Design and the Stories we know, tell and believe - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

From the time we are born, we start making sense of our world, we form ideas of who we are and what our world is. These become the stories we know and believe in. They are at the core of who we are. From a state of tabula rasa we are able to develop a paradigm which we use to outline our worldview. Everything we do bears the imprint of our evolving paradigm and our creations express it in different ways. 

Design is an activity as old as humankind itself; looking at fire and harnessing it for our needs can be seen as one of our earliest design acts. We have, through design, transformed our world in ways that have helped us evolve to our present selves. 

We have created a world of our making, nestled in nature and drawing sustenance from it. Our institutions, our belief systems, our knowledge systems. Our cities, our networks of various kinds, our buildings, our products. A complex ecosystem of interconnected parts which governs every aspect of our lives.  

We have created an environment that manifests our collective selves. 

Examine your city. Its markets, its roads, its hospitals, its services for the poor, its sense of wellbeing and safety, its institutions, its infrastructure. They are unique to it and are a testimony to the thoughts, emotions and stories of its inhabitants and generations of people who have passed through. 

Our many stories have crystallised into concrete forms and abstract thoughts. At all times our motivations have been rooted in a search for improvement. 

How we perceive ourselves, our values and our motivations are part of the paradigm within which we approach questions of ‘Quality’ and the meaning of ‘making things better’. This determines our needs and desires, the nuances of our likes and dislikes, our comfort zones. These in turn determine the form of all that we build.

Contemporary Design can be seen in terms of actualization of intent. An intent to make things better. It harnesses our stories to satisfy our needs and desires, to transcend the norm, to offer fresh perspectives, or sometimes, to help the coming together of diverse streams to chart new futures. 

Fulfilling needs and desires; creating experiences of value, usefulness and delight are the objectives of any design endeavour. Designers continually strive to recreate our human built world of cities, buildings, spaces, products, services and communication. 

Everything that we do to transform the natural world to our will. 

Quality of our offerings depends on the ways in which we are able to optimise all of the many variables determined by user needs, sustainability considerations, technological feasibility and economic viability and the ways in which we articulate them in new, better ways.

Crucial to any successful design solution is a nuanced understanding of the complexities of the problem space. With human beings in all their diversity at the centre of our scheme of things, ambiguity is ever present and gaining clarity of intent is an ongoing process.

Receptive and sensitive understanding of ambiguous, diverse and sometimes conflicting emotions of users offer design teams opportunities to gain insights which can lead to sets of objectives that can be addressed and translated into the many experiences that are embodied by all that we build. The stories that we know and tell reflect who we are and aid us in understanding our innermost desires. This is an invaluable tool for designers to make sense of the complexities of human needs and desires. What we deliver, in turn, adds to our individual and shared stories. 

Our human built world can be seen as the articulation of our collective stories. Our physical spaces, our systems of governance, education, commerce are built on shared stories that we learn to negotiate and add to. There is diversity and plurality here, and conversations. There are histories and an increasing awareness of the need for herstories. An evolving collection of ideas of who we are.

The stories that are woven into the environment that is our Earth and those that are reflected in our built world are the foundations of our individual stories and all together are an evolving design of great complexity. 

Design, when seen in these terms, belongs to all of us and modern design practice is co-creation involving a multitude of disciplines and more importantly, the intended users at all stages of the process of evolving fresh perspectives and articulations that inspire, delight and transcend. 

Ever evolving stories of the ways in which humans are ‘becoming’. 

AGI in India - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

Ajeenkya DY Patil University Published on Feb 06, 2019

Deepankar Bhattacharya, Academic Council, ADYPU, speaks how design has influenced our lives and the emergence of design thinking over the years. The National Institute of Design Alumnus has also contributed largely to start India’s first magazine on architecture and interior design - Inside Outside. On speaking about AGI in India, he said that conferences like these help us understand how graphic design has evolved over the years.

Design notes: 27-09-2018 - DeepankarBhattacharyya

Design Thinking is actually fuzzy, messy and non-linear where the ‘steps’ are ill defined and one doesn’t hesitate to go back and forth in search of meaning, clarity and solution. It can also be very participatory where decision making is de-centralised. 

The more rigid interpretation as a step by step process along with an expert at ‘empathy’ is one, which the new converts find handy because of their innate need to define things and analytically understand complexity. 

Will our fuzzy intuitive selves retain it’s essence and usefulness in the hands of those who must keep their eye firmly on results and deadlines; and prioritise these over innovation and creative output? 

Only time will tell whether there will be happy meeting grounds but a start certainly has been made.

Workshop on Design Thinking at Vishwakarma University - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

"The prime function of design is to make life better for human beings and this prime intent is at the center of form, function and context of design”. Mr. Deepankar Bhattacharyya, Strategic Design Consultant, conducted a workshop on ‘Design Thinking’ for B.A., B.Des and M.Des students. Mr. Bhattacharya designed activities for the students which helped them engage with issues of design and intent.

Design notes: 21-11-2016 - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

We try to enhance the experience of ‘users of the world that we humans build'. This could be for one's grandmother negotiating a complex metro system or getting one’s food delivered or even crossing the street with minimal chances of mishap. 

I really do think that Design schools have lost their way and teach very little 'Design' but quite a lot of 'Art'. This has its place but not more than technology, culture and a host of other inputs. 

Problem solving is increasingly human centred and is the reason why 'Design Thinking' is increasingly being adopted by other professions. Design is far too important in our lives, considering that we spend so much of it in environments that are human-made, to not be multidisciplinary. 

Design schools must evolve to embrace the complexity of modern systems that rely on advanced understanding of technology and sophisticated human psychology. Our world today is very different from the world of Bauhaus and Design has come a long way from the early days of 20th century 'Modernism'. 

Perhaps it is time to seriously consider introducing 'Design Thinking' in schools. 

What does Design mean to you? - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

Compiled from slides supporting a talk on the ecosystem of Design

Design notes: 07-07-2016 - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

Sorry to be such a spoilsport but the days of 'Design as skill' or 'style' has outlived it's usefulness. Traditional design schools are obsolete. Design encompasses processes that are being developed and rapidly absorbed by everybody. At long last Design is being led out of the hallowed portals of a kind of specialised thinking that essentially belongs to the industrial age and was an antidote to the times of extreme analytical thinking. Everything is far more holistic now. Design processes are being rapidly synergised with other processes. I am all for this and look forward to the demise of the sort of design school that has defined design over the past few decades. Those times are past, they have outlived their usefulness. I will go so far as to say that unless designers can redefine their roles in multidisciplinary teams they will no longer find a useful role. We have seen the most innovative and creative ideas come from the synergy between T shaped individuals who have their specialisation dovetailed into a very generalised understanding of wide range of subjects. I am working to make design a part of the vocabulary of every university student, I hope this happens to every school student. I am dismayed by the quality of output from the design schools who basically look at design either as styling or a very uninformed version of design for the web masquerading as user experience. 

