Fifty years ago a new independent India was born. Ten years into his administration, amidst the turmoil of “midnight’s children”, Prime Minister Nehru’s government invited Charles and Ray Eames to travel the nation, talk about design and recommend how it could shape India’s future.
What a far-sighted move. The now legendary India Report, with its disarmingly poetic allegory about the design of the lota – the classically perfect pottery water vessel unchanged for thousands of years – sets out the precepts for a modern design industry of polymaths with deep roots in culture and craft, new skills in design and broad, open minds to tackle the social and economic challenges facing India.
India today is reaping the rewards of the investment it made in design education when, following the Eameses’ Report, it established the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedebad, India’s nearest equivalent to the Royal College. Dr Darlie Koshy, the current Director, boasts proudly of his alumni, many of them now the creative brains behind India’s most successful business brands.
On visiting one of the country’s biggest independent design consultancies, Elephant Design, I discovered that all the partners met while at NID in the late 1980s. Another leading light of brand design, Sujata Keshavan, a graduate of both NID and Yale, affirms the importance of a rounded education which roots the best of western-style design practice within thousands of years of Indian tradition.
India’s savvy new industry is wide awake to the urgency and scale of its calling. Hot product designer Mukul Goyal explains that, “the future of design in India does not lie in the hands of designers but in the expectations of a billion people”. The point he and others make is that there are at least two Indias which are set to make very different but ever growing demands on India’s design and creative capabilities.
One India is the much vaunted success story with a 9.2% annual rise in GDP, a middle class of a quarter of a billion, 45 million graduates in 2007, and a twentyfold growth in US patents in the same year. In the other India, 500 million people rely on agriculture for survival, the majority in Bihar live in poverty, hand-loom weavers in Benares commit suicide as their livelihoods are lost to the mills, the road infrastucture can’t cope and the cities are choked. Both of these pictures are real and both, in different ways, offer huge design challenges.
Rapid industrial and technological growth is providing Indian design professionals with colossal and demanding commercial assignments alongside a live learning environment unparalleled in the West.
Retail designer Darryl Noronha from Retailscape has been working with Unilever to help transform the environments of 7,500 local grocers, or Kiranas so that these “Mom & Pop” stores become, for better or worse, effective channels to market for global brands. In another example, Elephant Design ran innovation workshops with industrial giant Kirloskar that led to a plan to re-vamp 100 products within six months and design 100 new products within the next five years. The examples continue across every sector from automotive and computing to banking and telecoms.
The surge in demand for design, from clients and consumers alike, has had interesting unanticipated consequences. There is a real sense that creativity and design are providing a new expression of Indian identity. This is largely at a national level but evidence points to it extending internationally, like Bollywood. For instance, in the UK, Kingfisher is a premium bottled beer while in India it’s an expressive brand competing successfully in the new arena of budget airlines.
Fabindia is a fair-trading, no-logo clothing and houseware chain that’s now opened in Milan. But in the rush to bottle and sell new India, writer, historian and creative guru Rajeev Sethi, who led the government’s taskforce on cultural heritage, sees a downside in the potential eradication of ancient traditions and crafts, many of which are unrecorded.
For a government wrestling with how to implement a new National Design Policy, the surge in demand from industry presents a potentially troubling capacity issue. On the one hand, TC James, from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, is seeking to establish new institutions, such as a new Indian Design Council to promote design to hundreds of thousands of SMEs. On the other, he is painfully aware that exponential growth in demand may be unsupportable by the design sector, even with predicted levels of growth from within education.
The increasing disparity in earnings between public-sector design teachers and professional designers raises added concerns about quantity over quality. The influx of western design consultancies may provide part of the solution. Firms like Landor are already important training grounds for indigenous talent. WPP has a good presence both through Fitch and its recent purchase of multi-disciplinary Bangalore consultancy Ray & Keshavan. Others are hovering. The right style of partnership will help to meet industrial demand and develop the sector.
Before leaving India I had the pleasure of speaking at the Designyatra, a mega design conference in Goa and the brainchild of entrepeneur and philanthropist Rajesh Kernwal. The event coincided with the religious Festival of Dahi Handi. at which young people traditionally gather to form improbably high human pyramids to smash clay pots full of rupees. It’s a re-enactment of a story about optimism, appetite, fearlessness and vitality – all very much in evidence within what is arguably the fastest-changing design scene in the world.
In more depthThis article originally appeared in
Design Week magazine on October 25