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.
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.