They will, of course, be always needed for their skills. But Design is far too important to be left to them. May this sort of design find its place in problem solving teams without laying claim to the word 'Design'. At least not wholely or substantially. 

Fix your design schools. Drop the walls that you have built to protect your turf. The times, they are a changing. 

This was a response to a post on 'Design Educators in India - Facebook' from A.Bala Subramaniam - 'Is Design Education going the Engineering way in India? Every self-respecting University has announced courses in Design without having recruited faculty. No permissions needed to start a programme in Design from anybody. Curriculum development means cut-pasting from various sources. " The uninformed are teaching the uninformed" ( Don Norman). The best students take up UX jobs in spite of other specialisations. Is anyone else seeing the rot setting in?' 

Also see: 'What do I bring to the table? 

A note to self about 'Beginnings' - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

At the beginning there was NID. It was going to drive design in India; it was built on a remarkable vision and unstinting support from an idealistic government and a few forward looking financial partners. 

I entered a world of exploration of material, form, colour; workshops and drawing; photography and film making; general subjects; great products; new ideas; of understanding design methods and processes. Of hearing about the masters who influenced and shaped 'modern design'; meeting some of them, listening to them. All the while, every Saturday morning, with Gautam Sarabhai talking and teaching about the meaning of learning, of freedom, of responsibility. 

There was a pedagogy developing that was fresh and experimental; every body's viewpoint was important, there was going to be no hierarchy and emphasis was on learning, experimenting and doing rather than teaching. Spoon-feeding was absent and everybody was on a very new and open ended journey where solutions were being found on a daily basis and a culture was being established. One was encouraged to not compete with others but to improve on oneself. There were no barriers between learners and teachers and everyone was on a first name basis. The number of people on campus were very few, brand new contemporary equipment courtesy Ford Foundation was available for use. Faculty was being developed and were trickling in after their training stints in the various institutions abroad. Everyone was very into what everyone else was doing and there were no real distinctions between the departments; one generally learnt from everywhere and one dabbled in weaving and screen printing as much as animation and working on form exercises in plaster of paris and acrylic. One knew that exposure to music, cinema and dance was as important as keeping abreast of technologies and the socio-cultural environment. Political awareness - not that much. 

Was this too idealistic to survive? 
Was it possible to maintain this in the long term? 

Government of India thought 'NOT' and at some point decided to start asking for a much more result oriented, less ambiguous, less experimental, more repeatable way of functioning. Gautam and Gira Sarabhai left. They were still available to us old timers though. They would come anytime I called or needed guidance. 

Things started to get tighter; lucky for me, I could continue in the old ways for my six years and left. 

Am I happy that I went through this kind of learning experience? 
I had just turned 16 when I joined NID and I can truly say that this was the best thing that happened to me. 

Of course I wasn't prepared for the humdrum non existence of any design framework and the appalling lack of 'quality' outside of NID. Every day was explaining what 'Design' was and how I could contribute. 

I didn't join the advertising industry which would have been safe financially and which was kind of a sister profession if you could overlook its shallowness and a certain doubtful integrity. Imagine selling fairness creams or soaps that made you completely sanitised and germ free. If you were a designer and system thinker you would recoil at such notions. I did. Tall claims were not for me. 

Building a design ecosystem from the ground up was the need of the times and that's what one set out to do. All of us early birds did that in varying degrees and success. There were many casualties. Not many could muster the grit to face the never ending, sometimes overwhelming, absence of any light at the end of the tunnel. 

You wanted to give up, join a corporation and live like your buddies from IIM. By the way my contemporaries from that institution started out, like us, as rank outsiders. We would all start off at around Rs.1500/- a month and hugely resented by entrenched systems (mid 1970s). Everybody in middle management was 40 something and had come up through hard work and experience. They weren't going to listen to a 20 something mouth case studies from Harvard or in our case from the work being done by the design pioneers in Europe and USA. These guys from IIM worked really hard, were given impossible tasks, showed results and broke through with remarkable success. We designers were still out in the cold, no real need for us, you see. Blame it on an anti competitive market environment and confused ideas of pseudo-socialism of the times. The IIM wallahs overtook us financially very quickly. 

It didn't help that we were trying to do stuff that had roots in other cultures. 
I was trying to find an 'Indian' voice or at least trying to understand whether there actually was one or a need for one. Took many years to sort that one out. One trudged on and could, in due course, painfully slowly, build a more receptive environment and find demand for what one thought was acceptable 'Quality' and real 'Design' 

Cut to the 90s; computers and digitisation were changing the game, younger designers were poised to work the fledgling ecosystems of design that our generation had built; Dr. Manmohan Singh had done his thing and Design Thinking was being taught at business schools. India was, at last, ready for 'Design'.

So ready that it started to proliferate in epidemic proportions; everybody was or wanted to be into DESIGN. Well, a certain kind of Design but it's a start.  

You know the rest. 

I hope this article offers some perspective on where we come from and help to develop insights into future pathways for design education. Design pedagogy needs continuous evolution; we must pay more attention to it, much more than what we are doing presently. We must not become formulaic and close our minds to evolution, experimentation and change. Remember that had we thought too much about employment possibilities when we started out there would not have been a design ecosystem today. Take risks. We really do have a long way to go before design becomes a part of our everyday processes and life.


This one is for you M.P. Ranjan and for you Nilam Iyer Ghosh, two of my closest mates who decided to hang up their boots this year. 
See you on the other side. 

11 August 2015 

India and the copycat designer - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

Modern Design is human centric in the sense that it has always endeavoured to solve problems from a user's standpoint. It is sensitive to human concerns, ergonomics, sensibilities and aesthetics. 

Really?! 

Indian Designers educated in a system that developed and flourished in a completely different milieu got so caught up in their training that they forgot to try and understand the 'Indian' ecosystem. This has led to chaotic solutions that, far from solving problems, create untold misery to many people. 

