the importance of ethos in design

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DESIGN AS A VEHICLE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE

[A version of this article was recently published in “What’s Next: The Creative Spark”, a book of essays chronicling an event of the same name held in Mumbai in February 2019 organised by Pearl Academy. Click here for more info on Pearl’s well-received “What’s Next” series of confluences .]

The Lack of Ethos

In the 1996 Hollywood film Jerry Maguire, directed by Cameron Crowe, the titular character played by Tom Cruise infamously writes a mission statement for his sports agency firm, the result of a late-night epiphany about the direction in which he felt that his company should be heading. The statement (the full text of which was released by Crowe some two decades later) entreated the company’s workforce to take a more compassionate and less profit-oriented approach to the high-profile business of sports management. What did Jerry Maguire get for his efforts? He got sacked.

Granted, the rest of the film is a sort of redemption story for him but the fact that his company not only outright ignored his vision but they instantly fired him, and that only one colleague felt strongly enough to join him as he left, is a grim acknowledgement of how the corporate world views compassion and justice. The cynical takeaway is that a well-meaning ethos is all well and good, but it’s not welcome in larger society where we have more important things to worry about like business targets, jobs, and salaries.

Fast forward to 2020. We look at the current political and socio-economic situation around the world and we can see where giving lip service to ethos has brought us. Corporate greed during the Great Recession of 2008, massive dependence on fossil fuel economies despite dire warnings of climate change, rising xenophobia and ‘otherism’ around the world as nations tighten their borders… We’re now living in a time where social groups — nations, cities, communities, organisations — are unable to clearly agree amongst themselves on what defines them and what values should drive their actions and policies towards the uncertain future. They either lack a clearly defined ethos, or they had it and rejected it altogether.

Developing a Workable Ethos

Social justice — in any form — requires a community or organisation to define, codify, and then strictly live by an ethos that represents its inherent values clearly and unambiguously. When it began as a lowly startup, Google defined its ethos with the words “Don’t be evil” which was not only spelled out in the company’s Code of Conduct, but was emblazoned on the walls of its brand new offices. Google has since removed those words and minimised their importance in their Code of Conduct after experiencing how difficult it actually is to be one of the world’s biggest companies and still live by a vague imperative to avoid something as complicated and commonly misinterpreted as ‘evil’. Google’s problem is not the lack of vision to impact people’s lives; rather, the mistake was being too glib about it. They believed that a superficially simple motto of “Don’t be evil” is enough to guide the actions of the massive diversity of its employee base, and to consistently do so through decades of business practice. When Google itself became a quasi-political power, they realised they could no longer live by the very ethos that guided their humble beginning.

What organisations can do, however, is to be more definitive about their stated values and then take steps to ensure that all members of the organisation from top to bottom understand and adhere to those values, no matter what. This applies not just to corporates, but any organisation or group of people with shared goals. You can call it what you like — a mission statement, or vision statement, or motto, or code of conduct — but it should be clear and unambiguous, and should not conflict with the organisation’s objectives. If a company’s ethos is to be mindful of the environment, they can’t be a polluter of air and water. If a non-profit’s ethos is to provide underprivileged people with economic upliftment, then 75% of its endowments shouldn’t go to upper management salaries. If an educational institution’s ethos is to ensure a delightful and meaningful learning experience to its students, then it shouldn’t force its students to go through endless bureaucratic hurdles just to get a simple permission note for a justified late assignment.

Social justice, in these respects, is not just about activism and communal responsibility. It’s certainly not only about just saying what you believe in. It’s about putting your money where your mouth is, and adhering to the high ideals and values that make up one’s ethos. This is hard enough to do at the individual level; having to worry about one’s own integrity and the lines they will not cross is ultimately a personal decision, and a weighty one. Where an ethos is most impactful is when groups of people work concertedly towards shared goals and abide by the values they’ve chosen to inculcate in themselves. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen as often as it should, because organisations and groups are diverse in nature, and agreeing on a common ethos to define the group’s behaviour isn’t as easy as it sounds. But this doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t try.

Ethos in Design

The importance of ethos should figure prominently in the design community. The outcome of designers’ work is very often subjective in quality, intent, and functionality. There is a lot of ambiguity in design, and practicing design with a clear ethos is often a matter of interpretation. In addition, maintaining a strong ethos while producing design is an added layer of complexity, particularly because the nature of the design industry is mostly the small scale of personal entrepreneurial ventures. Being a ‘struggling young designer’ is almost as much a cliché as ‘struggling young artist’, and rightfully so. Design is rarely appreciated at face value, and getting the public to understand the value of a designer’s ability takes a great deal of time and effort, where jobs are won or lost almost entirely on the basis of reputation and word of mouth. For a designer to stick to an ethos and live by it often requires giving up paid work that the designer sorely needs.

In addition, for a young designer to get into socially responsible work is extremely difficult. First of all, it doesn’t pay. Second, because the work is often voluntary, it requires more time than a young designer has. So there are few incentives for a young designer to spend the time working on projects that have a strong social benefit. Therefore, it becomes even more important for an ethos to be embedded in ALL of a designer’s work, where it is infused with social sensitivity and ethical responsibility.

