of designing with the user’s unstated needs in mind and designing with the users themselves being an integral part of the process, is an approach that has gained rapid ground in the last decade, and like most brilliant ideas, seems almost childishly simple and obvious once stated.

User-Centred Design focuses on the usability of the final product or service that is its outcome. As such, it requires a detailed analysis and deep understanding of the user’s contexts, so that the final outcomes are future proof and take into account not just the needs of the user today, but is capable of scaling up or down to address the future needs of the user as well.

The NCF pays a fixed sum (INR 3,500 per month) to a ‘protector’ whose job it is to find birds, monitor nests and ensure that the nesting pairs and their nest trees are not disturbed, during the breeding season. This nest adoption program is financed almost entirely through donations from private individuals, evidence that the program and it’s messaging have struck a chord with an audience outside the program and the region.

Nest protectors were selected by the NCF in concert with the Ghora Aabhe and the villagers, one protector from each village. Most nest protectors are ex-hunters with experience in tracking the birds through the forest. Each nest protector begins by identifying a nest or breeding pair. They are also given training that lasts about 2 months and includes note taking and methods to record their field observations of the birds and their activity at the nest sites.

Considering the success that the Arunachal Forest Department and Tana Tapi, the Nyishi Forest officer in charge of the Pakke Tiger Reserve have had in reducing hunting amongst the Nyishi in Seijosa, the next step was to begin to get the community involved in conservation at multiple levels, so that the entire societal structure is understood and respected with the value in a conservation-oriented understanding of their natural resources.

I met with Suresh Pait, who is leading an eco-tourism initiative at Pakke. Eco-Tourism is a rapidly growing niche in India and Pakke, with its vast forests teeming with wildlife is an ideal place for it. With advice and organizational assistance from the NCF and the cooperation of the Ghora Aabhe and Arunachal Pradesh Forest Department, Pakke Tours and Travels was set up as a body to enable and strengthen eco-tourism opportunities in Pakke. One of the first initiatives of this new entity has been to set up an eco-tourism lodge, ‘Pakke Jungle Camp’ in partnership with Help Tourism, a West Bengal based eco-tourism concern, that will give visitors the opportunity to experience the grandeur of the forest and it’s animals first hand, through guided hikes and tours around the various parts of the Reserve and well as the surrounding forests.

Suresh is also part of the teaching and awareness initiatives that the NCF and Ghora Aabhe conduct as part of the goal of increased respect and awareness for the rainforest ecosystem. A teacher at the local secondary school, he has included talks about conservation awareness, information about the natural balance of the forest ecosystem and the vital role played by the hornbills into his teaching curriculum.

For younger children, activities like drawing and colouring the animals they regularly see around them and simple games are tools that he uses to help the children build positive associations and a nurturing mentality towards the forest and it’s denizens at an early age.

The typical kit given to a new initiate of the hornbill protection program. A backpack, raincoat, binoculars, cap, shoes, leech-guards, and ID and Insurance cards.

A drawing by Suhas, 10, part of the awareness and education activities conducted by the NCF.

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That is just what the NCF’s work in Seijosa is attempting to do. By involving the Nyishi locals so closely in the program, they ensure that the eventual end users’ needs are met and that systems are put in place so that the program can efficiently adapt to meet those needs, while still addressing the primary goal of improving the conservation of the hornbills of the region, as well as the many other plant and animal species vital to that effort.

As I stand in the middle of the rainforest, soaking in (quite literally, I might add) the many sights, sounds and smells this magical paradise has to offer, I can’t help but marvel at the power of an idea that can unite people from different worlds, cultures and with seemingly utterly disparate interests. The NCF working with the Nyishi people, have put in place a program that in many ways echoes the notions of user-centred design, showing that the ideals of the process are not only universally applicable, but universally accessible as well. Design Thinking as a process is a powerful tool, applicable in many different contexts and as we have seen in Pakke, one that can have a dramatic impact.

Siddharth NairSiddharth Nair is a writer and designer working with Codesign in New Delhi.

Striking a chord with Design

How the Indian music Industry sees the role of design and why you need to pay attention!

Ritesh Rathi & Mira Malhotra

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they created with beautifully designed stages and record covers that promoted the ethereal experience of their music. You could say that Pink Floyd used design to succeed. The time seems ripe for the Indian music industry to apply the same virtues of design as their western predecessors. Fortunately, the ball is already rolling. In fact Jolene Fernandes, Manager at Stiff Kittens, an event and artist management firm has to say, “…good design shows self-awareness and a seriousness of the musicians and management towards the band/project, and will invariably make the band stand out from the rest.”

Speaking to some of the leaders (and pioneers) in the Indian music and design industry revealed that there seems to be a trend emerging. Creating an experience for the listener that encompasses the intangible aspects of enjoying music as well as the sounds that you hear has become paramount. Music still is at the core of it all. Rishu Singh, label head and founder of punk label Ennui. Bomb makes a strong point “If the music sucks, great artwork cannot save you.” What’s worth mentioning is that these experiences are yielding financial compensations for the designers as well.

The people behind the scenes of music, that include band managers and music festival organizers have expressed their need to differentiate musicians and events, and it is heartening to see that designers have answered their call. This call is answered because the message ‘there is money to be made’ is also coming in loud and clear. The industry that earlier comprised of fan boys and musicians themselves now sees professional designers dedicating much of their time and efforts into creating artwork for the music industry as they now see it as a viable career path. The money has allowed designers to think deeply about their work and have understood that there needs to be a “…synesthetic correlation between sound and image”as Nikunj Patel, designer at Krunk puts it. They both need to synchronise and the gig poster has to become an extension to the sounds. A note that exists, but is never played.

Indian bands have thus found new ways to be heard. As Deepti Unni, an ex-writer from Rolling Stone magazine explains, “Design has worked for some bands as a promotion tool, social media for some, and a certain “cool factor” for others”. Such is the case with T-Shirt brand Nameless Merch (aptly described as Indian Indie Clothing), whose sole focus is on making band tees. In fact the cool factor in design matters so much, that for some bands sales of merchandise actually outsells album copies, with bands earning more from tees than compact discs. Design thus allows for the creation of an identity. For instance, a CD cover could be used to tell listeners that a band is Indian through iconic retro Indian imagery. This was evidently the case for the band Peter Cat Recording Co. for the cover of their album Sinema and video Love Demon. What design can also do for bands, is create a link between their stage selves and their digital selves. Bands like Swarathma, don ghodis (horses) on stage and then use this visual icon on their website and other promotional material.

When you hear the words Indian music, there are two images that might pop up in your head. One of an aging man playing an ethnically Indian instrument like the tabla, alongside a posse of other musicians dressed in linen kurtas. The other image, vastly different, might be of a hero, lip syncing and dancing synchronously with a group of young ethnically Russian women behind him. For years, these two images captured the Indian music scene. And then, ever so quickly, it changed. Definitely for the better.

Over the last few years, India has seen a boom of independent musicians almost out of nowhere in genres she hadn’t ever even heard of before. Technology, ubiquitous as it is now, has allowed for one, a great amount of access. People are listening to and discovering music faster and with fewer clicks. It certainly beats finding that album in a music store subject to domineering labels who can limit choice. Bands who are ultimately exposed to these genres create music that’s richer and more diverse, and they have access to sites like Soundcloud, Myspace and Youtube. All for free. The learning and production curve is shorter too. Online courses, instructional videos, DSLRs, recording software with synthetic sounds all get thrown into the mix. Which means you’ve got yourself better musicians who need much less backing. As a result, globally even, independent or ‘indie’ is the new cool. The DIY aesthetic has never been more prevalent and all the tools are placed in the hands of, you guessed it–You.

The early 90’s in India, with its low budget music videos and limited points for sale is a chapter in history. Today small town bands and big city bands alike, aspire to play in front of thousands of disheveled sets of hairdos at the many alcohol-sponsored music festivals. Band managers and music festivals armed with MBAs from around the world now see India and its potential as a hub for music. Celebrity as a word has been redefined as well and being famous on the internet is just as important as it is in the physical world. But there is a downside. With all this music being made, there’s a lot of noise. And to be heard, literally, you’ve got to be loud. Musicians, band managers and festival organizers have the arduous task of promoting themselves as being unique yet inclusive. In this India of choice, people in the music industry are trying to create brands and experiences rather than just music, for the purpose of keeping themselves relevant as well as bringing in new listeners. One of the ways this is occurring is through design and using design materials to create and support the brand, a musician or a festival wants to create. The design of gig posters, EPKs (Electronic Press kits) CD Covers (yes, people still have CD’s), images to update as their cover photos on facebook, t-shirts and other merchandise, and everything in between are now being ‘designed’.

This is by no means a novel idea and design has often supported a musician’s image, but what is of interest is how musicians are applying this practice in the Indian context. It is undeniable that bands such as Pink Floyd owe at least some of their success to the experience

Namaah Kumar, gig posterfor Bomb Thursdays for Ennui. Bomb, 2013

Agnello Dias and Santhosh Padhi, Taproot India, magazine cover for Rolling Stone – Cover as Art Project, March Issue, 2013

Swarathma performs on stage with Vasu Dixit on Ghodi. The same Ghodi is featured on the poster

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The most inspiring outcome of this is what the music industry has already achieved through designers, in such a short span of time. OML or Only Much Louder, since its inception in 2002 works on a range of activities in the music space. With a video division, artist management and a strong presence in the music festival department they have their finger firmly on the pulse for music. The very inclusive and comprehensively branded NH7 Weekender (that springs forth from their popular website NH7.in) will be in its fourth year in 2013 and was attended by 50,000 people across 3 cities in 2012. Sameer Kulavoor, founder of Bombay Duck Designs, was responsible for its creative direction. A pioneer in design for music, he started fresh in college by animating a video for Pentagram for his student project. He has 2 weekenders to his credit plus a Jack Daniels rock award winning video “Lovedrug Climbdown” for Pentagram, his second for the band. When

Ragasthan, a music festival set in the Thar Desert, chose a design centric approach to their marketing with a logo, website, digital posters, stage and set design, maps, videos and other marketing and branding material. The theme of an Indian Rajasthani village was maintained throughout the exercise and it began with the promotion of the event on social media and continued all the way to the event itself. As this was a new event in only its second year, they illustrated a complete desert setting displaying the various activities an attendee can enjoy on the dunes, helping city dwellers who were the core of their attendee list to get a glimpse of what to expect.

asked about design for music, he notes the difference in approach “I think there are certain similarities in the way an artist/designer & a musician / music-related-entity functions. Both are driven by ‘intuition’ or a ‘feeling’ to some extent”. Apart from NH7, OML’s video division, Babble Fish also created The Dewarists series, part music documentary and part travelogue with a very Indian flavour. Musicians travel to exotic locales to collaborate on a track which unfolds at the end of each episode. It was enough to earn them a Cannes Bronze in Branded Content and Entertainment (2012). Besides the larger projects, NH7 also runs The Scene, a free monthly gig at Blue Frog that features fresher bands. They encourage young designers to send in gig poster entries (the winner gets a goody bag from Blue Frog) and the initiative has seen some wonderful artwork.