Admittedly, this ecosystem exists on many levels and has a prominent 'International' dimension to it especially in the marketplace of desires and aspirations. Is catering to this alone, enough? 

A large majority of people who were hitherto unseen and unheard are joining the mainstream and are bringing with them habits, desires and aspirations rooted in a diverse and plural past. 

Designers must understand this if they are not to become irrelevant to the emerging processes and needs of a more comprehensive and democratic reality. 

We must embrace diversity and plurality and once again put the human being at the centre of our design processes. All human beings. 


Finding long forgotten 'voices' 

Originally a set of slides complimenting a talk at a Design Education seminar on the occasion of DDS15 at Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay, Mumbai on 15 June 2015 

Finding long forgotten 'voices'

Design Thinking - An Introduction by Deepankar Bhattacharyya

I use this framework for workshops and classes and adapt it for learners from different backgrounds and disciplines. Exercises are devised around the ideas presented here and interactive hands-on experiences are created to assist learners understand Design Thinking. 





Design Thinking - An Introduction 

A user centric approach to finding opportunities for design and for business - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

Start-ups commonly generate and develop an idea from their own point of view. They do not think from the consumer's point of view and often land up with an idea and business plan that does not create value or enhance the experience of the consumer. This can result in the prospective consumer not buying into the idea; with catastrophic consequences for the fledgling start-up. 

This paper outlines a methodology that I use in a workshop to find opportunities that address this issue either at the very start when opportunities are being explored or at a later stage when a promising idea requires validation. 

One can begin by mapping one's area of interest in broad systemic terms. Design methods show us how to do this visually and are explored as part of the workshop. In this example let us take a hospital or health care system.  

1. Map the components of the system - would include broad areas of administration, personnel, skill sets, equipment, physical spaces, buildings, statutory regulations etc. These will, further, have subsystems from the macro to the micro until one gets the component system map of a hospital that the end user accesses for her/his health care needs. This will include everything from parking, reception, various out-patient departments, emergency and trauma care to operation theatres, doctors and nursing to drug delivery and billing.

2. Map the relationships between the components - It is understood that all the components have some relationship with one another to be considered a part of the system. A relationship map will make visible the various connections and processes that are inherent in the system and which makes the system work. 

3. Map the processes and tasks that make the system functional - and enable the system to deliver on its objectives. This also makes visible the various interfaces between the system and its users whether they be the patients, doctors, nurses, administrators or utility personnel. 

4. Map user journey through the system - All stakeholders negotiate the system in different ways. In our example let us examine this from the patient's point of view. S/He parks a vehicle/enters the premises, goes to the reception and fills out his/her details and is directed to a department or doctor where s/he waits for a consultation. This may take the patient to other departments for tests and reports which may further lead to hospitalisation or out-patient treatment. S/He may also in case of emergency, be taken directly to the emergency or trauma centre.  

What happens to the user at each interface or point of interaction can be mapped and feedback loops made visible. The patient, in this case, has to follow a path through the system that is determined by the outcomes of her interaction at each point of interface. These can be mapped in terms of yes, no or maybe responses and form the basis of the quality of her journey. 

The doctor experiences the system quite differently as does the nurse or the administrator. 

Understanding the quality of the user experience in her journey through the system is vital to our understanding of the quality of the services that the system offers. 

People from different backgrounds in terms of education and socio-economic access, of all ages and at various stages of distress will have different needs and expectations. We need to know what they are and we need to address them. 

Listen to users as they journey through a particular system. Listen to the user articulate what they expect at each stage and their views on making the experience better. 

Do they feel welcome? 
Have the staff been attentive? 
Was the process of admission or billing too tedious? 
Was the wait for the doctor comfortable? 
Was the journey to the concerned department easily negotiated? 
Were they happy with their surroundings? 
Was the level of hygiene and cleanliness satisfactory?
Did the level of care inspire confidence?

5. User feedback will tell us where the problems are. 
Problem areas are opportunities to improve quality of service and add value.
Value that can be delivered by a business or design idea. 

Every interface between the user and the system harbours an opportunity. 
An opportunity to address a desire or a need that the user feels will enhance her/his experience

Business ideas can revolve around a product, a sub-system, a service but they must add value to the consumer if they are to succeed. And they must be sustainable within the community that is their ecosystem. 

Map the systems in your community or any area that interests you. Derive your idea from a felt need within the system or place your idea within the said system and evaluate it's efficacy. 

Does your business idea deliver value? 
Does it enhance user experience? 
Will the user buy into your idea? Why?


Deepankar Bhattacharyya conducts workshops for entrepreneurs and designers on using design thinking to find and map opportunities.
contact: deepankar(dot)post@gmail.com 

Design the 'little' things - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

There has been a trend towards looking at design in terms of planning, especially when it comes to design for social needs like delivery mechanisms in education, health, water, sanitation and other civic amenities. 

While there can be no doubt about 'design as plan' being a legitimate understanding of design, it is equally useful to look at design in terms of relationships between the user and the desired function. 'Design as relationships' is more subjective, more immediate, more human centred and more process driven. This approach is not usually considered strategic in nature because it is based on extension of and emanating from the user. 

It becomes a process of bringing desire, creativity and imagination as prime movers and leaders in the problem solving process. We have seen this approach work wonderfully in markets which are consumer driven and is becoming the norm in markets where competition is fierce and choices are plenty. 

Can we learn to find common ground and develop similar approaches in areas dependent on central planning and execution where a one size fits all approach necessitates solving for a median level of defined function? 

Most of our approaches to problem solving were developed in the industrial age and we have carried them over to this information and communication age. Technology drives 'game changing' design and contemporary technologies demand that we look at problem areas with fresh eyes.

The area of health delivery is waiting for innovative approaches that is not wholly dependent on the Allopathic system and the pharmaceutical complex. Focus on health rather than cure may allow us to deliver holistic approaches that can bring knowledge to people, knowledge that helps prevent disease and affect cure from the vast database of information in the realms of the many different approaches to medicine including Ayurveda, Homeopathy, Herbal etc. Work is being done in several research centres on systems medicine and alternative medicine. Approaches that focus on decentralisation of care and reduce dependency on large investments in hospital infrastructure. This is not to say that hospitals with leading edge research and equipment will not find a place in the scheme of things, but sustainability and affordability could drive delivery mechanisms to bring health care to everybody. Multiple layers of diverse health professionals who interact with each other across systems of medicine and whose focus is 'health' not 'cure' is possible in this day of the Internet and the ability to tap into vast reservoirs of knowledge at the click of a mouse. 