For example, there is currently a strong emphasis on Sustainable Design, which is a term that I have some problems with. It implies that sustainability is something that is added to design, like an overlay; it’s not necessary but it makes design better. In my opinion all design must be sustainable. If it’s not sustainable then it’s not design. The term sustainability should be part of the definition of design, in the same way as the terms usability, process, empathy. Is there a separate discipline of architecture called Comfortable Architecture? Of course not, because all architecture is assumed to provide comfort by definition. So why Sustainable Architecture?

This is because the design community has yet to embed social justice and social responsibility as an ethos in the definition of what design is all about. The medical field has “First, do no harm” in its Hippocratic Oath. Can design have a similar ethical manifesto? Can designers be made to swear by a Designer’s Oath to be socially responsible towards all populations, to do no harm to the planetary ecosystem? To use design as a vehicle to aid and assist humanity, decrease oppression, and promote good will? Perhaps these are as vague and difficult to follow as Google’s “Don’t be evil” but it can be a start. Designers can certainly band together and make it a priority to have an ethos for all design work. Traditionally, professional guilds would ensure this would happen; if a practitioner was a member of a guild, it was a way to ensure that certain ethical standards would be practiced. Indeed, this is still the case with many professions; in particular, architecture guilds around the world have a code of conduct or ethics that is required for all members. But too often, only the most egregious or criminal acts are the ones that make a case for debarment. Professional associations for design can go farther, and be more persistent about establishing opportunities and requirements for social justice for all designers.

Whatever the nature of the ethos, it is important to have one. Whether it’s an oath taken by all designers, or a code of conduct for each design practitioner, it is high time for designers to reflect on their respective practices and work towards building an ethos for practicing design. And more importantly, staying true to it.

inclusive habitation in indian cities

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THE NEED FOR RETHINKING URBANISATION IN THE POST-BOOM ECONOMY

[A version of this article was recently published in “What’s Next: The Creative Spark”, a book of essays chronicling an event of the same name held in Mumbai in February 2019 organised by Pearl Academy. Click here for more info on Pearl’s well-received “What’s Next” series of confluences .]

Raising the Alarm: India’s Housing Crisis

“Cities that adopt a strategy of inclusive prosperity now still have the power to transform their communities and neighbourhoods into more open, equitable, and profitable places to live.” – Amitabh Kant, CEO Neeti Aayog

An internet search of “indian housing crisis” will uncover a disturbing array of cautionary tales and doomsday scenarios, and amongst all the data, one can find two grim statistics revealing a paradox in understanding the nature of the exploding urban population of India.

The first statistic is that, as of February 2016, there are almost 700,000 unsold homes in India (Mukherjee, 2019). This is apparent to anyone who drives past the unfinished hulks of luxury high-rises along the fringe highways of Indian metros. The second statistic is that, as of November 2017, there is an urban housing shortage of about 10 million units (Economic Times, 2017). The paradox: India has been unable to house millions of (mostly poor) people while simultaneously overbuilding housing for the wealthy.

This reveals an uncomfortable truth about how we’ve dealt with India’s rabid (and rapid) urbanisation and the imbalanced benefit for the entire population. This is a well-reported problem, and indeed there are already several public and private schemes that are attempting to correct this unnerving disparity. But where does the design community fit into this? Can creative professionals provide any solutions?

Grass Roots Action: Academics and Designers

Indeed, this problem is largely the responsibility of policymakers. Most designers, architects, and urbanists are only able to contribute to projects for which they’re hired, and usually don’t have extensive control over policy decisions at a metropolitan scale. But there can certainly be an effort to foster a sensitivity towards such socioeconomic imbalances, perhaps starting with professional academic institutions. The graduates that enter the workforce as young professionals may not have a strong voice in the way their projects are run, but they can surely plan their careers to find opportunities to deal with urban disparities. Many colleges are themselves located in urban areas where these disparities are highly visible to everyone. So, there’s a potential to sensitise new generations to first become aware of such problems, and then to encourage them to try and solve them.

A striking reflection of my academic experience in India thus far has been that even though my students have often come from privileged backgrounds with a lack of active exposure to ‘real’ urban issues, by the time they complete their academic programme, their sensitivity towards the needs of the underprivileged becomes more pronounced. Many of the graduate thesis projects I’ve encountered have been focused on improving the lives of children, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, and other underprivileged and marginalised populations. This implies that higher education, working together with industry, can be a strong support in developing the necessary sensitivities.

But with so many issues at hand, it’s difficult to prioritise the most urgent needs of urban India. In my experience as a teacher, I’ve been happy to see many socially sensitive projects including packaging for the blind, apps to increase sexuality awareness, devices to assist with manure collection… the list goes wonderfully on and on. However, as an architect and urbanist, my most urgent concern goes back to the persistent inequity in urban housing policy, planning, financing, and design. If we don’t create more affordable, equitable, and sustainable housing for all populations, then almost all other efforts are meaningless.