So what’s working in music like for a designer? Firstly it’s important you’re aware of music in general–the contemporary variety. Knowing the influences and genres matter. Besides a high level of skills, managers are looking for designers who can appreciate the music as well as be left to their own devices to research and understand what the band stands for. Working with musicians might be even harder, as the designer has to interpret what they perceive themselves as, and then design artifacts based on that interpretation, which leaves room for misrepresentation. Sahil Makhija, lead for Reptilian Death and Demonic Resurrection, mentioned he is looking for designers who can understand the need for gory and horrific visual cues, which is definitely not every designers cup of blood…erm…tea. Musician and designer for his own band R. Venkatraman, who created the logo for Bhayanak Maut and cover art for Goddess Gagged (loosely translated as scary death) exemplifies how important it is to understand what the band stands for and have an affinity with all things blood. For designers like Nikunj Patel, Krunk, the process of getting to know the band was easy, as he considers many of the bands he creates artwork for as his idols. Like him, many designers have a close affinity to the music already. Knowing this would serve young designers well. Secondly it takes a while to break in. Despite the fact that the music industry is flourishing, the community is somewhat closed and they don’t necessarily have a ‘career’ section, though that’s changing. Most designers work as freelancers or part-time, and after hours, with contacts or friends who play in bands. Timelines are tight and requests come in usually, at the eleventh hour. Harikrishnan Panicker, who

Bombay Duck Designs, festival branding for NH7 Weekender (2012)

Bombay Duck Designs, music video for Lovedrug Climbdown by Pentagram (2011)

Ishan Rathod, gig poster for NH7 The Scene vol. 3 (2013)

Nikunj Patel, key art, Flutter by Bay Beat Collective, represented by Krunk (2013)

R. Venkatraman, album artfor ‘Resurfaces’ by Goddess Gagged (2011)

Keith Menon and Harun Robert, logo for Ragasthan Festival (2010)

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designed the Doppelganger album artwork for Dualist Inquiry had to make Sahej (of Dualist) wait almost a month as he was busy with other work. “I nearly did not take up the Doppelganger gig since I had a big show in Denver that month and it was a crazy time for me.” Sahej however insisted on working with the artist and waited before reconnecting. The results speak for themselves. On the other hand, full time positions have opened up for people, such as working on creatives in a music magazine, though these are few and far between. Aaquib Wani has the luxury of working as Creative Head for RSJ (Rock Street Journal) one of India’s own legendary rock magazines, even though he freelances after hours for bands. Being a musician himself (he plays guitar for Heavy Metal band Phobia) it was much easier and more natural to fit in and grow fast.

A good starting point for designers looking to break into the music space seems to be gig flyers. They are easy to translate from print to digital, need to have all the fundamental features of an events identity, help listeners learn about a band and have a call to action. A successful gig poster goes a long way as it’s also the most common artwork that is produced. Rishu Singh goes further by saying , “what’s important is that the gig flyers be awesome.” However there are different approaches to gig posters, drastically affecting the quality of work. Kunal Anand also known as Cabein worked in the UK music scene before migrating to India, and prefers not to work on promos saying “I rarely do flyers and posters as there are usually many edits, oversized sponsor logos, and extremely short deadlines.” His truly bespoke service is evident in his extremely detailed and rigorous process which can’t and shouldn’t

Aaquib Wani, magazine cover for Rock Street Journal, March-April (2013)

Harikrishnan Panickeralbum art for Dualist Inquiry (2013)

align itself to the quick turnarounds gigposters are expected to go through. On the other hand Ennui.Bomb head and Stupiditties creator Rishu Singh chooses an artist and then also chooses not to censor him/ her, a rare freedom. He shares his unique viewpoint “We are providing an opportunity to connect with a wider (newer?) audience and some (potentially better paying) clients who might check out an artist’s work and commission them for something. If an artist wants to put a shit job out there, that’s their call. “

Older designers who have reconciled their love for music with a lack of opportunity in this space might have to rethink their positions and try to get in now, when design for music in India is still in its nascent stages. And judging from all the stuff that’s going on out there, it’s only going to grow rapidly. The real question you need to ask yourself is: Are you listening?

Kunal Anand aka Cabein, album art for STD (Self-Titled Debut) by Sridhar/Thayil (2012

Shweta Malhotra, gig poster for Soma Project (2013)

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Ritesh RathiRitesh Rathi, principal at designaren is a product development specialist with an emphasis in technology and design. He has experience in a plethora of industries ranging from robotics, video games, furniture and house wares.His work has been featured in the Museum of Design Atlanta and is an award recipient from the Product Developers and Management Association (PDMA-USA). After schooling at the United World College in Hong Kong, Ritesh went on to complete his MID from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. Ritesh has previously worked at Robotics at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Playmotion, Inc., Atlanta, Hampton Forge, New Jersey and Gototest, an online testing and evaluation platform, where he was a founder employee, in Mumbai.

Mira MalhotraMira Malhotra is a graphic designer, visual artist and design writer graduated from the National Institute of Design. Based out of Mumbai, her work explores issues at the intersection of design and culture.

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ACK made mortal a whole range of mythological characters and made accessible the stories of yore. ACK was a rigorous storyteller–it sourced ancient lives such as Kannagi, Sadhu Vaswani and Joymati from non-mainstream cultures and made itself a pan-Indian caterer to the public consciousness. Furthermore, in reverse fashion, it raised the heroes of the independence struggle such as Bhagat Singh and Veer Savarkar to the status of demi-gods in an independent nation. If we needed heroes, ACK gave them to us.

However some of the most memorable superheroes were created by Raj Comics. Established in 1986, Raj Comics has till date published more than 5000 titles and is dedicated to creating original superhero comics. Remember Nagraj, Super Commando Dhruv and Shakti? These charming superheroes were inspired by facets of Indian mythology. Nagraj, as the name implies, was based on the popular myth of snake-men and Dhruv, who was more of a detective in the earlier issues, became a supernatural-forces-fighting hero with enemies such as Mahamanav and Bauna Waman. There was something readily intimate and familiar with these characters that saved the world alongside their DC and Marvel counterparts. ACK and Raj Comics were responsible for distinguishing an Indian identity for comics from the rest of the world.

Abhishek Singh, an artist whose graphic novel Krishna: A Journey Within was published by Image Comics in 2012, says, “Myths are projections we collect through our conflicts, dilemmas, realizations and raptures. One is for sure constantly and unknowingly stitching them together into a fabric much larger than ourselves. Be it mythology, science fiction or a slice of life story, all of them eventually are statements about our curiosities of life beyond, around and within ourselves.” For a nation so given to the escapist tendencies of cinema, mythology and fantasy are hardly inseparable. Whether it is world creation, spells, cool gadgets or the eternal war between good and evil–it is all there in mythology, tailor-made for ready consumption. This is a vast galaxy enough to sustain our notions of the supernatural, the unexplainable and the magical.

The Fantasy of Exotic IndiaIt wasn’t readers here alone that were addicted to the spells cast by mythology based comics. Virgin Comics, established in 2006 by names such as Sir Richard Branson (obviously), Shekhar Kapur and author Deepak Chopra, began showcasing aspects of Indian mythology to audiences abroad as well. In the first issue of The Sadhu, a newly recruited English soldier named James Jensen enters a temple hidden from time in colonial India. As he encounters a statue of Kali, a strange man in the premises introduces the goddess thus, “Kali is the destroyer of all things, the bearer of death and with it new life.” Jensen’s reply–“Sounds like a pretty unfriendly gal.” While the mighty goddess has probably put up with worse, there was a problem with the Virgin approach.

Devi, published by Virgin Comics, put an avatar of the powerful Hindu goddess into modern settings. From issue #5, Tara Mehta, the Devi incarnate, carries out a wounded police officer in a manner of role-reversals.

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A planet populated by comic characters. Its terrain lights up with a war raging between two forces–both equally vibrant and fascinating. From the battle ground rise a pantheon of heroes rooted in Indian mythology and classics. From the skies descend a hardy league of characters alien to these native legends. An ancient astra plunges into a metallic heart. A seductive nagin hisses at a wererat. Flying chariots powered by nuclear energy soar above. Who will win this war? We wait with bated breath.

Indian fantasy comics and graphic novels belong to a smallville of few publishers and artists. The industry is seeing early days with independent publishers competing with the giants of the game. Morale and conviction are high on either side. There is no doubt that these are the times of intense daredevilry with characters, themes, visuals and even publishing standards. Fantasists are growing weary of the age old attraction to Indian mythology and they are asking: What’s new?

Indian Mythology, Indian FantasyThe emergence of Indian comics happened not so long ago and was part of the larger fantasy of nation building. While Indrajal Comics (by publisher Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.) began its import of superheroes from the West in the 1960s, Raj Comics and Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) began to give the Phantom and Mandrake some serious competition. From 1969, as ACK commenced its homage to the plethora of Indian mythological and legendary figures, it fed the public imagination an almost Jungian fashion.

Reena Puri, Editor, ACK, says, “Unlike other ancient mythologies of the world, Indian mythology is a living one. Our gods and goddesses are relevant in the day to day lives of those who believe in them. In ACK, Indian mythology occupies an important place as more than being just stories from any particular religion, they reflect the ocean of wisdom and thought that is a part of our heritage. Our wish is to convey even a fraction of it in a simple way to young people. And what better way to do that than in the comics format?” Primarily targeting a young audience,

Amar Chitra Katha was the first comics publisher to present copious volumes of tales from Indian mythology. Even after several decades since its establishment it still remains one of the top publishers of comics in India.

Mythology based Indian fantasy comics are giving way to modernity. Benita Fernando talks to the mythology rooters and the modernity supporters to find out the future of fantasy comics in India.

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Drawing from the Classical PastLike Holy Cow, other publishers are venturing away from the avatars of the mythical past to newer frontiers digging for gold. With globalisation and its resulting fluidity of identities, surely there is more to this nation that just the ruler of Lanka and the epic battle of Kurukshetra, isn’t there? Last year, Rovolt Entertainment launched its series titled Aveon 9 which the publisher confidently promises is “a magnum opus inspired by Indian mystical classics and Western sci-fi.” The series and characters are loosely based on Devaki Nandan Khatri’s Hindi novel Chandrakanta that narrates the story of two star crossed lovers belonging to rival kingdoms in ancient India. Aveon 9 locates the story many light years into the future when humans have colonised a planet in the Alpha Centauri system with technologically inferior natives reminiscent of Indian gypsies. Very close to the movie Avatar, you might say (and for that matter, Spielberg’s Pandora is also in the Alpha Centauri system).

Despite some obvious plot issues, every comic in the series maintains international standards as each is replete with resplendent visuals, vivid imagination, maps and posters for the fans. Aveon 9 is a mighty world enough to infuse a publisher with hope to unearth new stories. Shamik Dasgupta, the tenacious storyteller for the series, counts Neil Gaiman, myth-makers such as Tolkien, fantasy games and even the classics he watched on primetime Doordarshan as a child as

Aveon 9 comments on colonisation and fuel wars while also charting the course of a pair of star-crossed lovers. Inspired by steampunk, the series features steam-powered machinery in an alien land.

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They beamed Indian mythology out of the ancient past and into realistic settings (the young urban America of Snake Woman) and historical settings (such as the First War of Independence for The Sadhu). But the marriage wasn’t a happy one. There seems to be a deliberate attempt to capture a tourist’s version of India–exotic, mystical, spiritual and enigmatic–very much in the manner of the orientalising coloniser. Spiritual tourism and salvation abound in Virgin. It is as if India never moved beyond kundalini yoga and snake charmers.

In spite of its ideological problems, Virgin’s work is commendable for its sensuous visual language. You are drawn to the seductive cover artwork, elegant panels and detailed illustrations that stand out in stacks of comics. Whether it’s Ramayana 3392 A.D. or Grant Morrison’s 18 Days, nuclear wars took place in futuristic dystopias amidst meticulous visuals. Qualitatively superior, laudable work by Virgin (now Graphic India) set a benchmark for other publishers.

Worlds of Their OwnIn an interview that was featured as a part of the first issue of The Sadhu, Shekhar Kapur states, “Comic book characters–traditional and digital–are the new cult, the new religion. India’s 600 million teenagers are now at the forefront of the creation of these new Gods. For the Indian Comic Gods are derived directly from the vast ocean of Mythology.” Virgin defined that moment when comic fans grew out of their school shoes and began asking for more.

