Working Paper towards - Humanizing
Design panel at WDO Research and Education Forum on 10 October 2019.
Abstract -
"This paper explores challenges and negotiations faced by Indian Design education as it is poised to locate itself within the changing cultural economy of India, and the wave of globalisation that is sweeping higher educational structures. Design education in India is struggling to meet multiple inadequacies brought about by changes in the global culture and economy. The discipline is coping with the lack of sufficient theoretical knowledge base, the lack of major inputs on ecological sustainability, erratic exposure to design management and a struggle to keep up with digital-based technologyi. At the same time, the process of privatisation has led to a readjustment of stakeholders, redefining the aims and functional realities of these design institutes. This is in parallel to the growing globalisation of education that is bringing about structural changes in pedagogy and assessment. As we grow and adapt into this flux, it is imperative to re-situate design education within the zeitgeist of a 21st century India.
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Once
India became a signatory to the World Trade Organisation, (1994) , it
became inevitable that the cultural; economy of India will be
affected and inflicted by globalisation. This integration was not a
sudden all encompassing process, but a change that came slowly,
negotiating through the layers and structures of Nehruvian socialism.
One of the sectors deeply affected by the socio-economic and
political shifts has been the sector of Higher education. In the
year 1995 World Bank published “Higher education: Lessons of
Experience”. In many ways this report has had a long term impact
in how higher education has been conceived, policed and funded. The
report termed higher education as “a private and quasi- private
good which allow students-consumer to command a better market for
their skill”. A first step towards the implementation of this
policy agenda has been the introduction of Establishment
and Maintenance of Standards in Private Universities Regulations,
2003, UGC. By
this time, the World Bank had revised its position and tabled the
“Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary
Education (2002)”1.
In this report higher education was again classified as a “public
Good and there was a strong push to initiate public private
partnerships while future through the Privatisation of Design
education began after the 2002-3 era has begun to expand rapidly.
This expansion makes it important for us to focus on its commitments
to its stake holders and how design education today understands its
cultural-economical role.
Though
globalisation has brought in a strong need to de-localise educational
methods, at the same time it becomes imperative to remember that
different cultural-political-economic contexts need different
responses and adaptations to globalisation. It important to
acknowledge that though the technological and structural spread of
globalisation has been all encompassing, its economic, technological
and ecological impact on cultural economies has been varied. The
largest private design universities in India are very new and in a
constant struggle to refine curriculum, define systems and arrive at
a sustainable pedagogy.2
The first world economies had gone through this transition in the 80s
through the 90s, and it was almost natural that many of the new
design schools would be looking at universities in Europe and America
to guide this transition. In India, Design itself was a new
discipline , institutionalised only in the 1970’s. At that point,
design was considered important to shaping a modern nation state and
crucial for India’s search for self sufficiency in urbanisation and
industrialisation. The scope of National Design Policy (2007) is
much more ambitious. Among many goals it states it’s objective
being “Making India a major hub for exports and outsourcing of
designs and creative process for achieving a design-enabled
innovative economy.3”
This
policy is a good refection of the confusions in imagining design and
design education , and a lack of roadmap in how the objectives and
goals are to be attained. The NDP mirrors the aspirational culture of
‘new India’, but fails to theorise solutions. The word
‘innovation’ is used all over the document without quantifying,
calls for a tremendous expansion of infrastructure and knowledge base
without mapping the resources needed for an expansion. The document
does not acknowledge that the discipline
is coping with the lack of sufficient theoretical knowledge base, the
lack of major inputs on ecological sustainability, erratic exposure
to design management and a struggle to keep up with digital-based
technology.
One
of the key debating points of neo-liberal education has been around
learning for learning sake and learning for employment's sake. As
academic fees increase across board, education has become an economic
investment (a shift away from its earlier existence an a knowledge
and economic investment). Many design educators feel that an
employment focussed design education takes away from long term
concept building by promising immediate hard and soft skills
requirements of the market. In a sense this a continuation of the
older clashes between ‘technical education’ and ‘university
education’. However, this takes a different meaning in the present
scenario because in most scenarios, the structural/ institutional
differentiations between universities and technical education
institutes have lapsed into a composite whole. The problem has been
compounded by us continuing to look at answers from the first world
where neo-liberalism is older and infrastructural and cultural
realities and completely different. However one very important thing
that the
National
Design Policy does achieve is to align the needs of design education
in India with the “Knowledge for Development,” World Bank 1998
report4.
