Dear Niladri Mukherjee, I saw your brief lecture at the Design Education Conference in Pune last year at the Vimeo site put up by the India Design Council. I agree that understanding of business and processes is critical to the unfolding of true value in design thinking and action. For this to happen design schools must recognise that these processes can be understood through the introduction of entrepreneurship in the design curriculum. However, the support systems here in India for the introduction of entrepreneurship is very limited. But design students have found ways to get around this through the setting up of small start up studios that offer consulting services and this is fairly common in graphic design. The other avenue that has been followed is working with crafts sector to deliver products in collaboration with local craftsmen and here we have seen textile and fashion designers build companies and brands quite rapidly. Boutique retail outlets have scaled and become well recognised brands. However, the design schools, particularly NID simply do not have studies of such work nor has the India Design Council done this. When we did a review of the NID curriculum in 1994 we did discuss these issues at length, but NID Faculty and the administration was not willing to change the rules to permit Faculty to run their own practice which was a strong recommendation at hat time. In 1988 my proposal for Faculty practice incentives was shot down by the Governing Council committee with inputs from senior faculty who believed that real contact with business would corrupt the faculty within the institute, very short sighted indeed, and we now are still in the same place. Even the NDBI located at NID does not permit Faculty to build or partner with their students in building new enterprises. This needs to change if design schools can come out of their studio mindset. See the 1994 NID curriculum at this link here. academia.edu/7990904/NID_Revised_Curriculum_Flow_Charts_1994
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 04:02:07 +0000
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