What happens when the human being and his/her relationship to health is put at the centre of the design and planning process? 

Enabling individual access to knowledge from all streams that contribute to wellness at the level of family and community can lay the foundations. Links between sanitation, life style, food and health need to become visible. Professionals who are versed in the ways of multi and inter-disciplinary knowledge about health can catalyse this approach to enable access to health delivery to everyone. 

When added to the existing infrastructure of hospitals and big pharma this approach can take the load off our overburdened health services.

Another area that can benefit hugely from an alternate viewpoint is education, especially in those places where resources are severely limited. The current approach tends to look at the education delivery mechanism as planning for the various components of the system and delivering on each as optimally as possible. 

You have the buildings; the curricula; the teachers trained to 'teach' in a certain one-way dissemination of knowledge kind of way; the amenities comprising sanitation facilities, playgrounds, mid-day meals etc. One then assumes that all of this together will educate a curious child. 

Sugata Mitra's work on minimally intrusive education has shown us what can happen when children are left alone with a computer and an Internet connection. 

You can download his Self Organised Learning Environment (SOLE) Toolkit here

This kind of problem solving starts with the child and her/his relationship with learning. Understanding of this relationship gives birth to a system that nurtures and enables it. Design in this context focuses on the process of learning and the solutions that emanate are also in the nature of processes; emphasis is not so much on the components as on the relationships therein. 'Design as plan' takes on a whole new meaning and new interpretations are possible with human centred relationships acquiring primacy even at the strategic level. 

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) are beginning to revolutionise learning and demands re-evaluation of the university system and over-reliance on traditional degrees from reputed institutions as entry level requirements for our young. I have been studying some courses offered on the MOOC platform and the experience has been eyeopening. The level of collaboration with an international peer group that is possible, was for me, astonishing. This has led me to begin working on courses that I can offer in this way.

Design institutions in India should take the lead in democratisation of India specific design education, there are some fine examples of design courses coming out of some of the online centres of learning around the world. These courses permit high levels of collaboration and group learning. Most of them are free. 

This approach can be extended to all areas of interface between us and our environment and completely change the ecosystem in which we spend our lives. Services that are built around our essential attributes of curiosity and imagination can lead to creative and innovative interactions that deliver much more than our current systems ever can. Our present systems are outdated that are collapsing under their own weight, they are unaffordable to most and they are extremely harmful to our natural environment. 

Newer technologies and post-industrial thinking that shifts focus from objects to information and communication driven service, from centralised and one-way monologues to interactive multi-dimensional dialogues and conversations will help evolve problem solving methodologies that deliver results which are more relevant to our times. 

What happens when we adopt similar approaches to the justice system, to mass transportation, to people friendly responsive models of governance? 

The tools available on the Internet including collaborative spaces and knowledge bases are asking for facilitators who have the vision to harness them towards changing the very essence of our built world and the way we live and interact. 

The design and planning taught in our institutions depend too much on an idealised view of what is desirable and ways to achieve such a state. This to a large extent depends on a desire for 'perfection'. This approach has its roots in the complex mechanistic needs of an industrial society, ideas of perfection and beauty that made palatable the world of mass produced objects that it spawned and later reflected a disenchantment with a world that was increasingly separate from nature as the ecosystem of all living things including homo-sapiens. 

Current leading edge technologies in nano, bio and digital including ones in the realm of information and communication promise a radical re-visualisation of the world we build and the systems that we put in place. Algorithms and sensor technologies are on the verge of creating artificial intelligence and smart objects that will further change the way we can deliver on design goals. 

Human-centric relationship models built on individual capacities for thinking and imagining and accessing information and building knowledge can become the foundations for systems in all spheres of our lives. Individual choice and control become drivers for collective harnessing of resources to power a society that is equitable, just, responsive and creative. Quality education; universal access to health services; equitable delivery of justice; responsive governance; universal access to clean energy, water, air and natural resources will need rethinking at a systemic level. 

This paper attempts to articulate a possible approach to it. An approach that brings centre-stage the little things that are of concern to all of us at an individual level. The little things that make us human; that harness our minds, our imagination, our deepest selves; and enable creative and fulfilling lives.

Changed Times... Changing Concerns... - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

It was convenient and appropriate to set up NID under the Ministry of Industries in 1961. Design was all about products and we were 'modernising' with zeal, industry was the way to a dream of a new and resurgent India. We were going to design and manufacture products using the latest in technology, we were going to build environments that reflected a 'modernism' that we had bypassed because of the circumstances of our history. And we were quite certain that we, all of us from every strata of society would benefit. The temples of modern India were the core industries, the dams and nuclear plants, the centres of learning that had the scientific method as their rationale for being, infrastructure for health, defence and institutions for good governance and furthering of democratic ideals. An ambitious effort was underway and no, no one had forgotten the cultural side, there were efforts to preserve, study and build on our ancient traditions of art, craft and cottage industry.  

In Ahmedabad, we also had the National Institute of Design, which was going to do something at the interface of craft, technology, art, ergonomics, systems approach to problem solving and human needs to basically make products of everyday use preferably in an industrial setting. To this end they had departments of product design, graphic design, textile design, furniture design etc. They interfaced with industry and the government on live projects. Also outreach programs to spread awareness of design along with intervention in craft clusters with the aim of documenting, modernising and marketing. They also started a process of education and training of people at various levels including school leavers to produce a group of dedicated professionals who would carry the activity of design into every part of Indian society.  

This is what they, by and large, continue to do. Of course they have changed with the times, they have introduced newer areas of study, they have incorporated new technologies and they have, to an extent, tried to cope with an India that had changed unrecognisably. They are even trying very hard to cope with new meanings of 'design' itself, not proactively enough as some would want, but with an air of not always reluctant promise, that encourages. Their alumni have spread far and wide in many niches of activity where they have contributed, sometimes with breathtaking brilliance at other times with whimpering ineptitude, but mostly with quiet efficiency. They have seen other centres of design learning and practice crop up, some very very good and vying for top honours and others covering a wide spectrum from excellent to 'rip-off'.  

