Image: Four volunteer coordinators and views of the class in session at the NID Paldi Auditorium in the morning and the post lunch session.
The theme of Food, Inflation and the Economy continues into the second batch for this year with the first batch at Paldi forming their groups and commencing work on their first assignment, mapping what we already know from our life experience. The subject and theme is Food and the four groups are to look at four assigned regions of India, namely:
Group 1: West Bengal
Group 2: Rajasthan
Group 3: Goa
Group 4: Uttarakhand
The members were drawn from all the participating disciplines namely, Animation Film Design (AFD), Transportation & Automobile Design (T&AD), Product Design (PD), Textile Design (TD), RMIT Exchange Students (RMIT), and Strategic Design Management (SDM 2nd year batch). We asked four student volunteers to step forward and act as coordinators and each of these coordinators was asked to choose one member by turn from each of the disciplines so that each group was composed of students from all disciplines. Each group has 17 members including the coordinator.
The four groups will now sit together and brainstorm to discover what they already know about the subjects of Food and their chosen region with an aim of developing a meaningful structure that could aid their deeper understanding of the subject at hand. Once they have categorized the words into an agreed structure the group would develop a metaphor on which they can locate their structure before making a presentation to the whole class which is scheduled for Wednesday (day 3) at 10.30 am in the Drawing studio on the second floor at NID Paldi.
In the discussions and the lecture that preceded the group formation we were able to discuss the massive changes that have been taking place in our understanding of design, both at NID as well as across the world. I was able to touch upon some of the directions with the use of my prepared models and lectures such as Understanding Design, the IDSA lecture titled “Giving Design Back to Society: Towards a Post-mining Economy” (download here the presentation pdf 812 kb) and my EAD06 lecture titled “Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education” (download pdf file of the paper 50kb and presentation 4.1 mb here) which was a description of the DCC course as it is offered to the Foundation programme at NID and its evolution at the Institute over the years. This gave us an opportunity to discuss briefly the role of the Bauhaus and Ulm schools of design in the shaping of modern design as we know it today and how this has been further transformed at NID and through the work of design thinkers across the world. In particular we referred to the contemporary books by Klaus Krippendorff – The Semantic Turn, Harold Nelson and Eric Stolterman – The Design Way, and the early work of John Chris Jones in shaping the whole area of design theory in the 60’s and through the mid 80’s as the movement in Design Methods and Design Processes. We used the Wikipedia entries on the subject by a quick web search using Google, very convenient indeed. I hope the students take the keywords discussed in class and connect with the larger history of design through their research on the web in the days ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment