This article was published today in all the editions of The Statesman: Kolkata, Delhi, Siliguri and Bhubaneswar. My take on where design education is headed.
These are uncertain times. The pandemic is raging, the planet is in crisis and the economy is badly hurt. Solving issues like these need a visionary mindset for long term strategies and beginner’s mindset for creative, immediate solutions. This requires a special kind of problem solving talent. A Designer.
Design is the chosen profession that solves people’s problems and designers are increasingly seeing their role evolve from a form-giving activity and aesthetics to an involved, informed, problem-solving activity. All professional programmes are going through a churning, with priorities changing each passing day. Design is no different. The face of design is changing so fast that design education is trying to catch up with the requirements of the people and the evolution of this new role.
Design education has been primarily catering to the industry and is predominantly producing specialist professionals to create aesthetic artefacts that please customers and delight users. User-centric products and audience-centric communication are designed by professional designers who are trained to do that. Common design programmes in these institutions include Industrial Design, Graphic Design, Fashion Design and Lifestyle accessories design.
But all these trained professionals are asking themselves searching questions whether this planet needs this. Another chair, another shirt or another fancy object that pleases the eye but pollutes the planet. While conventional design education teaches this, several new institutions, world over are rethinking and repurposing the contents and the pedagogy of design education. New disciplines are emerging that is the need of the hour.
So fashion design is moving towards sustainable fashion, where you are trained to re-think materials and production processes to see how eco-friendly can the products be. Industrial Design is moving towards environment friendly products that are helping in creating a circular economy.
When the pandemic struck us all, industrial designers applied their talent to produce inexpensive oxygen generators, designed mobile medical facilities, developed products using AI and IOT , re-purposed train compartments into mobile hospitals, thus creating functionally sound and easy to use products catering to people’s requirements.
In the same vein, communication designers dealt with the surfeit of data and visualised them into easy-to-understand graphics and published them to shock and awe. Quick fix videos were made for stitching your own masks, spreading the impact of the pandemic and spreading the idea of healthy living.
The web was crawling with fake news and rumours and technology-led designers found ways to block unwanted messages, show agility and give the users a holistic experience.
How does design education prepare designers for roles like these? Design education has risen to the challenge and has identified required skillsets and mindsets that are incorporated into it.
- Product Design, not just objects of desire:
Product design education is turning it’s focus from making pretty objects of desire that contribute to the landfills and pollute the planet. Product design education now sits in the meeting point of society, culture and people. Social issues are tackled with equal ease using design thinking. Issues like battery-operated lamps for places without electricity and rollable tanks for providing drinking water to communities are just two examples what product designers are doing to make this earth a better place.
2. Interdisciplinary Design, not specialists but generalists:
Designers are now being trained to work in a variety of projects that showcase the plurality of the profession. They work with techies and managers, and grassroots artisans with equal ease, float new startup ideas and strategise, design a sustainable packaging for products, design campaigns for advertising and activism with same enthusiasm. There is a new discipline of Interdisciplinary Design that is evolved. It encourages a generalist approach rather than work in specialised silos.
3. Interaction Design, beyond UI design:
Designers are being engaged for User interface (UI) design for far too long and have been just pixel pushers. This is now changing to now developing complete experience design of interactions of people with devices, devices with devices like Internet of things, and people to people. Interaction Design is developing into a hot new design discipline.
4. Communication that integrates the old with the new.
The erstwhile communication designers dealt with pencils and picas, type and colour. Much of these are now available as templates and apps. The new communication design discipline is emerging as a bridge between analogue design and digital design, dealing with effective communication that includes areas like data visualisation, writing and reporting. It includes the moving images like video and film as much as photography. Designers are visually literate and communicate using the written word as much as the image.
To stay relevant design institutes are re-imagining the curriculum and pedagogy. New institutes of design in India have these new disciplines that are relevant and current. At JKLU, this is being addressed by sensitising the students in developing empathy, equip them with thinking tools like Systems thinking and Critical thinking, giving cross-disciplinary inputs, tech-embedded courses, liberal choice of courses, blended learning and emphasis on excellence.
Students are trained to show high level sense of ethics in developing safe products, responsible communication and immersive user experience and excellent end results. This may be the beginning of a new kind of designer, who will be ethical, enterprising and effective.
Prof A Balasubramaniam is the Director of the Institute of Design at JK Lakshmipat University, Jaipur. At JKLU, he has put together robust, new-age, Design programmes for UG and PG
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