Indian Design, thankfully, has always been more than NID, many of the good things that have been happening here have come from people who were always outside the sometimes high walls of this institution and a great deal, especially in the realm of unconventional and breakthrough ideas, is owed to them or to those who may have studied at NID or worked there for a bit and then went and did their thing. The latter, because of the connection, became unwitting brand ambassadors for NID without the corresponding benefits. Some of these people have been talking about paradigm shifts in design learning and practice. They have seen the effects of design thinking in unusual niches of activity and have been keen to look at design outside the confines of industrial and communication products. I must acknowledge here that there have been some members of the NID community who have kept an open mind and have contributed in no small measure to furthering these ideas. 

There has, in the wake of the government wanting to set up more NIDs, been some discussion recently about visions for design in India and the brand equity that name may be able to generate in monetary terms. I will not dwell on the details, more information can be found here.

Design has moved much beyond the realm of industry and products. It has shown its usefulness in every human activity and some of us have long argued that education institutions revamp their curricula to reflect the new realities. Those of us who want to see new and relevant visions of design in India have, perhaps, to approach the problem from outside the entity that NID has become and the limitations within which that brand can multiply itself. For one thing design education should, even within government initiatives move to departments other than industry, like rural development, health, infrastructure building, culture etc. NID can't do this while remaining a part of the ministry of Industry. This ministry has a mandate and must use all its resources to fulfill them. The broad design framework it understands has to do with industry and business and this has, unfortunately in my opinion, been the basis of the National Design Policy. The other departments of the government do not see design as something that they should and can incorporate into their scheme of things.  

This national design policy should, more appropriately be looked at as the national design policy for industry.  

It would, without doubt, benefit everyone if this policy is implemented in the industrial space. I, however, think that design needs to outgrow this space, to be truly national it needs to proactively build on the possibilities it brings to enhance our lives in all areas of our environment and our activities. Human environments are complex, many layered and full of meaning and effort. The sort of 'design' that NID, the ministry of industry and, increasingly the newer institutions of design teach and practise is but a small part of the spectrum.  

We have been arguing for a broader vision of design but have we been amiss in thinking that the ministry of industry is the place to go to?

I think so, I also think that private players need to play a larger role. Let us not forget that some of the finest institutions here and abroad have been built in the private space. Let us also not worry too much about NID's brand equity, we all have worked to help create it, many of us have moved on. Let us leave that institution to continue the good work it has done and strengthen its core areas of competence, however they may choose to define it. There is a whole new horizon coming up and the terrain is full of promise. Let us start from a fresh perspective; design is creating itself in so many new ways in surprising niches. Some of us have been developing our visions and ideas for a long time now, we need to find support and funding. This may come from sources that we have not considered but I sense an optimism and a fertility in conditions that may allow a variety of effort to actualise.

Towards articulating visions of design education in India - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

There is a buzz in the design communities in India, especially among those who have had something to do with NID and are miffed that they have not been consulted on the setting up of four more institutions bearing that name in different parts of this large and diverse land.

I am an alumnus of NID from the first batch, an endeavour that was started with a dream and unbounded hope and enthusiasm. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gautam and Gira Sarabhai, Pupul Jayakar along with Charles and Ray Eames laid the foundations of what was envisaged as the premier institution that would drive modern design in India. I do not use the term 'modern' lightly, modern design anywhere in the world was barely 35 years old when the India Report was written in 1958. We had had a taste of what rational thinking could do to the built world as early as 1951 with Corbusier's Chandigarh exploring sensibilities and thought that was definitive of this kind of modern thinking. A leap of faith, dreams of Utopia, a belief in modern thinking and a desire to catch up with other parts of the world prompted the commissioning of American planner Albert Mayer, with his associate Matthew Nowicki to build this city. The sudden demise of Nowicki brought Le Corbusier into the picture and he turned out to be a perfect complement to Nehru's visions. A vision of the modern, of Utopia, of entitlement for the poor and of Indian-ness that was being articulated in the policies of that time had been brewing in the prime-minister’s mind for quite a while.

This Nehruvian vision became the backbone of much that defines our early independent history.

NID was a part of this vision; it started to get a form in 1961, three years after the India Report. By 1970, the year I joined, it was felt that post-school education to train designers needed to be part of the mix along with projects, industry linkages, craft intervention, outreach activities etc.. That it took so long to happen was symptomatic of the times and was actually quite normal. We were, as H. Kumar Vyas our first dean and later head of the Executive Committee liked to say, the 'guinea pigs' in the start of this experiment that was unique in many ways. Gautam Sarabhai had fresh and innovative ideas on education, interesting people from all over the world would visit and we knew that we were in the middle of something that had never happened before and rarely since.

That experiment floundered in subsequent years on the realities of inadequate finance, quality of participants, changing government policies and the demands of an under-developed market economy. Government control, their distrust of individual initiative and their sometimes misguided if well intentioned lip service to socialist ideals bankrupted the economy and produced a generation of individuals and businesses who had no real initiative or motivation. It built a mammoth system of corruption and lethargy and a power structure that was not answerable to any rule of law.

The world has changed radically since then. The main camps driven by capitalist, communist, socialist or non-aligned ideologies have all but disappeared. The entrepreneur in the Indian has been unleashed and the distrust with which wealth has traditionally been viewed in Indian society and government is a thing of the past. Central control, license raj and the role of the government in everything from industry to health and education has been modified forever. Individuals, collection of individuals, trusts, associations, cooperatives and corporations are at last finding outlets for their initiatives and creativity in all fields.

Also in Education.

We are far more globally connected; the internet has empowered the individual to access information and communicate his/her views on anything.

The Indian caste system has lost its grip on our collective psyche; many sections of society who were traditionally at the bottom of the heap have found their voice and the means to get ahead.

Indian craft scenes have changed unrecognisably, it is difficult to find the 'Eames lota' in everyday use, it has been replaced by the colourful plastic variant that has put the potter out of business. Crafts are well on the way to joining the world of big business and brands, with the craftsperson struggling to redefine his/her role. Indian industry and services are maturing rapidly. Indian corporations are becoming multinational.

Urbanisation has become an unstoppable force and inequalities have formed stark lines of conflict. Environmental concerns have never been so urgent and the desire for upward mobility and the improvement of one's surroundings is being felt at all levels of society. 

Has the time for 'design' to play a much broader role in our lives finally come?

Notions of 'Quality' have changed radically. Post-Modern attitudes and easy exchange of cultural influences have forced us to think afresh on questions of good, bad, desirable and possible.