Vivek Goel, artist and CEO of Holy Cow Entertainment, brought in a mature reading audience with fantasy comic series titles such as Aghori and Ravanayan in the last two years. Written by Ram V., Aghori is set in urban Mumbai and follows Vikram Roy, a corporate employee, on a search for his lost son. Roy transforms into an aghori by the name of Veera (an avatar of Shiva) and travels through realities that shift between this and the other world. While dealing with current issues such as female infanticide and smugglers, Aghori attempts to capture the mystical side to India in an almost ‘Gaimanesque’ manner. The Ravanayan series tells the Ramayana from the so-called villain Ravan’s point of view. In Holy Cow’s re-imagining, Ravan is a hybrid of sage and demon and is only an instrument of destiny.

Hoping to build a franchise of characters, Goel states, “One must not do Indian mythology from the cradle to the grave. Give the story a spin.” However Holy Cow did not wish to be associated only with aspects of Indian mysticism and came out with Were-House in 2011, a series with sketchy visuals in black and white. The comic has a new dimension, as you see a social worker named Somakshi Dixit turn into a wererat who is unreasonably possessive of her husband. Unused to these new hybrid forms of comics such as European monsters in Indian settings, audiences may find it a matter of getting used to before they can begin appreciating it.

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Moonward is in fact a stark comment on consumerism and can even be called an anti-capitalist manifesto. Allegorical and fable-like, the stories are a vortex where the religion of capitalism makes sure that the rich get richer and the poor mice struggle. Inspired by Tolkien, Orwell, Tintin and Asterix, Mathen says, “Moonward is a grey look at progression. Like the Mahabharata or Ramayana, the world of Halahala is epic – there are several characters and a string of stories. I want to flesh out new worlds instead of trying to sell India to India itself. There is a need for an original Indian sound in the comics space apart from mythology.” Mathen’s upcoming graphic novel, titled Aspyrus and also set in Halahala, is about an idea that goes wild and takes over the world.

Fantasy Future With the resurrection of myth-based characters and the invention of fresh characters, there is, thankfully, an audience for every kind of fantasy sub-genre. Vivek Goel, who plans to bring out the last issue of Ravanayan this August, states that fans are eagerly awaiting its release. “History and mythology have a mass appeal among Indian audiences as well as foreign audiences. These will never go out of fashion but it is important to infuse them with freshness.” At every comics convention, he finds readers that prefer to read their titles based on Indian mythology rather than, say, were-wolves.

According to a survey conducted across online retailers and retail chains by Nielsen BookScan, a leading global provider of insights and analytics, 1.2 lakh comics have been sold in India since 2010 and with a sales value of 73 million INR. Despite these optimistic figures and the enthusiasm of upcoming publishers, the leading Indian comics publishers are Greengold Animation (of Chota Bheem fame), ACK and Campfire (who have published several titles based on Indian mythology). With the target audiences of these three top publishers being children, fantasy comics for mature reading audiences is still an unchartered universe.

Far from being an apocalypse, the current scenario is more like a chemical reaction where a potent number of avatars are possible. “The industry of fantasy comics is still in its infancy in India. Another 10 years and we will have a huge library of work that will define the

Grant Morrison’s 18 Days is a re-telling of the epic Kurukshetra war and is qualitatively superior to its peers. While visual languages in comics are more sophisticated than they were a few decades back, we are yet to experiment with non-mythological themes.

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his chief inspirations. Dasgupta, whose tryst with fantasy comics began as a writer for Virgin’s Ramayana 3392 A.D., aspires to experiment more with brand new elements and says, “With such a rich and multifarious culture as ours we should never be in dearth of stories. It’s high time that we pull ourselves out from the mire of mythological retelling and tell stories which are more secular and modern in nature.”

Away from MythologyIn a graphic novel titled The Caravan, written by Dasgupta and published by Anitracks Media this year, a troupe of nautch girls turns into a pack of vampires and massacres an entire village on the borders of Rajasthan. With ample quantities of blood, violence, titillation and horror splayed across the pages, the work has a definite Bollywood feel to it (in fact, Dasgupta hopes The Caravan will be made into a feature film). While the plot can have been less straightforward, it is encouraging to see lead characters such as Asif, references to Hindu-Muslim tension and discussions about who’s the baap of Bollywood. It is a mythology-less space that tells you why you shouldn’t trust every jhatka of a tender waist.

While works such as The Caravan offer you the fantasy of setting up a comics store with myriad monsters, some scathing political and social commentary comes in the guise of fantasy as well (remember

Swift, Orwell and The Matrix?). Moonward and Legends of Halahala are silent graphic novels by George Mathen who goes by the nom de plume Appupen. Moonward is a compilation of stories set in a fictional dystopia named Halahala. Unusual as it may sound, Halahala is the name of the poison that Shiva selflessly drank in the aftermath of the legendary churning of the ocean in Hindu mythology. Mathen is clear to state that the reference to Indian mythology begins and ends with that in his work. (He first read about Halahala in an ACK comic as a child. What did we say about mythology supremo ACK?).

Each page of Moonward looks like a separate composition as Mathen chose to do away with frames. With text used as minimally as possible, Moonward’s visual language fluctuates intentionally.

George Mathen

A caravan of nautch girls transforms into blood-thirsty vampires in The Caravan. With no references to Indian mythology, this graphic novel narrates a gripping horror story in Indian settings.

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Benita Fernando Benita Fernando is a content creator and a freelance journalist based in Mumbai. Her column ‘The Silver Lining’ appears in the Sunday Free Press Journal. She loves photography and currently blogs for Dharavi Biennale. Illustrator – Chaitanya Modak is a communication designer who loves working across print, film and digital surfaces. His work can be seen on www.inhousedesign.co.in . He also makes and publishes comics under the pseudonym ‘Won-tolla’.

essence of Indian fantasy comics,” says Shamik Dasgupta. Better distribution avenues and an influx of fresh creatives daring to experiment will fuel the emerging industry of fantasy comics. Comics artists and readers need to look at comics as an end-in-themselves rather than as a starting point for film rights or merchandise. In all cases, the industry will benefit by losing its overly self-conscious ‘Indian-ness’ (why does Spider Man in India have to wear a dhoti?).

As the battle rages on in the planet of comics, the voice of Professor X thunders above, “Mutation: it is the key to our evolution.” Perhaps, the opposing factions are not fighting; perhaps they are lovers caught in a dance. These are just the beginnings but it’s time, to quote the vernacular, to rock and roll. The rest, as they say, is fantasy.

Ayesha Vemuri

The Delhi BRT To be or not to be?

This article uses a user-centered design approach to explore the factors that contributed to the perceived failure of the ambitious BRT project in Delhi. The article highlights the social and political structures of Delhi that have contributed to this failure. It suggests, in conclusion, that any urban design project must necessarily think beyond physical infrastructure and incorporate these underlying contextual realities within the design process itself.

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And, as an extension of this, are designers far too hopeful in viewing design as a panacea for solving problems? And more, can any design succeed without the support of the systems and people who use it, who implement and who are responsible for its maintenance and smooth function? If not, especially in massive projects such as this, which involve many stakeholders, then perhaps this indicates that the very definition of design must be expanded to take all these ‘external’ elements into consideration. Design, then, would need to encompass not only the infrastructural and physical requirements of the project, but also take into account the social, economic and political structures within which it operates.

The BRT, first introduced to Delhi in 2008, was an attempt to introduce a more equitable allocation of road space, in addition to decongesting traffic and reducing air pollution. Planning for it began much earlier, in 2005, with a team of urban planners at IIT Delhi who were trying to redesign Delhi’s roads to better accommodate its large population of cyclists (while the exact number of cyclists in the city is unclear, the Hindu reports [Cycling Cities, July 9 2012] that Delhiites make 2.8 million trips a day by cycling, which is almost equal to the number of trips made by car). They realized whilst conducting their research, however, that a bicycle lane wouldn’t get the political support they needed. At the same time, news of the success of the BRT in Curitiba, Brazil as well as Bogota, Colombia was becoming well known in the urban planning space as a cost-effective and efficient way of improving urban public transport. This was when they started to consider the idea of a similar system in Delhi, where more than 4.4 million passengers use buses everyday, according to the Delhi Statistical Handbook 2012 (page 205).

The BRT in Delhi was implemented as a pilot in June 2008, with a corridor that stretches across roughly 6.5 kilometers, from Ambedkar Nagar to Moolchand, a highly congested area of the city. By combining GPS data and other technology along with the new infrastructure, the city hoped to prioritize the movement of buses over private transport, with the logic that since buses carry many more people in a smaller amount of space than cars, they should have the right of way. Moreover, the design team responsible for the BRT hope to make not only a faster bus transit system, but an integrated system which could better accommodate all the different modes of transport that use Delhi’s roads–included oft-neglected ones like bicycle, cycle rickshaws and pedestrians.

In order to distribute the space more equitably, the team – a group of urban planners and designers from IIT Delhi – conducted in depth surveys of traffic flows in the proposed pilot areas. They monitored the traffic throughout the day, observing when different kinds of vehicles – trucks, bicycles and cars – would pass. They mapped not only the numbers of cycles, rickshaws and buses, but also the amount of space they occupy when loaded with gas cylinders, milk containers and even

Kamlesh Kumar, a 36-year-old resident of Faridabad, rides his bicycle everyday for roughly 20 kilometers each way from his office in Chhattarpur. He loves riding his bike, he says, even though the distances he covers each day are so long. It keeps him fit, although it can be scary sometimes when he’s competing for space with buses, cars, motorcycles, and trucks–all faster, bigger and louder than he. When he gets onto the segregated bicycle lane on the BRT corridor, he heaves a sigh of relief. Finally, he feels safe and relaxed.

That is, until a motorcycle or scooter comes whizzing past. This, of course, is despite the fact that the lane is meant specifically for non-motorized vehicles like bicycles, cycle rickshaws and thelawalas. For the few months when the BRT’s laws were implemented, it offered a welcome respite from the usual challenges he faces everyday, and he wishes it would go back to being better implemented.

Kamlesh’s story and his relationship with the BRT is a unique one. While he uses its bicycle lane to commute back and forth from work, his work as a driver for a private South Delhi firm means that he then interacts with it as the driver of a large 4x4 Mahindra Xylo. Once he switches to this role, he then experiences the BRT from a completely different perspective, and becomes ‘jealous’, as he says, of all the space allocated to the buses and cyclists. He talks about how he often looks over longingly at the near-empty bus lane while stuck in chock-a-block traffic at the 6-7 minute long traffic signal. And, since the last few months, he’s followed the precedent of many other drivers and looks for opportunities to enter the bus lane as well. While he knows it’s against the law, he can’t help himself because he has the responsibility to get from place to place on time, and that’s a near impossible task in Delhi’s traffic. Also, he says, he wouldn’t do it but for the fact that everyone else does, so he figures he might as well too.

Kamlesh also has a third interaction with the BRT, as a passenger on buses, which usually happens only on weekends when he goes out with his wife and two kids. He likes the new buses that have been introduced with the BRT and appreciates the added comfort they bring. He doesn’t like riding them on weekdays though, because not only do they not get him right to where he needs to go, but they’re also horribly crowded, even overflowing. Moreover, they’re actually slower than the cycle, especially now that cars and other vehicles also enter the bus lane with impunity.

This incursion of vehicles into segregated lanes is a sign of the supposed failure of the BRT, or the Bus Rapid Transport System. Motorcycles and scooters as well as auto rickshaws and small cars can regularly be seen on the bicycle path. The pedestrian walkway has been taken over by parked cars and even motorcycle riders. Cars and motorcycles can regularly be seen in the bus lane. But are all these symptoms of a design intervention that failed, or can they be seen as a consequence of the city’s deeply entrenched social hierarchies and outdated policies that render it unprepared for this intervention?

Kamlesh Kumar, in his driver’s uniform, on his way home from work.

Cyclists continue their battle for space against aggressive motorists who use the non-motorized transport lane to bypass traffic.