In the Indian context the push towards design as capital (away from
design as function of manufacturing) is significant and crucial to
the future design and its cultural-economic value.
Our
excessive focus on the first world to guide our tryst with design
education has lead to us ignoring the parallelly looking at models
and experiences from Japan, China, Brazil, Mexico, South-Africa and
other dominant-emerging economies where privatisation and
neo-liberalism in higher education, particularly in design has been
closer to our journey and have been going through their own journey
balancing between delocalisation and localisation of design
pedagogy5.
Even today almost all private universities are focussed exclusively
on Euro-America and do not engage with China, Japan or Brazil,
countries who have made shaping design to be an effective tool for
manufacturing as well as an independent capital accumulator. Our
entanglement into the technical versus university debate has kept us
away from important issues like the need to to rethink knowledge flow
in a data saturated world and the need to reconfigure the position of
craft in the future of design.
The
modernist idea of design has been governed by the idea of a
‘significant form’ and aesthetic unity. The National Institute
of Design formed its pedagogical practice based on these principals,
and this perpetuates how design is taught and evaluated even today.
This approach limits the role the design process into trying to
arrive at a form-function harmony working within the principals of
aesthetic unity. This model has a little understanding of design
thinking as being separate from design process and is incapable of
responding to the heterogeneity of taste cultures in post colonial
societies. What we see as short term demands of the market could be
the demand for a more diverse and non modular understanding of design
itself and a simultaneous need to different approaches to form and
concept.
Working
within large scale privatization of policymaking creates challenges
in situating the future of design education within the zeitgeist of
the nation6.
Yet, in a diverse nation like India, the solutions might come from
moving away from the notion of a singular zeitgeist and instead to
focus on a sustainable relationship between key stakeholders. Design
education needs structural interventions through design thinking as
there is an urgent need to reimagine business models and long term
development goals of key institutes. A failure to do so risks loosing
the recent growth of design education to an economic bubble and more
dangerously to fail in our goal to become a country that exports
design and design based solutions. Almost all institutes look at
students as service consumers building their revenue models of
increase of intake and fees.
A
cursory deconstruction would lay bare the insubstantiality of this
model as a business proposition and the tremendous continuous
pressure it puts on infrastructure and resource building. Design
schools can only become sustainable in terms of business models if
they shift from an admission based to a content based revenue model.
The kind of value incubation centres, patents and content design can
achieve has the potential to surpass earning potentials of the
admission and fees based model. However, this would require design
schools to re configure their approach and focus on research,
analysis and intellectual property rather than on employability
creation. We need to understand and respect the market as the supreme
appropriator and realise that it will in any case appropriate the
training/education of design school graduates to meet its demands and
there is more sustainability in centring design as a more conceptual
and structural context.
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1Neo-liberalism
and Higher Education in India, Dr. Marami Goswami, Quest Journals
Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Science, Volume1 ~
Issue 3 (2013) pp: 32-37
2
Chatterjee,
A, Future of Design Education within the changing cultural economy
of India, Design in India: The Experience of Transition. Design
Issues, 21(4), 2005.
3National
Design Policy , 2007
4
World
Development Report, Knowledge for Development, World Bank, OUP,
1998.
5
Barbosa,
Ana Mae. "Art Education in Brazil: Reality Today and Future
Expectations." Visual
Arts Research 16,
no. 2 (1990): 79-88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20715734
6
Jayandhaya
Tilak, The Privatisation of Higher Education, Prospectus, Council
for Social Development, 1991.
i
Chatterjee,
A, Future of Design Education within the changing cultural economy
of India, Design in India: The Experience of Transition. Design
Issues, 21(4), 2005.
ii
World
Development Report, Knowledge for Development, World Bank, OUP,
1998.
iii
Barbosa,
Ana Mae. "Art Education in Brazil: Reality Today and Future
Expectations." Visual
Arts Research 16,
no. 2 (1990): 79-88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20715734
iv
Jayandhaya Tilak, The Privatisation of Higher Education, Prospectus,
Council for Social Development, 1991.