Indian Demographics have the young in a majority and the promise of them staying that way for some time to come. They do not carry the baggage of past ideologies, hopes, attitudes and conflicts.

Neither do they believe that you can plan their lives for them. That you can plan their education for them. That you can tell them what and how they should be thinking. They are connected to happenings in other places and they have aspirations that are fresh and sometimes radical. Even in the village.

The pace of qualitative change is ever increasing and a generation that did not experience it in their childhood cannot possibly appreciate its meaning. Our students are barely being prepared for today's challenges and who amongst us has glimpsed what is to come?

I know that we must 'let a hundred flowers blossom' to quote Mao (with none of his penchant for executing dissenters ;0) and be open to the changing meanings and directions that 'design' and design education is taking. The four new schools of design being envisaged must be open to new ideas, must be experimental in nature, must be different to one another and must be trusting of all sections of society.

India is a complex place, there is no 'one' India. The India at the bottom of the heap is nothing like the India of sophisticated markets. The India in modern urban centres is very different from the India steeped in tradition and folklore. There are many ways of 'seeing' and 'understanding' that exist simultaneously and enrich us. I hope that all of this difference can be celebrated and can be part of our guiding principles when we articulate our visions for the new centres of design learning. I also hope that we bring humility to our deliberations with the sure knowledge that we cannot fully comprehend the complexities at play and that the future has a way of shaping itself in ways that can never be second guessed.

Thoughts on a rapidly evolving interface - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

2011 is here and while we were doing whatever we do in the normal course of our lives, events of considerable import have been making new and startling connections.
It may be interesting to dwell on one of them.

Technologies and software vendors are about to harness the power of many-core processors, enabling mind boggling output within the same space as occupied by the relatively few that are used today. At ever lower energy consumption. This coupled with something that is ten times faster than flash memory, is half as expensive, needs less energy and retains its state even when switched off. The world of 'memristor' and the instant 'on' computing device with no more boot ups! Add some of the other developments across the spectrum of information and communication technologies such as cloud computing and HTML5 and we have a recipe for radical and worldwide transformation.

Mobile phones have reached everywhere and most families, even in rural India, have them. There are approximately 700 million connections; our population is just over a billion. Telecom is rapidly converging with information and communication technologies, 'phones' can do a lot more than what was dreamed of in the last decade.

Information, Communication, Interaction, are fast becoming the foundations of everything that we do. Soon enough, there will be no place that is so far as not to be in instant and constant connection with everything else. Via a multiplicity of devices, cheap and energy efficient devices that will be the defining characteristic of our environment. Our world will have a layer of rapidly evolving thoughts and meanings that will permeate every one's consciousness. Everyone will be talking, sending messages and images, looking at each other's lives on a scale that will make today's communication networks look elementary. Everyone will be creators and distributors of news, ideas, entertainment, pornography and art, the line dividing the producer/disseminator and the consumer will be blurred and, the roles interchangeable and shifting. Many new ways of interacting with information and with each other will add dimensions that lie beyond our imagination.

The contexts of modern design has evolved from craft technologies to science technologies to knowledge technologies, India has all of these co-existing side by side and in interesting mixtures. We involve ourselves in a diversity of projects across these contexts. We may work at the level of strategy and decision making or on the shop floor and implementation but we make products or offer services that help in product making - hybrids of communication/industrial/craft systems and products and through them help create usable environments that sometimes delight and sometimes frustrate.

All very well, but what happens when the context defined by knowledge technologies and economies progress to contexts defined by information, expression and social interaction - every body's changing thoughts, emotions, expression, opinion and neuroses.

Culture and the memes that are its repository have traditionally had their roots in geographical locations and specific communities, they play an important role in defining world views and is a paradigm which informs us of the basic contours within which our senses learn to make sense of our world. Cultural traditions come from way back and have traditionally formed the backbone of perceived realities within which we create and express ourselves. Our arts, rituals, habits, all have a strong connection to it. It isn't a static thing; it imbibes information from other cultures and grows to make these new influences its own. Thus far, different cultures have been able to retain an individual sense of self even while changing with the impact of meeting other cultural influences.

One characteristic of a globally connected world is the ready availability of different cultural inputs at the click of a mouse. This facility, when available to the young in their formative years has a profound effect on how they see and engage with their world. You cannot de-construct before you have constructed.

Does this lead to acultural paradigms of sensory development or perhaps, more appropriately, a complex global culture, more uniform than not? This paradigm is likely to be far removed from the myths and fables that sprung from our encounters with the vagaries of the natural world and our specific geographical contexts or the sensory archives of our immediate ancestors. Human experience or more correctly, individual experiences as expressed through various new media from across the world will shape the new cultural paradigms. This is a qualitative change from what we are used to and will probably impact on design education and practice in a fundamental way.

Notions about 'Indian-ness' are under enormous stress.

Already, that repository of Indian sensibility that is/was seen in our craft traditions has been reduced to mere decoration and serve to identify a certain quaint prettiness that one uses to decorate one's homes. How the mighty have fallen! These ancient and rich traditions, expressions of core visions of reality, honed over centuries and definitive of a people's sensory history have, now, a utility that is best appreciated in the isolation of a decorative curiosity.

The Hindu caste system, that great stabilising influence of our societies in the face of impossible odds and intertwined memetically with the making of our objects of use, our built world, our crafts, has faced the demons of its inequalities, its foundations of slavery and oppression, its ruthless subjugation and static, mind-numbing immobility and is, thankfully, on the way out. It is a pity that our custodians of craft culture find freedom and dignity at the cost of having to relinquish age-old activities. 

The potter's wares have no more takers, multi-coloured plastic pots have found acceptance and are seen in abundance, his children migrate to towns and cities to work at construction sites and factories in search of sustainable incomes and upward mobility, mechanisation of farming has put the metal worker out of business, the weaver has no work. It is the same story everywhere. The young workforce is looking to find higher incomes to improve their living conditions and to put their children through an education, they go out and bring back new ways - change is visible in everything from the clothes they prefer to the foods they eat or the music that stirs their souls.

The new sensibilities that seek to find acceptance and validation make attempts to find connections with ancient sensory traditions and new and enormously interesting avenues open up. Designers are uniquely placed to pursue these and to develop new languages, new stories and bring them to bear on the world of objects that are their domain.

Along with a few other 'more universal' things...