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April 24, 2008) and Delhi Bus Corridor: Fiasco Continues (Times of India, April 23, 2008). Yet another Times of India article, Delhi livid with BRT trial, from July 27, 2008 even promises its supposedly inevitable death:

It’s like a bad marriage. You may be forced to live with it but you can’t learn to love it–particularly when you are badly bruised and scarred in daily encounters. It’s like a volcano waiting to erupt. Commuters haven’t learnt to live with the BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) corridor, no sir, and they won’t. The truth is that many have learnt to avoid it and those who have no option can only grind their teeth in silent rage.

Almost all media reportage of the BRT focused solely on its negative impact on the city’s traffic, claiming that it has led to greater congestion, longer waiting times at traffic signals, and a more confused and chaotic driving experience. The few articles that do support it tend to be off-beat publications like Kafila, personal blogs and some articles on international publications like WSJ, some of which point to the underlying conflict between the classes.

And then there was the involvement, or lack thereof, of the traffic police. After a short duration of less than three months, the police shirked itself of the responsibility of implementing the new traffic laws. And that’s when all hell began to break loose, with motorcycles regularly encroaching on the bicycle lane, cars being parked on the pedestrian walkway, and a failure to implement the new traffic regulations that would allow bus passengers to cross safely to the center of the street where the bus stands were placed. The implementing agency, DIMTS, then hired private traffic wardens to regulate traffic and ensure that rules were followed. This intervention was doomed to fail, however, since the wardens wielded no real power to impose fines and chalaans on the people who flouted laws. All they could do was try, and in a city where everyone knows or could know ‘somebody’ in a position of power, it was too much to ask for them to risk their livelihoods and well being for the sake of laws that are commonly broken.

This stems from the fact that even though personal cars are the luxury of only about 8 percent of Delhi’s commuters, they’re also owned by the people who wield most power in the city, both economic and political. Delhi’s wide economic rift has been written about in detail elsewhere, so I won’t delve into it except to say that the ownership of cars and road space is a very visible manifestation of the divide. This has also meant that, in the interest of appeasing and supporting the existing power structure, the media, the police and other governing agencies have tended to side with this powerful minority.

Apart from cars, motorcycles and scooters comprise another 10-12 percent, and auto rickshaws about 3 percent (Delhi Statistical Handbook, 2012), but the rest still rely on walking, bicycles and public transport. This majority is also the service staff on which the city

Car drivers, bus passengers, cyclists and pedestrians are equally plagued by the poor implementation of the BRT, often deemed to be the primary cause of its failure.

furniture. They observed the amount of space street vendors, a typical adjunct to most bus stops. They employed international standards for the width of pedestrian pathways. Based on the need, volume of transport and space needed, the road was reconfigured and reallocated for all the different modes of transport. Moreover, the team ensured safety and access for the disabled by installing ramps and footpaths that would allow them to board and de-board the buses with ease. They consulted with residents’ welfare associations in the area, as well as NGOs who were working with different stakeholders who would be affected.

In short, the research that went into the design of the BRT appears to have been thorough. The biggest shortcoming, which didn’t strike the planners at first as even being one, was the retraction of space from car drivers. For them, the cars were allotted the right amount of space considering the number of passengers they carried. But in a city where roads are planned for cars and not necessarily for people, this came to become the seed that would sprout countless new problems, eventually leading to the breakdown of this optimistic new system.

The original plan for the corridor was a 13.5 km stretch (of which only half was built and tested), which would then be extended to roughly 600 kilometers over the course of the next decade. The system would be integrated with 415 kilometers of Metro rail by 2021, creating an excellent public transport network across Delhi. This ambitious plan hoped to make public transit convenient, affordable and far more attractive than private transport, thereby reducing the proliferating problem of traffic congestion.

The plan wasn’t overly ambitious, it seemed, given the success of the BRT in other parts of the world. The BRT, which was first implemented in 1974 in Curitiba, Brazil, was conceptualized by the Mayor at the time, Jaime Lerner, and is regarded as his greatest contribution to the city. The success of the system led to its replication in Bogota and over 80 other cities around the world, albeit with varying degrees of success. When one reads about all these successful BRTs around the world, and the kind of social, economic and environmental benefits they’ve brought, its difficult to understand why the Delhi BRT wasn’t able to achieve a similar impact.

The launch of Delhi’s BRT and all that ensued in the months that followed tells a tale of a highly contested affair. To begin, small errors like technical problems with traffic signals and confusion amongst commuters cast it in a negative light right from the get go. Media reportage, at least in the English language Press, supported this image, with mainstream publications focusing on car-drivers’ perspectives rather than balancing their opinions with other users of the space. One article in The Pioneer was particularly tasteless, with a headline that read ‘Experts’ order serial rape of Delhi roads (Nov 6, 2007). Other articles included Buses Hog Space, Cars Squeezed Out (Times of India, Nov 16, 2007), BRT corridor chaos worse than ever (Hindustan Times,

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sivaye koi bhi gaadi iss line mein allowed nahi thi, toh bahut hi accha tha. Zyaada jaldi bhi chalti thi, aur savaariyon ke liye bhi surakshit tha. Jo cycle chalaanein wale log hain aur jo paidal chalne wale hain, unke liye bhi badiyan tha.” (Yes, when no other vehicles except for buses were allowed in this lane, it was really good. We could move faster, and it was also safer for passengers. Even cyclist and pedestrians benefitted a lot).

The bus drivers and conductors also had many solutions to improve the design of BRT based on experience. They had to be coaxed into giving them, in a way, because most felt that their opinion didn’t matter. Jo uppar wala chahe, wahi hoga. Humare kehne se toh kuch nahi ho sakta. “Whatever the ‘ones above’ (which I took to mean both God as well as the wealthy and powerful) want will happen. Us saying something makes no difference”. This is a very common statement amongst India’s lower classes, indicative of their lack of agency in the larger scheme of things. But their suggestions, once they were finally voiced, were incredibly balanced and thoughtful.

One major complaint from car drivers and bus drivers alike has been the decision to place the bus corridor in the center of the road. Anvita Arora, an urban planner from IIT who was involved in the project, says in defense of the decision, “The left side of the road is the most contested side of the road. Pedestrians, cyclists, rickshaws all use the left side of the road, because it’s also the access side – all the entries into neighborhoods and side streets are on the left side. The center of the road is the through side, where traffic can move quickly, without stopping behind all the other slower modes of transport.” While many drivers and conductors first wanted the bus lane to be moved to the left, they agreed that the center was a better solution once they heard the rationale.

Leading from this, however, all the drivers were adamant that if the bus lane was going to be in the center, then access to it needed improvement. While the design team did try to create pedestrian walkways and zebra crossings, the wait time is long, it isn’t implemented, and people run across the road, leading to accidents and even deaths. Some of the drivers had themselves been in accidents involving pedestrians, and suggested that there could be either a subway or an over-ground walkway that would make getting to the bus stops easier and safer.

The other massive complaint about the BRT, once again from car and bus drivers alike, is the wait time at signals. The biggest complaint was the change at the highly trafficked Chirag Dilli crossing, where cars are often stuck for two or three rounds of a 7-minute signal, which means a wait time of twenty or more minutes. For buses too, even though they get priority, it often means a wait time of 7 –12 minutes, which counters the benefits of the lane to a large extent. Some suggested that the bus route could have been planned with a subway or an elevated lane that would allow buses to move through without stopping, and at the same time also reduce the waiting time for cars. This

relies heavily but values little: drivers, electricians, plumbers, maids, secretaries, office boys and myriad other lower and lower middle class professions. These are the people who often reach the offices before everyone else and leave afterwards, and for whom public transit is the only means to earn a livelihood. So the question remains, do users like Kamlesh, the bus drivers, conductors, passengers, cyclists and pedestrians, who normally aren’t allocated any space on the roads but comprise a majority of the users of the space, also consider the BRT a failure?

Today, even the traffic wardens are nowhere to be seen. This has resulted, especially in recent months, in a kind of free-for-all and a complete disregard for segregated lanes. Bus drivers and conductors talk about how for a short while when the BRT first opened, there was a sense and experience of more regulated traffic, and for them, a smoother, faster and safer journey. Now, though, it’s devolved into so much chaos that many wish it had never been built, or that it would be demolished. When asked about what it was that really failed in their opinion, the answer was ubiquitous: “Ab toh gaadi, bike, autowalein sab bus ke lane mein aa jaati hain, aur inke waje se zyaada dheere

bhi chalna padta hain, aur zyaada khatra bhi hai. Pehle toh koi bike wala saamne aata tha toh bus ko iss side ya uss side mein kar paate the. Ab bus ki line choti ho gayi, toh hum idhar-udhar bhi ni jaa sakte.” (Nowadays, cars, motorcycles and auto rickshaws all drive in the bus lane, which makes it both pointless as well as more dangerous than before, since the lane is narrow and there’s no way to avoid or bypass them).

And on whether it seemed to work, or eased traffic in any way while it was being (even patchily) implemented: “Haan, jab bus ke

Cars itching to beat the traffic, find themselves stuck behind a bus waiting for the signal to turn green.

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across India were already underway before the Delhi BRT’s so-called failure, several have been halted as elections are around the corner, and politicians are wary of being seen as supporting such a controversial project. Now, new public transit projects almost always choose the metro over the BRT.

Another major learning for her, on a personal front, was that the design team came at the project from a very academic perspective. They were naïve in their thinking that, “if the solution was serving the maximum number of people, of course it would be adopted!” They admittedly sought out the most effective design, but did not pay much attention to the political aspects of the project, something that they regard in retrospect as their own biggest shortcoming. Anvita spoke of how:

“ the supposed failure of the BRT helped them learn a lot. For one, without political buy-in, in terms of a political champion for the project, a project is bound to fail. The other crucial thing is the buy-in of the media. Without articles that give a balanced perspective and talk about the benefits of these systems, their failure is inevitable.”

The design was based on how things should function rather than how they really do function. While the team did take some elements of the context into consideration, these were largely the physical, quantitative ones, and not the less tangible qualitative context, which can ultimately make or break a project. This leads back to the original question of how the very definition and conception of design needs to be expanded, to incorporate the entire process of implementation, rather than limiting itself to the physical infrastructure.

Pedestrians move through traffic to get to the other side, while cars and auto rickshaws inch their way out from under the direction of a traffic signal.

was exactly how the BRT in Curitiba had been designed, so it was interesting to see that the bus conductors had arrived at the same conclusion on their own.

The conductors and drivers were also very vocal about the fact that the current BRT stretch is simply too small to really have made an impact. While some did feel that the new lane allowed them to move faster, they asked how one could even effectively measure its impact, when the pilot covers such a short stretch in a city as large as Delhi, which has over 31,000 kilometers of road. But extending it would similarly be pointless, they said, without proper implementation of its laws. This would require the involvement and support of the police, without whom none of this is possible, and that is the single most important thing that must change.

Anvita Arora from the IIT design team agrees wholeheartedly, and cites this lack of implementation as one of the primary reasons for the BRT’s failure. She spoke of the many conflicting interests from different governing and social bodies as the biggest challenge. Moreover, she said, one of the biggest failings was the lack of political ownership and ‘political champions’ for the project. Though Delhi Chief Minister, Sheila Dikshit originally supported the BRT, she has been very cautious about extending the project, given the media backlash and the fact that she will be up for re-election shortly. Take the Ahmedabad BRT as a contrast: a project that has been hailed widely as a success, at least from the media perspective, it was supported and promoted by not only the city but also sanctioned very publicly by Narendra Modi. The Delhi BRT though, according to Anvita, is no one’s baby.

