DCC2009 Foundation: Focus on Sustainability

What is Design in the age of Global Warming?

DCC2009 Foundation: Focus on Sustainability
Prof M P Ranjan

Image: Foundation class of 2008 batch at the start of DCC2009 this morning in the new extended classroom.

The year has passed and once again we start with a new group of students in the NID Foundation programme who are looking at the Design Concepts and Concerns Course with interest and apprehension. We talked about this today in class and passed the mike around to hear from the students what they had heard from the NID grapevine about the course in the, good and bad, and the discussion was lukewarm. That is till we came to the current topics of interest, in the news, around the world and in India and about their awareness of these events and happenings and its importance to design education and action.

The ice was however broken when we talked about Slumdog Millionare, the movie and its effects being discussed in the media and in blogs about films and the Academy Award nominations. Heated debate followed and it gave us a window to show that on all issues we could hold different positions and some of these could be deep seated and others could be swung in one way or another based on the new data that was presented as well as the quality of the arguments offered in the debates that followed.

Image: DCC2009 class black board discussing “What is Design?” in the age of global warming and setting a stage for the theme of Sustainability.

The blackboard that emerged as Rashmi captured the words that emerged from various efforts of the students to try and define design show the slant that we have chosen to give this particular module. Students would be engaged in ‘visual sense making” as described by G K VanPatter in his NextD conversations and the focus of the course would be on the theme of Sustainability which we had started working on earlier this year for the World Economic Forum at the Design Charette in New Delhi followed by the NID workshop on Sustainability that culminated in the preparation of five posters on the theme which have been sent to Davos for the event on 29th January 2009 which we shall watch with interest. We talked about Victor Papanek and his visit to NID in 1979 as well as the India Report by Charles and Ray Eames in 1958 that makes this the 50th year of its writing. This gives us an opportunity to look back and look forward at India and its need for design in the context of the global financial meltdown as well as the global warming that makes the sustainability debate all the more important for all of us. The other words on the black board are self explanatory or can be cross checked on wikipedia and by google search..

Students have been asked to write their own version of the blackboard discussion and we hope to share some of the more interesting ones here on this blog tomorrow. We closed the day long session with the distribution of the two papers that I had prepared about this course, the first in 2002 for the Design Issues journal called the “Avalanche Effect” (download the paper as 55 kb pdf here) which was unfortunately not carried in the India issue that was published later and the second called “Creating the Unknowable” (download the paper as 50 kb pdf here) which did get accepted in the peer reviewed conference EAD2006 in Bremen, Germany in March 2005. We showed the Davos posters to the students briefly and we will discuss these in greater detail as the course progresses into the theme of sustainability in the days ahead. We propose to form groups tomorrow which will look at what the students already know from their lifetime experience about the topics assigned to them and the chosen topics are very political indeed, at least at the level of popular slogans in Indian politics – Roti, Kapada, Makkan, Bijili, and Rozgar – which stands for Food, Clothing, Housing, Energy and Employment in Hindi.

Image: A sneak preview of the five posters on sustainability which were sent to Davos was shared with the DCC2009 class.

Let us see how this course develops as we go forward from here. Promises to be exciting indeed.
Prof M P Ranjan

Assignment two: Disclosing the Self – Modelling the Discovery through Reflection and Introspection

Image: Slide from the EAD06 Show about the DCC assignment on “Disclosing the Self”

In the lecture and discussion held at NID Gandhinagar yesterday with the batch of thirty students in the DCC course we examined the nature of design as well as the attributes and characteristics of the designer. Design is an activity that takes place in a field of thinking and believing persons where a variety of belief systems and levels of understanding may prevail and this by itself would call for a great deal of sensitivity in the management of the intentions as well as the directions of the proposed outcomes. Technology is but one of the many considerations that the design teams would need to cope with and it may not be the most challenging aspect of the design task on hand. Social and cultural factors may play a significant role in shaping the intentions as well as determine what can be indeed offered as a solution to the perceived problems in the given context. Temporal factors too would have their own impact and one solution that was found valid at a certain moment may become invalid or even objectionable when the context would change with time and location. This makes the task of design truly complex and it has therefore been called “wicked problems” when the complexities are almost unmanageable using the usually accepted tools of logic, science and management.

Image: DCC Whiteboard from Gandhinagar, August 2007

In such a situation the designer too would need to know what the self is bringing to the situation, since all of us have our own system of beliefs as well as our abilities and knowledge levels which would in turn determine our ability to understand or empathise with the particular situation that is to be improved or changed. It is here that this assignment of exploring the self with an intention to discover and disclose comes into focus. The student is asked to reflect and introspect about themselves and attempt to try and plumb their memory and the boundaries of their consciousness about themselves in order to discover their true interests as well as the sources of their learning and belief systems in a whole range of areas that may matter in the process of design. Knowing ones strengths and weaknesses as well as interests may help in setting the learning agenda as well as help set priorities for what one would like to learn through reading and self study. It can also help motivate one to make the investments needed to change oneself in the area of skills, knowledge and most importantly in the area of the attitudes that one brings to the activity of design. It is here that the assignment may make sense in helping one reveal to oneself many aspects of our being and from this we may choose to disclose only a part of our experiences and beliefs but the journey would be useful in any case for the individual and their peers in the class.

Design is a reflexive activity since it is carried out in a thinking and acting field of persons who can and will react and this calls for a heightened level of sensitivity in the designer if we are to achieve a degree of satisfaction and closure. Charles Eames when asked a question about the nature of the boundaries of the design task he asked for the boundaries of the design problem. In a diagram that he submitted for an exhibit in Paris in 1969 he modeled the roles of the designer, the client and the society in a very insightful manner and stated that one could achieve real satisfaction only when the task fell within the overlapping zone of the interests of all partners. This amazing diagram or model of the “What is Design” can be seen here along with more about Eames at the Library of Congress archive.

My slide presentation and paper titled “Creating the Unknowable” which described this course at the EAD06 conference in Bremen 2005 can be downloaded from my website here. Link: Full paper 50 kb pdf file Link: Slide Show 4.1 MB pdf file