Dimensions Of Design

Meha Mathur Sep 29, 2022

The low-floor buses that enable small kids, the old and people in wheelchairs to board the bus with ease; the furniture pieces that take up limited space and serve multiple purposes (which proved so useful during lockdown period, with limited space at home); the mixers and blenders that ease up the life of the person doing the cooking chore, these are all the result of someone’s concern to make others’ life better. There was a problem, that person not only understood the problem but also thought of a solution and devised a product. This is the role of a designer, and thanks to their problem-solving approach, some great, user-friendly designs have come into being.

In India, starting from around the 1960s, with the launch of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and the Industrial Design Centre in IIT Bombay, the movement for great designs has gained traction, and now is a popular area of study and career. Praveen Nahar, Director, NID-Ahmedabad, says, “Many design movements across the world are as old as NID. Design as a profession also came up around the time when we established NID in India.”

A design is not confined to beauty or aesthetics, though that is always an added advantage. But the central function of design is functionality — to make day-to-day life better through better-thought-out products. A furniture piece that is great to look at but gives you backache is a waste of resources. A plain-Jane-looking building space might look uninviting, but it could have the ventilation just right for the season.

Aditya Lingam, a faculty of the Department of Design in the United world Institute of Design, Gandhinagar, provides another perspective and attributes the growing emphasis on design to the customised requirements of consumers, and people becoming very specific about what they want. He adds that the emphasis on R&D within the country, with a view to self-reliance, is also leading to this shift.

Central to the concerns of the designer community is also the ecological footprint and Praveen Nahar of NID talks of designing services instead of products so that there is reduced consumption. “There is also the larger concept of how you design services instead of products. This is a major shift, wherein, instead of buying a product, we buy a service, so that we don’t need so many products, like renting a car, or having community washing machines,” he says.

Today, design has varied dimensions. A large number of areas of study have emerged, some of which could be overlapping too. Some of these are:

•Fashion, apparel, accessory, shoe design

•Textile design

•Product design

•Automobile design

•Space and exhibition design

•Communication design (like graphics and animation)

•Information Design

•User experience design

•Game Design

The last two are especially gaining popularity. User experience design entails taking up a product, ascertaining its usability, and also branding. Game design is used not just for entertainment but also for digital educational tools.

Institutes

Besides the Mecca of design that is the Ahmedabad-based NID, several branches of NID have opened up, including in Gandhinagar, Bengaluru, Kurukshetra, Bhopal and Jorhat.

The hub of fashion technology that is the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) with its multiple centres, has courses in fashion design, leather design, accessory design, fashion communication and apparel production among others.

Design courses are offered by several IITs now. besides Mumbai, design programmes are also offered at Delhi, Kanpur and Guwahati, and IIT-BHU launched a Department of Architecture, Planning and Design a few years ago.

Communication design is also offered by universities like Jamia Millia Islamia, Sayajirao University, Vadodara, and university-affiliated colleges like the College of Art, New Delhi. Design programmes are also offered by private institutes like Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Pune; Unitedworld Institute of Design, Gandhinagar and Amity School of Design, Noida.

Interdisciplinary approach

Joining a professional course at an early age does not imply that one starts working in a silo. The discipline not only draws from engineering and technology but from social sciences too. Interaction with a person from a host of disciplines and an open mind to absorb from surroundings are extremely crucial to your own growth. As Aneesha Sharma, HOD, Department of Design at IIT-Delhi says, “Design is by nature interdisciplinary. At the core it’s user-centric,” adding that understanding the psychology of the user is involved, as well as an understanding of the material. Pratul Kalita of IIT Guwahati says, “We apply a lot of contemporary research like ethnography. On the basis of that research, in the Indian context, we have to come up with solutions.” The aptitude requirement is expressed effectively by Manasi Kanetkar, Assistant Teaching Professor of Design at IIT Gandhinagar, when she says, “You have to be a team player for sure. You have to appreciate what each stakeholder would want. You have to come together, be versatile in terms of outlook and need to look at the bigger picture. And you have to go to the tiniest detail at the same time. The detailing matters.”

Training Method

It’s a practical-oriented course with a thrust on hands-on learning and projects, rather than classroom lectures. Assessment is by way of jury following your project submission. The Covid-induced lockdown came as a litmus test but the design fraternity as a whole was swift to turn online. “Initially it was difficult to explain to students how different materials work. We had to first try out the alternatives ourselves, to be able to explain to students,” says Aditya Lingam. Demos were posted online, and students were encouraged to use locally available materials to come up with some innovative designs. At IIT Guwahati, one student from Bihar shared that stuck in his native place, he ended up making a simple tool to extract the crop of singhara from ponds.