Besides this political orphaning of the BRT in Delhi, Anvita also talked about the conflicts with the other major urban transport project that’s being undertaken simultaneously: the Metro Rail. Even though the two projects were envisioned as eventually building up to an integrated public transit network, in reality there were a lot of conflicts of interest. The biggest of these was most certainly the difference in cost of the two projects, and the fact that a state-of-the-art BRT can be built at 1/30th of the cost of the metro. This, combined with a corruption-entrenched system, means that low-cost projects are considered less desirable than expensive ones like the Delhi Metro, which not only requires massive amounts of steel and concrete, but relies heavily on imported technology.

Anvita, reflecting on the entire incident, as well as comparing Delhi’s story with Ahmedabad’s, talks about how this is has been a massive learning. She is currently consulting with multiple urban transit projects across several cities in India, including BRT projects in Vishakapatnam, Indore, Hubli and other tier-two cities. In the planning of these, the team takes care to consult with all the different stakeholders, and attempts to ensure political agreement before proceeding to the implementation stage. However, the media aided failure of the Delhi BRT has taken its toll. While many of the 20+ BRTs

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Ayesha Vemuri Ayesha Vemuri is a researcher, writer and visual artist based in New Delhi. With a passion for entrepreneurship, design and urban spaces, she loves to think and write about how these reflect and impact the society. Currently, she works with a Delhi-based startup that crowd-sources safe city information using a smartphone based app. There, she is responsible for research, network building and social media communications. Prior to this, she worked with the Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS), a design and innovation-consulting firm based in New Delhi. She has also worked as a freelance consultant with several social sector organizations. Ever since she returned to New Delhi in 2010, she has been especially interested in the changing urbanscape of the city and the ways in which urban design impacts the behaviours of its users.

Design in Indian Startups

Gurpreet Bedi

A brief look at the state Indian startup ecosystem from the lens of the design. Understanding how well it is understood or misunderstood and how the next generation of the technology startups are battling the design challenge in a globally connected ecosystem for the right consumer audience.

As for the future of Delhi’s BRT, according to Anvita as well as all the bus drivers and conductors, it is only a matter of time before it gets further implemented and adopted. All these media and implementation problems only serve to delay it, not to destroy it, and the city will necessarily come to accept the BRT. Without it, commuting in the city won’t be possible, given the high density of inhabitants and the congestion that already afflicts it. Moreover, with rising prices of fuel, it simply won’t be feasible for many people to drive cars. However, it still may require some design interventions to make it more conducive to the city, including more training and citizen involvement. Kamlesh, talking about this says, “Its good that they’re thinking about the bus passengers, cyclists and pedestrians, but unless we design for the car drivers as well, the system will not work, at least in the short run. They must be brought on board as well… they can’t be left behind.”

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Had things been as black and white as they seem we wouldn’t have startups explaining their design strategy in terms of the visual design. Or in the case they understand the value of design keep looking for that one mythical designer who could solve all their problems. With the ever changing relationship and interaction of humans with technology, and its constantly evolving nature, the boundaries of what explicitly is the job of a designer or the hacker is quickly overlapping.

Take the case of Rasagy Sharma who after finishing his undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering joined a Bangalore based startup as their UX Designer. One of the first ‘design’ hires in the team comprising of hackers, leading him to explain his role to the people around him. If the challenge of understanding what exactly entails in these new design roles wasn’t tricky enough, Rasagy highlights the emerging debate of ‘Should designers code?’ “The answers vary from the extremes of ‘Designers can code and should code’ to ‘Designer cannot code and is not expected to code’ with a comfortable middle ground emerging in the form of ‘Designer can code but is not expected to code’, “ says Rasagy.

But if there is no one designer who can solve all of the problems of the startups which range from visual design & interaction design to in certain cases industrial design; and finding the talent is tough. Then shouldn’t we see the limited resources of the startups being spent on the function (technology) than form (design and by extension user experience)? One of the most interesting theme to emerge while talking to a number startups as a part of the research was their unanimous agreement in pushing design forward for their product. Neeraj Sabharwal who heads the design at the Hyderabad based NowFloats quotes Tom Peters when he says “The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’

Design has been and will always remain at its core a form of problem solving.

“Designer can code but is not expected to code”

www.nowfloats.com

According to Dave McClure, the founding team of a startup should include the holy trinity of a hacker, hustler and a designer. In simple terms, a dream team comprising of members responsible for the technology, business/marketing and the design. Dave is no stranger to entrepreneurship or India, and as the founding partner at 500Startups (internet startup seed fund and incubator program based in Mountain View, CA), each of their accelerator programs have seen interest and presence from a number of Indian startups.

This then begets the question of what exactly is an “Indian startup”? Unlike Israel, a nation known both for its military prowess and high-technology startups along with the fact that it has the highest per-capita VC investment in the world. Startups in India, like the nation itself, conform to no unifying sector or theme. On one hand we have Delhi based Langhar helping connect foodies with authentic home cooked local cuisines on the other we see SarkariExam a portal dedicated to helping people find government jobs. Even after applying the filter of technology and technology enabled startups with their constantly blurring boundaries in the internet and mobile space, the bandwidth of the spectrum is still large.

If one goes by the estimates of AngelList, a platform dedicated towards the startups and the investors, there are 1500+ startups in India. This by no mean implies that all of them would be independently successful or have a profitable exit. Many of them would eventually shut shop and might not even exist the next summer. Despite this uncertainty and the increasing belief of Indian founders in their idea have led to a rising entrepreneurial activity. Catering to everybody from the hyper local audiences to products specifically built for the customers abroad. Helping us establish the fact that there is no single way to explain or define as to what constitutes an ‘Indian startup’. If question of the Indian-ness wasn’t tough enough the attention to design has increased the complexity of the understanding manifold. Invariantly a handful of startups like Cleartrip (travel), Zomato (food), Paytm (payment) and Hike (messaging) have become the poster boys for the best designed products being built in and in certain cases for India. This then progresses us to our next challenge of “What is design in the context of the startups and what is the role of a designer?”

Depending upon who do you ask, one is bound to get various forms and interpretation of what constitutes ‘design’? Making it easy to complicate things for the humble hackers and the hustlers trying to fathom as to why their designer is unable to deliver in the face of the challenge for their startup. Going over from formal the definitions provided in academic institutions of design being ‘a noun and a verb’ to the one followed by design practitioners whereby they try to highlight the difference between “art and design”. One thing that emerges is that design has been and will always remain at its core a form of problem solving.

“Holy trinity of hacker, hustler and a designer”

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design yet understands the other well enough to guide somebody with your vision. A similar ideology was put forth by Arun Jay, who amongst a number of other claims holds the post of the principle designer at SlideShare and the senior UX designer at LinkedIn. By academic training Arun began as a communication designer but his experience with film making, photography and web based technologies makes him the ideal choice for the unicorn designers so many startups look for.

But it wouldn’t be fun if there weren’t a few startups breaking the mould. HealthifyMe and NowFloats are two startups which were a part of the Microsoft Accelerator program in Bangalore. On one hand we have Neeraj Sabharwal from NowFloats with no formal training in the various disciplines of design yet relying on his industry experience and understanding of design thinking principles to lead the charge. On the other we have Tushar Vashisht co-founder of HealthifyMe attributing the fact that “Lack of a dedicated designer in the founding team even with the team valuing design, cost them precious resources in the decision making and product building exercise. With HealthifyMe treating the user experience as an integral part of the product building process getting Rohan Gupta as a designer onboard has positively affected our shipping time.”

But believing that a well-designed product is the end all in the product building exercise would be plain naïve. Design is one of the integral processes amongst the host of other responsibilities held by the hustlers and the hackers which make a product successful.

www.healthifyme.com

the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.” Even in the case where the technical founders thought of design as nothing more than a marketing gimmick they did approve of increasing the resources dedicated to certain design activities by either hiring talent or outsourcing the process. And putting the bill under what they felt was the ‘cost of customer acquisition’.

The cost of starting an internet business is decreasing by the year and in no other period of history have we seen more entrepreneurial activity than the present. Faced with the simple market forces of consumer choice, a positive user experiences is a simple measure of how efficiently the technology works to help the user achieve his goals. In a somewhat surprising trend that in hindsight makes perfect sense, some of the best designed startups being built in the country include a designer as a part of the founding or the founders atleast have the design aesthetics in place to drive things forward.

Eventifier is being built in the southern city of Chennai at The Startup Center. Eventifier helps keep all the social media chatter around an event including the conversation, photos, videos, presentation decks in a single place. They are one of the few startups using the hacker, hustler and the designer approach since the day they began. Mohammed Saud holds the mantle of the Chief Design Officer and one would give weight to his belief when he says “Being equally proficient in all facets of design even when their underlying principle might be the same is difficult.” His solution is the one that is increasingly becoming common, become proficient in one form of

www.eventifier.com

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Brij Vaghani is the founder of live traffic monitoring service, Traffline which currently operates in three metropolitan cities. His team is working in close association with a design studio for the soon to be launching next version of their product. “Even though we understood the value of design, the founding team relied upon our core strengths of technology in the early stages of the product. An approach which we feel might have had an impact on the metrics we use to track the product success but something that was within permissible levels”

Where are we headed? Great design and technology have always existed. The founders are still looking for that elusive designer who can handle all their design problems, but as unicorns go those beings are still rare to find. The consumer internet is nearly twenty years old, the smartphone nearly six and the tablet less than four. Yet the potential of the startups building upon and specifically for these platforms is seeing an exponential growth.

We haven’t even begun scratching the surface of the potential and can’t predict the trajectory of the startup economy in India serving an internal audience of a billion plus people and catering to those abroad. But the fact remains that the designers seem to have finally found a voice and Indian startups are rearing for them to go.

Gurpreet BediGurpreet Bedi’s greatest love are entrepreneurship and design thinking, though he is not sure what those fancy words actually mean. An active member of the startup ecosystem, he writes about early stage startups, technology and design. His writing have been published in some of India’s best platforms and in his last role served as an interaction designer with a Delhi based studio. When not doing either of the above activities Gurpreet is pursuing his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. He tweets at @grprtbedi and blogs on his website www.gurpreet.be

What We Talk About When We Talk About Design

Ruchita Madhok

“How can we have a conversation about design,” Ruchita wonders, “when we can’t seem to agree on what we’re talking about?” Born of a series of casual encounters and deliberate interviews with people, this piece of visual narrative looks to accumulate ideas about what design means in India, and also what it has come to represent for the design community in the country.

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Ruchita MadhokRuchita Madhok is Principal at Kahani Designworks, a communication design practice from Mumbai. Her work lies at the intersection of design and culture and the studio’s online project Perch is a platform for Indian perspectives on contemporary design practice. Trained at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London and at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad she has worked for internationally for design studios and cultural institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she has contributed to an upcoming exhibition on Indian design. A designer, writer and blogger, she’s looking at new ways of recording the conversation on design in India.

The India Story

Anubha Kakroo

The historical and political journey of the Indian textile, handlooms and related handicrafts from near extinction to a revival thanks to the efforts of a group of women. This movement deeply affected the Indian design sensibility and pedagogy, across disciplines, from architecture to digital. In it also lie the roots of the new, emerging face of Indian Design – Social Design.

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Perhaps the most fragile thing in our known universe is the human psyche, even more fragile than the delicate balance of nature. It is the easiest to shatter and once shattered, near impossible to put back. This is true not just for the individual but also for the collective.

The basic tenet of colonization as it unfurled on our planet, was the reduction of the colony and the colonized to a commodity (raw, unprocessed resource to be processed for consumption), both, in civilizational as well as material terms.

The colonized was not accorded the empathy and respect that was extended to an equal, was often looked down upon and thought to be in need of redemption. This eroded the collective psyche and the self-esteem of the natives. They started to believe that they deserved the status that had been accorded to them. It also built an aspiration in those colonized to be like those who dominated them. They tried to emulate their colonial masters because they were made to believe that the way of life of the colonizers was the superior way of life.