It will not be long before everyone has the means to send out as much information as they receive - their thoughts, needs and desires. Solutions will need to be interactive and personalised to suit the desires of individuals who are now consumers and creators in equal measure; flexibility will need to be built into products and spaces that will tend to be multi-functional. All of them will essentially be information and communication devices that can be programmed to deliver experiences.

When our individual perceptions, thoughts and ideas begin to find easy translation into the 'information & communication atmosphere' we, all of us will begin to have a more direct relationship to the shape of the worlds that we will live in. A complex, democratic, highly personalised built environment...

Technologies are becoming cleaner, cheaper and energy efficient
Desired and interactive experiences are more readily amenable to be conjured up via cheap and omnipresent devices in our environment
A very high degree of personalisation to suit every need and mood is becoming the norm
Notions of 'Quality' are being recognised as subjective, good design is efficient design that can deliver what 'I' want
Everybody has to be part of the process of design development, because everybody participates in actuating the product deliverable

I see design moving from product to process, from form to experience, from consumption to collaboration.

Everything, from delivery of medical facilities to education to governance to the tapping of utilities is going to undergo massive change and will demand re-definitions at a conceptual level.

How do these developments, among several others that can be enumerated and should be discussed, impact on design education and practice?

I think that we need to debate the changing realities and discuss ways to bring design education more in line with emerging design possibilities, there is little point in preparing our students for yesterday's challenges.


New Delhi, 01 January 2011

What do I bring to the table? - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

Professor MP Ranjan of NID has been instrumental in bringing to us 'LOOK Back – LOOK Forward: HfG Ulm and Basic Design for India' (see his blog). After Bengaluru, he along with Prof Suchitra Sheth, CEPT University, Ahmedabad, chaired a conference in Kolkata (28 September 2010), the organisers for which were National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad – in collaboration with Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata, HfG-Archive Ulm & IfA (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, Germany) Stuttgart and Rabindranath Tagore Centre, Kolkata (ICCR). 

I was invited to participate in this conference, particularly the panel discussions on 'Multi Institutional experience of Basic Design and pedagogy propositions from experiences in design education' and the breakaway group discussions afterwards. 

There are many shades of 'Indian Design' and different institutions and individuals have been working across a diverse spectrum ranging from 'craft centred design' to the newer 'experience and interaction centred design' with a range of others including 'styling and form centred design' somewhere in between.

Basic design courses have been focused on learning the stuff that designers apply to their design projects by way of the senses, skills, materials, thinking, knowledge etc. Starting with foundation courses, institutions continue this process for around four years while gradually increasing the emphasis on applications of this learning in design projects.

Participants spoke about their experiences of teaching and learning basic design across the diversity of our pedagogical landscape. There are institutions where learning is centered around materials like wood, clay, stone, textiles etc., there are others where the learning stems from the needs of our craft ecology or the needs of our industry, there are still others who have jettisoned the idea of 'thinking with the hands' altogether, and concentrate on the interfaces between computers and budding designers and there are those who focus on the aesthetic or the senses.

They all have one purpose - to enable young designers to work on design projects and to enable them to earn a decent living.

The fact that we, in India, have such diversity is heartening and this opportunity to formally interact with others from across the spectrum, was for me, gratifying, particularly because I have been teaching design at various institutions and interacting with students from a variety of backgrounds who were learning to work in a diversity of environments.

I have, at one point or the other, been through the shades of emphasis that are being practiced today and appreciate the value that each one brings. My own current paradigm sees design moving from product to process, my emphasis is more on structure rather than form. I value the iterative process where 'thinking with the hands' helps to explore possibilities and approximations that lead to the 'eureka' moment, when 'design thinking and doing' lead to great design solutions.

Design is changing in fundamental ways. Paradigm shifting technologies along with systems driven by information and communication are giving us opportunities to redefine our world in exciting ways. What do I bring to the table where more and more professionals from other disciplines employ 'design thinking' or an interesting understanding of it and design projects have complexity that require many different inputs from many areas of human activity?

It is not an easy question to answer, but I think that working on it may well lead us to greater understanding of the needs of basic design education in contemporary contexts.

What do I bring to the table?

 

Revisiting reductionist aspects of design in the time of holism - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

Just the other day in Bangalore, I viewed an exhibition titled ulm: method and design/ ulm: school of design 1953-68 and attended a conference titled - LOOK Back LOOK Forward: HfG Ulm and design education in India. This was organised by National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad and Bangalore in collaboration with Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan (GI/MMB) Bangalore and HfG-Archive Ulm & IfA (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, Germany) Stuttgart.

The experience took me back nearly 40 years to my days as a student at NID, to a time when the world was a simpler place and notions of sustainable growth, ecology and alternative lifestyles were fringe phenomena worthy of either contempt or rebellious adulation depending on how young you were.

There was a prevailing notion of quality and beauty born of rigorous study, analysis and application of the fundamental elements of design, a striving for simplicity, cleanliness, efficiency, objectivity and economy. A rational extraction of principles that governed form, space, structure and colour, coupled with sound technological insight and their application in the making of solutions towards the fulfillment of human needs was seen as a watertight methodology for dealing with the problems of our world. For many older designers here, it still is.

During my initiation, I stood a little past half-way between the beginnings of modern design methodology and the present. The momentous happenings of the first half of the 20th century, the masters who had been spawned at Bauhaus and Ulm, the various movements that built on and from these two institutions as well as the one in Chicago, the seductive simplicity and cleanliness of the international style along with whispered mutterings of discontent was a fertile backdrop for my learning 'design'. Rem Koolhaas was about to happen and the established relationships between form and function were being revisited. Composition, scale, proportion and detail were beginning to become unfashionable. A new realism was being born.

Notions of 'quality' were being challenged, realisation that people could actually be happy anywhere and 'well designed' habitats had nothing to do with it was turning established notions upside down, existing definitions of up and down, north and south were being seen as quaint perceptions of preconditioned thinking. The crisis of faith in the soundness of prevailing notions of 'progress', development and 'the better life' was stirring the young to newer forms of expression. Peace, Freedom and Love were worthy goals to strive for, as were sustainability and animal rights. The predominant view of reality was expanding and transforming, so was the meaning of design. Well, not officially of course, because a lot of this was still heresy.

On the way 'Out' were the structured environments and forms that were the offshoot of function. 'In' were adaptable organic forms that enabled a multiplicity of functions, many unplanned for.

The consumer was becoming a proactive player in the making of meaning and interactive processes were beginning to determine design outcomes.

