Design is rarely ever mentioned when we discuss frugal innovation from India. This article in Livemint too misses the opportunity to do so. All of design for India has had to follow that route of frugal existance route since the support from government and industry has been focussed on technology and science over the past 60 plus years and the design efforts required over the 230 sectos of critical need have gone unaddressed by both, sadly. This must change and it should begin with a serious review of design work already done by Indian design community to measure what value the unfunded efforts have indeed brought to our society. Design has been flying under the radar here in India and this needs to change and change fast. While design has been fund starved the technology sector has recieved substantial investments from the first Plan onwards and with expoñential growth in each budget there after! In spite of all this we are in a sorry state after 60 years. Why? Designers, on the other hand, have addressed several of these needs and have created models that can be scaled only if only sufgicient funding is brought into both the early stage explorations as well as in rolling out of these innovations. NID has produced 3053 graduates in its 55 years of existance but it has not kept in touch with its graduates and over 200 other alumni to see what they have been doing across the world over the years. An extremely small number but my claim is that these small band of designers have made huge impacts that have yet to be measured. Many have created real value and this should be measured just like the EU has, which produced a recent report on how design can be valued. (See and earlier post for the report inquestion) this valuation exercise needs to be done quickly and inorder to do this we need to get inputs from all the NID alumni as well as graduates to make a data base of contributions and I am sure that this will show te tryevalue of design across the 230 sectors of our economy in desparate need with almost zero funding given to the design community who have done this. What do you think? The MHRD has issued The. Design Manifesto in January 2014 calling on all IITs and NITs under their charge to put design into all their course offerings. This initiative was spearheaded by Amita Sharma, IAS and I hope that her vision and spirit will percolate throught the IAS lobby and impact other Ministries as well, all of whom need design but do not know it yet, unfortunately. Let us hope that the tide is turning finally and we will see a greater focus on design in the years ahead. What do you think the design commuity can do here?
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 03:56:27 +0000
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