This was the state the Indian (sub-continental) psyche was left in when the British departed in 1947. There was an utter lack of any self esteem and self belief apart from the political which had fortunately and strategically been nurtured by Gandhi. Gandhi, in the form of the Swadeshi and the Swaraj movements, had tried to instill self-belief amongst the Indian population. Because of the obvious and larger agenda of political independence, the Swaraj and the Swadeshi became symbols of a national identity and empowerment that, however, did not extend beyond the political context.

The cultural fabric of the new nation was in a severe crisis. A lot of our political leaders had made the effort to ground our national identity within our cultural identity. Yet, for a majority of the Indian people, the last few centuries of colonization had wrecked havoc with their traditional systems, be they social, economic or aesthetic. Thus even as the national leaders took on symbols like Khadi, and these symbols did suffice for a few immediate years post independence, all too soon they were not aspirational enough for the vast majority. By the 1950s the country started to seek a modern identity and a lifestyle that went beyond the nation state. Many of the elite, who were also the trend setters, had had a western upbringing and education. Added to it were the colonial memories of the general populace and it was natural that the young nation looked to the West for theories on Modernity and for models of Development. Anything that was deemed Modern was derived from this thought and like all else, this held true for our aesthetic and material culture as well.

So modern machine-made fabric, stitched into suits for men and the chiffon sarees for the sophisticated women, as they entertained in their drawing rooms, were all in the order of the day. This was only restricted to a certain segment and such a lifestyle may have been beyond the reach of the ubiquitous common man. Yes, most of it was. Except for the cheap man-made fabric which the mills were spewing

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initiatives were also tools to encourage inclusive micro-development and carried a strong agenda of women-empowerment. But there was also an attempt to regain the Indian aesthetic. Not simply because it was indigenous or nationalist to do so, but also because it had been an established aesthetic, long having been appreciated and valued across continents.

The Indian aesthetic in craft and textile had been in demand for many millennia across civilizations. Textiles had always been a major export from the sub-continent and can be counted to have been the major ‘industry’ which controlled the ‘GDP’ of the region. We have heard tales of the spice trade, the spice route and how it was the spices that led the Europeans to these regions. But how many of us know that the spice traders of the Far East were not interested in the European gold. They would trade their produce only for textiles from India. The Europeans therefore had to dock at an Indian port, trade their gold for textiles and then use these textiles to trade for spices further east! Such was the value of Indian textile, literally worth its weight in gold.

The allure of Indian Textiles continued into the early mercantile excursions of the Europeans into India. The reason for this interest in Indian textiles was because they were in huge demand not only in Asia and the Far East but also in the West. Not just the fabric, but the aesthetic idioms were also sought and consumed. In fact some of the earliest and extensive documentation of Indian Textiles was done by the East India Company and we do owe it to them for archiving some of the processes, techniques and artifacts that otherwise may have been lost to us. However the British soon realized that the export of finished textiles from India was in direct competition to the mills in Britain. To counter this, the export of finished goods from India was banned but the idiom was so much in demand that the British mills started to produce machine-made cloth with a similar visual language. In this way the ‘Cheenth’ became the Chintz and the Buta/Badaam/Ambi/Kairi became Paisley (after it began to be manufactured in a town called Paisley in Scotland).

By the time Kamala Devi and Pupul Jayakar launched their efforts, a lot of water had flown under the bridge and the Indian Craft and Textile traditions were in shambles. It required and took a great deal of

out by the reams. The same mills, which had been founded in the British India to service the colonial economy, were now considered important pillars of the socialist-industrial economic model that India had adopted. The cloth and other goods produced from these mills were cheaper and at the same time considered modern, as were other industrially produced goods.

In this factory choked atmosphere, the Indian handlooms and handicrafts were floundering. They had been in doldrums for a while anyway due to the colonial, economic model which had reduced the production and expertise of the Indian textile tradition to the commoditized export of cotton and indigo. The fragile eco-system of the village-based craft system had also been shattered by the behemoth of the colonial industrialization process. Many crafts people had had to abandon their homes and traditional skills to take up unskilled jobs in the mills or other available means of employment.

Into this rather grey environment she walked in wearing bright, very bright, handloom sarees, pieces of chunky tribal jewelry and flowers in her hair. If the idea was to shock the pastel sophisticates or the khadi monochromes, it did. Unmindful of the reaction that she left in her wake and the iconoclast that she was, Kamaladevi Chattopadhaya, refused to cow down to the notion of a modernity, which presupposed ‘western’. She proudly wore her handloom sarees and venis, encouraged first by Nehru and supported later by Indira. She was what she was and she did what she did because this cultural sycophancy to the west did not appeal to her ferociously independent streak. Plus Gandhi had said that India lived in its villages. How could this political child of Gandhi not resonate with that thought! Kamala took up with evangelical zeal the revival of the Indian craft and textile tradition. She worked tirelessly to revive the dying skills and idioms. She was soon joined by another one of her ilk, Pupul Jayakar.

Inhabiting, as they did, two very different worlds and different approaches, there were obvious differences in the ways these ladies worked and lived; but they were very alike in the single mindedness with which they took upon themselves to revive, nurture and reinvigorate the Indian Artisanal Traditions. Of course nation-building & a nationalist sentiment played a part in this endeavor as these

All photographs are by the Futurebrands team and are the property of Futurebrands India Pvt. Ltd.

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single-minded focus on both their parts, and some serious facilitation from the government leadership, to be able to make the far-reaching impact that they did. These initial efforts reflect a more developmental than cultural thrust, which was relevant to the socio-political milieu they were operating in, but their influence would be deep and significant in the cultural milieu as well.

As these initial efforts were in the sphere of rural development they left the Indian Middle Class to its own baggage, struggling with its dual conundrum, that of aspiring to a notion of modernity, which presumed western, and at the same time of affordability and accessibility.

The mills provided this modernity in the form of the synthetic cloth they produced. In the 1970s, polyester and other man-made fibers held sway. They were well-finished, had a western aesthetic, seemed new, and heralded modernity. Cotton, the mainstay of Indian textile, was seen as passé. The coarse, hand-hewn, traditional handloom could not compete with the smooth, seductive and affordable modernity of industrial production. In 1975, it’d have been difficult to visit a small town in Uttar Pradesh, say Meerut, and ask for a hand block printed textile in the local market.

Our ladies and their growing breed, undeterred, carried on. The ‘movement’ had acquired a momentum of its own and around the eighties it almost became a ‘trend’.

In acquiring a more public, educated middle class persona, the movement was helped by the setting up of the Central Cottage Industries Emporium and the other craft emporia which were started under the direction of Kamala Devi. The Festivals of India, the brain child of Pupul Jayakar, showcased the Indian Artisanal Traditions in the West, and made them more appealing to the urban audiences at home. The increasing activism in theatre and cinema as also the academia helped lend an air of glamour to the, till then perceived, dated, Indian Handloom sector. This trend was known as the ‘ethnic’. The Jhola/Chappal/Bindi look that KamalaDevi had sported more than 20 years ago was now a statement, of fashion, of beliefs and of attitude. Being ‘Indian’ was in vogue (all puns intended!)

Thanks also to the institution building efforts of our feisty women; we had in place the Handicraft & Handloom Exports Corporation of India (HHEC), the Central Cottage Industries Emporium (CCIE), the Crafts Museum, National Institute of Design (NID), National School of Drama (NSD) and later the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA) and National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT).

Coming from the thought lineage they did, these institutes were very conscious of their Indian roots and much of the pedagogy was affected by it. This influence has reared generations of designers and creative practitioners in India. Even if they don’t directly work in traditional idioms, at some level their work has been informed by these influences. Most designers trained in India under the influence

of this pedagogy, today work or like to work with indigenous materials, resources, and contexts.

Having influenced the design institutions per se, the thought has moved beyond textile or textile based crafts, into other design spheres as well. At a very apparent and direct level, it is visible in the world of apparel and fashion. Its effect in this domain has been dual. One has been in the revival of Indian textiles which saw a resurgence in consumption at mass levels and the second being the incorporation into hi-fashion where people like Ritu Kumar and graduates from the National Institute of Fashion Technology took these textiles and other techniques to the ramp. Today it is not at all unusual to see a completely hand-woven and hand-crafted outfit which is a much coveted addition to the wardrobe of any Indian woman.

It is also not unusual to come across a proliferation of everyday textiles and techniques in cities and towns in India where theyre-resonate with an innate intuitive connection and immense practicality. Cotton textiles, with block printing, with ajrak, woven borders, mirror work embroidery, all are found again in some form or the other in the Indian household.

So has the tide turned? Is the Indian Artisanal and Aesthetic tradition out of the woods now? Unfortunately, no.

Not so long ago, in a conversation, a Japanese friend lamented how Japan had lost its ‘traditional design’ knowledge in the steam-rolling ‘development’ in the 50s and the 60s. India is at that place now. Will we also lose our inherent design sensibilities? In that conversation I was confident that we were better informed now, as opposed to Japan in the 50s, thanks to increased communication across cultures. This constant interaction with the world will makes us realize the importance of our traditional knowledge systems and we will value it appropriately.

Increasingly and in dismay, I realize that this is not the case. In a mad rush to be a part of the larger, global world, we seem to be blindly adopting the very systems that the ‘developed’ world now realizes to be inappropriate in the larger context. So while they move away and move beyond those systems, we choose to pick them up. We still have an unbroken tradition of the ‘local’, the ‘slow’ and the ‘bespoke’ that everybody seems to be seeking. It would seem ideal for us to leapfrog into the new world-view while we still have the intrinsic skill sets left with us.

Have we considered what can be done to preserve this rich heritage in a relevant, contemporary way? Can India leverage whatever skills are inherent indigenously and stay in the loop with back-to-basics movements that are sweeping the world of design worldwide. In fact we’d be in an enviable position to lead it. But no! I am afraid that we have not learnt from the trajectories elsewhere and seem hell-bent on following the curve as is and fail to look beyond the hill to see that it all eventually comes back.

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Swati talks of her gradual revelation, on graduating as an architect, that design is a luxury only the affluent can afford. Illustrating the work of individuals and organizations who have taken it upon themselves to bring design to those who do not otherwise have access to it, the article throws open the question of whether design can be more democratic.

Design is an Expensive Word

Swati Janu

Anubha KakrooAnubha is an architect/industrial designer/design strategist (all by training) and an intellectual vagabond by nature. So she is, in the true sense of vagabondism; grammatically incorrect but nonetheless a term; “with a vagrant strain in the blood, a natural inquisitiveness about the world beyond their doors.”

References

BOOKS• KamaladeviChattopadhyay:TheRomanticRebel;

Sakuntala Narasimhan, 1999• TextilesfromIndia:TheGlobalTrade;ed:RosemaryCrill,2006• TheIntimateEnemy:LossandRecoveryofSelfUnderColonialism;

Ashis Nandy, 2010

PAPERS• India’sDeindustrializationinthe18thand19thCenturies;

David Clingingsmith, Jeffrey G. Williamson (Harvard University, 2005)• Competitionandcontrolinthemarketfortextiles:Theweaversandthe

East India Company; Bishnupriya Gupta (University of Warwick, 2009)

CONVERSATIONS• SujataParsai• SanjayGarg• JogiPanghal• ShefaleeVasudev

It is these pensive ruminations that I am left with as there is still no clarity on which way we are headed. If I were to be cynical, we seem to be on the verge of losing a whole lot of skill sets, if not the aesthetic vocabulary, which were an intrinsic part of our way of life. On the other hand, it is heartening to see a whole lot of people working very hard to create environments, contexts and platforms where these languages will thrive.

To me, the whole emphasis on Social Design, which is sweeping the world currently and in which India plays a key role, not just as a player but as the incubator, springs from those early interventions, albeit indirectly, into the Design Pedagogy in India by the likes of Kamala Devi and Pupul Jayakar. Added to this is the fact that we still have the indigenous skill sets and the communities which can contribute immensely to these paradigms. We also have a community of trained professionals who can and who do intervene into these dialogues. We have the economic pulls and pushes that are needed for this paradigm to evolve, sustain and flourish. Above all, as a nation, we have the urgent need for these systems to be successful, not just for our own well being, but for the overall well being of the planet. And I hope we are able to emerge true to the cause.