This explosion in consciousness has now accelerated manifold in a globalised world driven by information and communication. Humans everywhere are touched by events happening anywhere and 'design for complexity' is having to formulate new principles - the simplicity and reductionist nature of forms born in the last century and the design pedagogy that grew around them appear unrecognisable. It is like looking at design at an atomic level and seeing the development of its very DNA, the building blocks of what we do. One sees the beginnings of all that is commonplace in our methodologies today and the historical movements focus into a new perspective.

As one revisits these times the polarities melt away and the reductionist and holistic aspects of the complexity of 'design' settle into a seamless whole. One sees that the 'one' doesn't exist without the 'other' and that both must be incorporated into one's design process. It is the very certainty at the level of 'micro' that enables the organic fluid flexibility at the level of 'macro'.

The intangible relational possibilities that we design today needs mastery over component design if we are to create meaningful and effective systems where 'quality' can be nurtured and human aspirations find freedom to actualise.

I thank the organisers for bringing this exhibition to me and allowing me this cobweb clearing look into the times of my youth as I renew my faith in what I do and hope to do. I thank the masters at Ulm and elsewhere who gave us so much that form the foundations of modern design (such a pity, that younger designers who haven't bothered with history do not understand the origins and development of so much that is commonplace in their methodologies).

Reductionist and Holism are but perspectives that give insight and allow understanding of complex processes and help us to develop the tools to design our worlds of increasing complexity.

Design Thinking for 21st century Designers - Deepankar Bhattacharyya

Design thinkers from Leonardo da Vinci to Buckminister Fuller and everyone else who did not suffer the effects of education systems that lead to development and articulation of linear and fragmented thinking will have reason to smile.

'Design Thinking' is fashionable at long last. As the last remnants of specialised thinking, so useful in the industrial age, begin to die a natural death and business discovers the value of holistic thinking in the creation of wealth, an era spanning roughly 200 years comes to a close. Left-brain thinking that changed the way we built our worlds and conducted our affairs is ready to consolidate its gains and give back the world to holistic paradigms that do not see reality in terms of dualities.

But, what is this design thinking? Is it still teleological as was practiced by 20th century designers?

I am afraid it is, and as other disciplines move to embrace it with enthusiasm, designers themselves are grappling with the realities of uncertain ends and the limits of causality. The popular idea of 'Design Thinking' resides within the realm of an Aristotelian universe.

Designers have always been concerned with the human dimension and unlike engineers, treat the human as central to the design process. In a post-modern world where diversity of world views and cultural complexity brings us in touch with peoples who do not live an Aristotelian view of reality, design as teleology becomes vulnerable and must be questioned.

It is no longer given that the form of the end product is clear and designers need only solve for it. End results are no longer clear, that is why innovation becomes key to problem solving. This implies that design process adapts to producing fuzzy solutions that are completed by the consumer. The end user is increasingly a key player in the design process and the making of meaning and form.

And, s/he comes with a variety of world views.

S/he may not understand a causal, teleological view of reality. She may have a background of Hindu, Buddhist or Zen which offers views of reality that are vastly different to the Aristotelian model that has formed the basis of modern design which has its roots in Europe and their dominant view of reality.

The end user from cultures dissimilar to the designer can render a design solution meaningless, this is immediately apparent to communication designers who make products that, by their very nature, need the user's interpretation to achieve completion.

I have long grappled with the problem of developing a 'design process' that is not teleological and does not presuppose the end result. This means being comfortable with open-endedness and uncertainty, with probable outcomes as opposed to certainty and finished products.

Communication products can never be finished when they leave the designer's office, they achieve fullness when they are interpreted by the user. When the user shares the same 'view of reality' as the designer, the chances of success are maximised. This has worked well when both the designer and user have belonged to the same tradition (the values of simplicity and minimalism inherent in modernism) either due to sharing of cultures or education.

Today the information/communication realities have transformed this certainty and end users are no longer from the hitherto dominant world view. Post modern interpretations embrace multiplicity like never before, global markets mean exactly that and communication products depend on 'variable' interpretations to achieve completion.

Non designers have embraced 'design thinking' as practiced in the industrial age, it is undoubtedly a huge step forward for managers and fragmented thinkers and will aid in problem solving that are human centric and have clear outcomes as goals.

Designers, however, need to rethink their positions and embrace a humanity that does not share world views and are insistent on being a part of both the design process and the definition of objectives.

Design has always had many meanings and interpretations, 'design thinking' as understood by traditional designers and now, managers, is no longer enough.
What shall we call the process we are developing now? Is it actually closer to the concept of 'universal thinking' (primary thinking) as articulated so many years ago at Bauhaus before design embraced the industrial ethos in its totality?

We deal with open-endedness, the end user is integral to the design process, s/he completes the communication product that we initiate and s/he does it from standpoints that we can never anticipate, our solutions deal with probabilities more than they do with certainties.

It is an interactive world and as the communication age attains maturity, design processes are hitting the new frontier. The transition from the tangible and physical to the virtual and interactive is no longer confined to communications and will become increasingly important to other designers too, as the end user becomes an integral part of and active in the process of problem solving.

Humans are at the heart of design, have always been and in this time where communication dominates the way we live our lives, the end user has never been more important or more active in determining solutions and articulating choices, needs and desires.

We will increasingly need to find ways to solve for multiplicity and interactivity. Design Thinking in this scenario will lead to problem solving process that is fluid, dynamic and receptive to surprises. It will have to be nimble and be prepared to find meaning and integrity in vastly different world-views.

The design process is never ending, not even when the 'solution' has been articulated and completed by the user.

We must accept that there are no absolutes and the world is whatever we perceive it to be, a reflection of our mind states, an articulation of our subjective and outside selves entwined in a never ending dance. Our solutions must be ever evolving and have the depth and maturity to enhance the experience of the end user even if they participate in apparently contradictory meaning making.

Designers are once again at the edge of a new world and we can taste the excitement our gurus and pioneers must have felt in the 20th century, at the dawn of modern design. My pulse quickens as I see the effects of this kind of design thinking, which lead to the end user's mind-set and world view creating self sufficient experiences and meaning, yet enhancing the communication objectives I apply this process to.

Design as an activity that keeps the human in the central role has never had it so challenging, the human for whom we design has taken charge of what s/he wants and how s/he wants it. S/he is, at last, an equal if unpredictable partner in our 'design way'.