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which had been their homes for decades and given tiny plots in this area 40km west of New Delhi, without any sewage, water supply or infrastructure to speak of. If it is a thriving settlement today, it is not because of, but in spite of the authorities – and because of the work of certain individuals such as Julia King.

A British-Venezuelan architect and doctoral candidate at London Metropolitan University, in 2011, Julia undertook the project of a decentralized sanitation system with support from the NGO CURE (Centre for Urban and Regional Excellence) for the residents of Savda Ghevda. In the absence of a sewage system or adequate and clean community toilets, most of the people resorted to open defecation. This was not only unhygienic but also unsafe for the women, who were vulnerable to sexual harassment. A few houses, with a bit more financial security than the rest, had built their own septic tanks but these tended to overflow due to bad design and maintenance, leading to diseases and poor hygiene in the community. These houses with toilets are also the ones which have incrementally developed from 1 to 2 and even 3 stories, in some cases, demonstrating that a private, in-house toilet is indicative of up gradation and better standards of living.

Through dialogue with the community, understanding their requirements and financial limitations, as well as discussing the need for private toilets – Julia, along with CURE, came up with the proposal for a community cluster based sanitation system. The system composed of a cluster of septic tanks, whose construction was funded by Sri Dorabji Tata Trust, while the individual houses paid for their own connections to this system. This communal septic tank provided an unconventional and intermediary system which was technically as well as financially feasible. It allowed for on-site treatment of the effluents under the community park which was cost-effective and at the same time away from the individual plots, since they are too tiny to meet the required standards for size and effluent treatment. This system can be plugged into the conventional sewage system, once the city expands its infrastructure to reach this area. In Julia’s words, “the issue of sanitation is an issue at the core of dignity and health” and through this project, the residents of Savda Ghevda can now move towards a better quality of living and housing.

Though funding is hard to find, Julia feels that it is the conflict of interest caused by funding from sources other than the client that makes it even harder to work with. “The practice of architecture is based on a client relationship which is completely turned on its head here, since the poor cannot pay for this engagement.”Apart from the challenge of arranging for the funding for such a project in the face of the authorities’ apathy, another hurdle Julia had to overcome was navigating between understanding what the community required, negotiating with the government on what it allowed and narrowing down on the best solution as a designer.

5 King, Julia, Unthinking Housing for the Urban Poor. http://incrementalcity.wordpress.com/

When I graduated in the summer of 2008 to the sounds of incessant construction in the rapidly growing capital city, I was ready to take on anything and ‘India Shining’1 was my oyster. With a gaggle of less than 50,000 architects2 in a country of over a billion, I felt the odds were in my favor. Over the next few years, however, it gradually began to dawn on me–exactly who it was that I would be designing for–less than 5% of the country’s population3 . Unless by some huge stroke of luck, I suddenly landed with government and public projects, I realized that like most architects, I would mostly be designing houses and offices for the affluent and maybe a very small component of the middle class. In a world reeling from the recent recession, I found myself clambering to get my hands on projects, shaking hands with more and more rich people. These were the people who understood and valued design, and could pay for it.Alastair Parvin, a young, visionary architect whose brainchild ‘Wikihouse’ talks of the ‘democratization of production’ through an open-source construction set that allows anyone to freely share and download model files for structures online, suffered from a similar angst when starting out with his career. “The uncomfortable fact is that almost everything that we call architecture today is actually the business of designing for about the richest one percent of the world’s population.”4 He also realized that the privilege of the education that a designer receives puts her in that ‘one percent’ as well. So, essentially design is an elitist profession, by the rich and for the rich. What, then, is the use of my skills as an architect, as a designer, if they do not reach out to most of the people in the country?

We live in cities where the unplanned, informal settlements constitute as big a chunk, if not greater, as the formal sector. In Delhi itself, more than half the city is made up of unauthorized colonies and slums, though the exact statistics may vary. Burgeoning city centers spurred by rapid urbanization and impoverished rural conditions are today facing a steadily increasing stream of immigration. It is this very lot of immigrants, relegated to the leftover spaces in the city due to the acute shortage of affordable housing, which is the first to be thrown to the fringes of the city in ‘clean-up’ campaigns by the government.Savda Ghevda is one such resettlement colony where over 40,000 slum dwellers were relocated from various slum clusters in Delhi between 2007 and 2009, in the name of a beautification drive for the Commonwealth Games 2010.5 These people were evicted from slums

1 India Shining was a marketing slogan referring to the overall feeling of economic optimism in India in 2004. The slogan was popularized by the then-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the 2004 Indian general elections. The BJP lost in the elections and some editorials suggested that the India Shining campaign was one of the causes for their defeat.

2 Council of Architecture, Registration statistics

3 There are “30 million rich people in India; 2.4% of our population…12% of our population can be classified as middle class… Interestingly, the number of people who are paying income tax http://wisewealthadvisors.com/2011/06/12/how-many-people-in-india-are-rich-3/

4 http://www.ted.com/speakers/alastair_parvin.html

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Matias Echanove, from the Mumbai based think tank Urbz, talks of how it is possible for even a fresh architectural graduate to earn much more than she would in a conventional office in a city like Mumbai, were she to work with the smaller, local developer cum contractors. “The market with the strongest creative potential can be found in off-the-map areas, where conventional architects have no business. We are talking about incrementally development neighbourhoods with G+1 or G+2 houses on small plots. There are hundreds of such neighbourhoods in the big metros and they are there also in smaller cities. Rather than working for large developers who tend to be focused almost exclusively on their returns, young architects could put their skills and talents directly at the service of residents and partner with local builders.” But, for something like this, we need to step out of the professional practice methodology architects are trained to follow, and actively look for other avenues to effect positive change.

Delhi based architect and researcher, Mukta Naik talks of hoards of small landlords in Delhi and especially, Gurgaon who have been providing affordable rental housing on their plots of land for the migrants in the area, something the government has failed to do. “Landlords in urban villages in Gurgaon and Delhi are the sole suppliers of affordable rental housing… The motivation today is the desire to move upmarket in the rental space and be able to build one- and two-bedroom studio apartments that would attract young professionals as opposed to the tenement-style rental housing they have been constructing for migrant workers until now. The accessible main streets of urban villages like Nathupur, Chakkarpur and Sikanderpur that are close to large office complexes are seeing a slow change, as old tenement buildings are pulled down to build swanker apartments for middle income tenants.” According to her, these landlords would be more than willing to pay for design input for safer and even better looking houses. The only problem is that this would not fall within the legal purview of urban development, and how many designers are willing to work informally?

Looking back, the country has had a strong history of architects working in the informal and development sector, from Charles Correa to B.V. Doshi.6 Even today, well known architects like Rahul Mehrotra can be seen leading the discourse on informality in the cities and the need to address it. However, in terms of the numbers today, there is an acute dearth of architects dealing with the urban poor, in a country where there is a dearth of architects, to begin with. Maybe the source for this can be traced to the way design education is geared in India. There is little or no emphasis on social issues in the syllabus itself, except for a few select universities organizing lectures or workshops on these issues as extra-curricular activities. Volunteering is a not a very popular culture with students in India either. Ask a fresh architectural graduate today what kind of work she aspires to do, and most of them

6 Credits to Julia King for pointing this out during our conversations

Despite the sheer number of people whose lives such interventions need to improve, Julia is averse to cookie-cutter mass-produced solutions. Instead she talks of ‘acupuncture urbanism’ that is borne out of a meaningful engagement with the community. However, she also points out that this approach is limited in scope and the challenge is in scaling it up. Every situation, place and community requires a direct involvement and understanding that can come about only by interacting with the people one is designing for, she believes. This is what makes the approach difficult for more designers to take up, considering there is little or no funding in such scenarios. Even Julia’s own funding is possible only through her PhD and other grants.

Micro Home Solutions, based in New Delhi, is a multi-disciplinary social enterprise that combines economics, sociology and policy-making with architecture. Considering a majority of our urban population in the bigger cities such as Delhi, Mumbai and Ahmedabad is informal, it is unfortunate that majority of its housing is built without any design or engineering input whatsoever. At mHS, the team has been working for the last 5 years on providing technical assistance to enable self-construction in low-income communities. Through working with the community and masons, the people at mHS have come up with prototypes and even a graphic language that translates difficult technical drawings into easy-to-understand graphics.

Apart from coming up with working solutions with the community, what takes up a good amount of time of the founders of mHS – Rakhi Mehra and Marco Ferrario – is looking for possible sources of funding. These could range from consultation for companies such as Lafarge, NGOs and the government, to grants and fees from a handful of independent architectural projects. While funding is definitely one of the biggest challenges when it comes to designing with a social agenda, legality and informality form the other obstacle, be it in gaining support from the government or loans for families who have no assets or even identification documents, in many cases. Another, less talked about issue is the need for stepping out of the conventional dynamics of how an architect or designer operates.

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Swati JanuSwati is an architect and writer based in New Delhi. Since her graduation from School of Planning and Architecture, she has increasingly concerned herself with urban issues, be it through the medium of design, research, film-making or travel.

want to be the next Frank O. Gehry or Hafeez Contractor, and are more than content with designing farmhouses–these are icons that define successful practices today.

Perhaps the lack of active interest in designing for the urban poor, or even rural, stems from a deliberate attempt by the design fraternity to dissociate themselves from the image of India as a country marked by poverty and informality – and anything that looks into that sector is quickly classified as social or charitable work. Though charity might be an attractive and even trendy word in the west, here in India, designers want to be recognized for their cutting edge and contemporary design, and maybe rightly so. It is no surprise then that most of such efforts have professionals from other countries who choose to work here –especially those from affluent, western nations.

This might be understandable seeing how the country is desperately trying to carve its own design identity and place itself in the global realm of design. It does not want to be defined merely by its traditional crafts and vernacular practices anymore. But, here’s a thought, in the form of a question–if informal were not considered a dirty word anymore, and design a more democratic one, may we not be carving a unique design identity? In other words, could it be possible that designing to improve lives is not simply tagged as social work but that it could actually enter the design psyche of the country?

Innovation in EducationAn interview with Usha Menon, co-founder of Jodo Gyan

Shreeya Kurien

Not-for-profit organisation Jodo Gyan attempts at redesigning antiquated and ineffectual education-based practices specifically around the teaching and learning of mathematics and science. The processes employed by Jodo Gyan are not traditionally within the purview of design, which helps provide a fresh perspective on otherwise rigid processes and prevents design in India from becoming insular. The practice of reforming classrooms through innovation is explained through a conversation with co-founder, Usha Menon.

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All photographs by Julia King

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into schools, doing workshops, curriculum interventions, essentially directly working with the schools. Then we have a production team, where there we have about 20–25 people, and we have our Kendra team, where we have teachers involved in running the learning center.

As an organisation, we have a philosophy of having very low differentials in salaries. The highest and lowest is around 1:3.5. At a lower level, you might get more of a salary than at a market level, and at a higher level you get way below what you could probably get. We realize that it is difficult to implement. Because it means that more skilled people will come to work only if they are ready to put up with a lower salary.

“When you’re working as an organisation, you’re working together, it is a sense of solidarity. And I think too big a salary differential will affect that. You then cannot talk about a ‘we.’”

Is there a reason why you currently focus on mathematics and science education?Of course mathematics is very important by itself. It is also a gateway for many other subjects, especially the sciences. One is very interested in science because science taught in the proper way can change the way you look at the world. But, you cannot learn science unless you know mathematics – that is one aspect of it.

Mostly, we have a static view of earth. For example, to understand evolution you need to understand, at a deeper level, what the world is made up of – understand the atom, the world we live in, the shape of the earth, the seasons, many kinds of other things and mathematics is needed if you want to go a little bit deeper. It’s a very different way of being.

First generation learners in Shakurpur, where Jodo Gyan Kendra operates.

A working model built by a student out of waste material from the production center.

By expanding the boundaries of conventional education and pedagogical methods, Jodo Gyan is at the forefront of innovation-led reform in India. Usha Menon and E.K. Shaji, co-founded Jodo Gyan with the purpose of making learning in schools relevant. Operating out of a small office space in busy Shakurpur Market, North Delhi, the unassuming character of the workplace and its people belies the complexity and reach of their work.

Through their mathematics and science curriculums for pre-primary and primary schools, Jodo Gyan’s innovative teaching methodology finds a presence across India. The development of curriculums and corresponding modules, activities and teaching aids include design processes that are integrated, not dichotomized, within the organisation.

Victor Papanek writes in Design for the Real World, “The planning and patterning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end constitutes a design process. Any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself, works counter to the inherent value of design as the primary, underlying matrix of life.”

Jodo Gyan’s problem-solving approach is intrinsically at the heart of design processes – of being user and context driven, of hands-on prototyping, iteration, implementation, and of viability and responsibility. The challenge of real world innovation and design to create social change often lies in reconciling the responsibilities of an organisation with the viability of its ideas. This is the intersection at which Jodo Gyan works, finding pragmatic solutions to challenges within education.

They recognize the value of creating change directly, within individual classrooms at the ground level. To put their work into practice, they have been sustaining an experimental learning center called Jodo Gyan Kendra in Shakurpur for children of the community. The students are first-generation learners who benefit from alternately designed education methods.

The underlying processes in Jodo Gyan’s work are revealed through a conversation with Usha Menon.

THE ORGANISATIONHow did you come to set up Jodo Gyan?

I’ve always liked teaching and I was also very interested in how to have an organisation that would run the way an ideal organisation should run. It is not only about what your organisation does outwardly. As humans, we all have to work together to do anything. So somewhere, the kind of organisations we create are very important. That was also something which, specifically for me, was significant.

When E.K. Shaji had resigned his job at Scholastic and co-founded Jodo Gyan with me, the work took off in a more formal and serious way.

We have 4 teams at Jodo Gyan, if you include the accounts team. We have what is called a school team, they are the people who go out

The Jodo Gyan office in Shakurpur, New Delhi.

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Once we develop some kind of idea, we go and take a class. If the class goes well, it’s fine, but then there will always be a situation where by the end of the class, we realize what to do differently. So we conduct follow-up classes. Then often what happens is, we sit down and talk about the class. We develop a shared understanding of the possible way in which a problem can be tackled.

So, what we do is work with children and then see whether it works. Sometimes it doesn’t work, we come back, we change it, we modify it and the next time we try it again. So it takes about three years before one module is created, whether it is integers or fractions. Sometimes we go back and revise. Our multiplication trajectory has gone through two revisions which has taken about seven years.

When we design a curriculum for geometry, for example, we start with straight lines, then progress to angles, triangles, quadrilaterals, rectangles and squares. The whole geometry curriculum is based on a trajectory–that’s a design–it’s a curriculum design, which is essentially a discussion of how the content has to be structured. Curricula is not just looking at one activity, but seeing it with relation to other activities and to other people.

I, mostly, end up developing the curriculums. Development is one part, and sharing it, implementing it and modifying it as per the requirement of schools and their context is the other part. Every school has a different environment, so we need to be able to modify and transact it, and interact with teachers as well.

IMPLEMENTATION AND REACHIn what capacity do you work with schools?

We work mostly with individual schools, or at times with groups of schools. The classroom has always been the focal point. This is because we actually need to do the activity with the children, after which we can talk about a framework, which helps teachers understand the process more deeply the next time around.

We usually work in schools, not just directly with teachers, but along with their coordinators, or in some schools with their curriculum group as well.

Sharing curriculums and activities with teachers is yet another creative process. For example Shaji modifies and changes the curriculum to be able to present it to the teachers according to their own understanding and context. What we try to do is help teachers at least make the learning a little more meaningful for children. The workshops are very intensive, creative processes.

What is the biggest obstacle that you face in implementation?You have a curriculum and you have a module in place, but how do you transact it with teachers? I think in communicating – this is the biggest challenge. We are talking not about changing one activity, but we are talking about changing an entire framework. The difficulty is we can’t

Language exercises from a notebook.

The other fact is that mathematics is a subject where there is a felt need for better learning. Teachers feel that there is a fear of mathematics in children. It is a good place to start talking about education and what education is actually about.

CURRICULUMS, MODULES AND ACTIVITIESWhat is the crux of your educational reform?

We start from the meaningful lived experiences of children, and from there we go step by step into the world of mathematics or science or whatever subject. We create a context for children through which they can understand the idea, problematize it, solve the problem, and then from there the link to mathematics or science slowly emerges.

So essentially, before we define any mathematical algorithm or operation, the children have already solved the problem. Of course, the context and question is designed in such a way that the children will be able to make the connections and solve the problem.

What methods do you employ to put your ideas into practice?We design curriculums which we share through workshops. The entire curriculum is shared when we have a longer interaction with schools or teachers who are willing to allow the change. This is usually an intensive process in which we visit the school regularly.

With some of the schools, we don’t share the full curriculum, only some of the activities that are embedded as part of the curriculum. Sometimes it can be a module for one topic within a curriculum, like fractions. We’ve had many fraction-based, two-day, three-day workshops, fractions in class IV, fractions in class V.

As part of the activities of the curriculum, we design Teaching Learning Materials (TLMs). These teaching materials are designed as part of a particular activity to aid the learning. Sometimes, people just want to get the TLMs, and that is very good, in the sense that it is often the starting point of an interaction. So, usually the TLMs are the first contact with people.

What is the process of developing these curriculums and modules?We design things that would be different from what is normally called design. We’re designing curriculums. We don’t develop something for the sake of it. Usually, we identify a problem when we work with our own kids at the Kendraor with a few other schools. We want to take the children to a certain level of learning.

We think about that problem – we also look to see whether there is any kind of international research on the problem, to get some insight. We’re never working in isolation.

“ Our approach is less formal research-based and is more design oriented. It is real world, real time innovation. However, the design has to be informed by the research–that is the way I see it.”

Older students learning through computers to contextualise curriculums to current practices.

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we were only using a normal cutter to make everything. Sanjay had used a square base, but when we wanted to put a wooden base, it would always tip over. The current base uses a half a crosssection of bamboo.

So, some people from production, along with all of us, worked on it.

This particular product is of course not part of any curriculum or activity. The microscope is a stand alone product. Otherwise, most of our other TLMs are an integral part of the curriculums we design.

What are your production methods for the TLMs?If we have a choice in production, then we would prefer to go with labour intensive. If there is a choice. We’re not fanatical about anything. You know sometimes you will make very expensive things, people can’t afford it, and there is no point. Finally in that way it is very pragmatic approach. Pragmatic not in order to create a surplus of products, but pragmatic to ensure the TLMs have that level of quality and their price should not be unreasonable. But if there is a comparable choice between labour and machine-intensive, then we will choose labour-intensive. The major fact is that, those who are working on the production, should get a reasonable income.

Is there a conscious decision to not segregate education for children of higher and lower socio-economic strata?Once you have a curriculum, and once you have a different way of looking at education – it is something which should enter our national scene. People should be talking about what are we doing in the name of education to our children. I think it should happen not only with underprivileged children. It is not a question of charity or helping some people who are not well-off to come up. Something about the way we look at education itself has to change. Somehow, we haven’t been comfortable with the idea of selling our TLMs at differentiated prices. The prices are reasonable in the sense that we should be able to survive as an organisation, without differentiated pricing. It is difficult to be in such a society–those who have the money to buy could always draw you towards them–that is the pull of purchasing power.

A recent prototype of the bamboo microscope.

Bamboo is used as a base material for many of the TLMs in production.

start talking about a framework while communicating with teachers. We need to implement the action first. When teachers see how children respond, then it starts motivating them. At the same time they need to see it in a larger perspective, even in terms of what mathematics is–it is not just about adding and subtracting, it is also about reasoning, about thinking and seeing patterns. We need to work at both these levels.

TEACHING LEARNING MATERIALS (TLMS)Who designs the Teaching Learning Materials? How do they

get designed?Unfortunately, I do most of the designs! Our designs are like that only. It’s jugaad.

Currently, we are thinking of a simpler ganit rack, because we need to bring down the price, so the current design problem is, could we use something better than a rubber band to stop the beads from falling of the ends of the stick when there is no stand?

The ‘ganit mala’ or the arithmetic string, a TLM that relates to the number line, was originally designed by the American mathematician, Hassler Whitney. It was later modified by A. Treffers, from Freudenthal Institute. He designed one with a stand. He tried it out in the classroom, and that is what we have taken up and developed further. We retained the same colour combination as the original. We tried other colours but they didn’t work. We don’t need to modify things for the sake of modifying them.

Your bamboo microscope is very interesting from a design stand point. How did the product develop?We originally had a plastic microscope, but to produce a plastic one would have been too expensive. We had this boy, Sanjay, working with us. I don’t know if he had even completed his schooling, but he was very good with his hands. He started tinkering with it, and he made the first version of the microscope from bamboo. In the first model he made, he used a lever for the up-and-down movement. I said, “This cannot work, we cannot do this, think of something else.” When he made the second version, he replaced the lever with friction-based motion.

But we still had a lot of problems with the microscope. The people who were working in production also made many modifications to it. So it has evolved over 2–3 different stages. Sanjay played an important role in using friction for the up-and-down movement. Swami, working in the production team, made many major changes in the microscope as well. Currently, we have put it on hold, because we need to work on the quality control, but don’t have the time to invest in it.

If I talk about the bamboo microscope, I should not forgot to mention Anoop. He really helped us, not so much with the design part of things, but more so with the machinery aspect. Sanjay used to build each microscope with his hand. Anoop is the one who went and got a pipe-cutting machine and put it in place, so we can cut bamboo. Earlier

Ganit malas (arithmetic strings) before they are sorted and packed.

The ganit rack helps develop number sense up to 20.

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With our bamboo microscope, there was a lot of international demand for it, especially when it was featured in Nature. We felt we could make a bamboo microscope, maybe if we spent more time and energy to solve its design problems. Also, it becomes very expensive, it has around 30 components which have to be made and put together by hand.

You can talk about labour-intensive–that looks nice in particular circles, but then if making it costs too much money and energy and time, with the people making it needing decent salaries, it will also cost more. Then who will buy it? Only the elite will buy it. There is no point of making a product for the elite to buy or to export. Our focus is the local, internal need and demand.

You see the problems are not just the design, the whole mechanics has to be looked at –I think there are a lot of possibilities for the microscope. It was a really big challenge, it is now put on hold, and that’s not good–we should be able to do it. Although it’s not curriculum related, it has its own place.

CONCLUSIONThe inherent design in Jodo Gyan’s methodology is without obvious articulation. Their work is capable of inspiring design practices to recognize the value of intentions and ideals, and the natural occurrence of design processes as a means to translate intent into a tangible solution. The approach ensures that design is embedded in a specific context and is not an insular, rigid attempt at problem-solving. Through perseverance and dedication , Jodo Gyan has affected substantial social change internally within their organisation and community, and externally in the classrooms that they reach.

“ Somewhere you want to make an impact and make things happen. You either talk about innovation, or you can actually go and try and innovate and see what happens.”

The 5/5 grid Mathemat and the Rangometry set encourages free play while supporting pattern recognition and developing number sense.

Shreeya KurienShreeya Kurien lives and works in New Delhi.

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COLOPHON

Creating Change:Design writings from India

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Design writings from India