Organisations like URBZ are another good example of grass roots efforts to bring creative solutions to urban housing problems. They focus on community-oriented solutions for slum improvement and have a strong user-centric approach to problem solving, engaging all stakeholders with an emphasis on the contexts of how people really inhabit cities, whether they are native-born locals or migrants seeking new opportunities. Such organisations are able to fill some of the gaps left by policymakers. Matias Echanove, co-founder of URBZ, says, “India has an endless opportunity to look within. Accommodation and mass housing are the first point of requirement for the rural exodus to the cities, aided by a well-connected transport system which facilitates this movement. Resource support and planning is required to maintain the health of urbanisation” (Echanove, 2019).

The Broader Challenge: Inclusive Habitation

However, large scale solutions still require the attention that only major policymakers can give. Besides academics and grass-roots organisations, where else can such matters be taken up by designers? The answer is uncertain, as there will always tend to be a divide between policymakers and design consultants. But there are two areas in which I believe we should focus our attention with respect to better urban housing.

The first is to radically alter the process of private property development in India’s metros. There is almost no synchronicity between commercial interests and socio-communal needs. Private development, which is the largest producer of housing units in urban metros, is almost purely driven by speculation and market trends. Thus, one tends to see rapid construction of massive housing schemes long before any real infrastructure or public amenities are in place. Scores of residential towers are built and sold first, while shopping centres, hospitals, bus-stands, metro stations, and other public amenities come later, only when there is a proven ‘demand’. This traditional demand-driven approach to urban planning has already proven to be ineffective.

Urban designers and planners know this and are trained to design cities that, from inception, provide a variety of public amenities needed for sustainable residential growth. They are also trained to make design decisions based on principles of design thinking, contextual research, user-centricity, and collaborative ideation. If policymakers (and private developers) choose to listen to what urban designers have to say, it will result in well-designed communities that consider the full spectrum of urban life, not just the living quarters and the garages.

The second area involves integrating a more diverse set of people to live in new developments. The great disparity between unsold luxury homes and housing shortage mentioned earlier happens because affluent home buyers were seen as the only viable market for large-scale residential development. Entire tower blocks of only 3-bedroom apartments serve only a narrow user profile and income group. When the whims of politics and economy cause a change in the fortunes of this narrow group, the entire real estate industry is impacted, taking years to recover. We’re undergoing that downturn now, and there’s no magic solution on the horizon to make things better. Developers and financiers are simply crossing their fingers and hoping that economic growth resumes to earlier levels and that upwardly mobile professionals start buying homes again.

Certainly, some municipalities have enacted legislation that requires developers of luxury apartments to provide a quantity of ‘affordable’ homes, usually to house the displaced slum-dwellers previously living on the property. But it’s questionable whether the needs of the displaced residents are being adequately served, let alone whether their living situations have actually improved.

But it’s not just the economically lower strata that need to be housed. There is a rapidly growing sector of young, single, college-educated urbanites from lower-tier Indian cities who have trouble finding suitable housing in large metros because: a) they usually need to find flatmates to share; and b) landlords are less keen to rent to transient populations. Many of these young professionals come to cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru for their first jobs and will only stay as long as the company keeps them. Many will find other jobs within a year or two, and often in a different city altogether. Many have to leave simply because they can’t afford the cost of living. Are any developers building housing for such people? Rarely. Some overseas cities have designed and built co-housing options for young professionals, but this isn’t the focus of Indian private developers, which is a short-sighted attitude. It’s financially unsustainable to view the entire housing market as only buyers of luxury 3-bedroom apartments. Designers and architects can help with this and provide innovative co-housing solutions for diverse groups of residents, allowing them a better opportunity to stay in their preferred city and not be priced out. This permanence leads to greater community ownership and engagement as well as the sustained usage of public amenities.

There is no greater truism proven by history than the fact that diverse and inclusive cities make better cities, for all stakeholders. The Indian urban development industry — property developers, investors, bureaucrats, community activists, designers, and planners — need to integrate better and follow a more collaborative and systems approach to decision-making, and ultimately understand that no community will succeed very long as a segregated island of residents with near-identical backgrounds. If rapid urbanisation is our new reality, then quality housing for all should be our highest priority.

References

Bellman, E. 2020. “India’s ‘Ghost Towns’ Saddle Middle Class With Debt — and Broken Dreams”. Wall Street Journal. [online] 16 January 2020.

Echanove, M., 2019. Keynote speech at “What’s Next: The Creative Spark”, February, 2019. Mumbai, India.

Economic Times, 2017. Housing shortage in urban areas down at 10 million units: Government. Economic Times [online].

Kant, A., 2019. Keynote speech at “What’s Next: The Creative Spark”, February, 2019. Mumbai, India.

Mukherjee, A., 2019. 673,000 unsold homes hold the key to India’s next shadow-banking crisis. Business Standard [online].

the digital campus

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PREPARING TODAY’S STUDENT DESIGNER FOR THE TECHNOLOGY OF TOMORROW – AN EDUCATOR’S DILEMMA

When I was studying architecture in the mid-1990s, the design profession (and design education, by extension) was in the middle of a massive paradigm shift. CAD (Computer Aided Design) was becoming the norm in architecture firms everywhere, and colleges were struggling to figure out how to strike the right balance between ensuring that students learned vital manual drawing skills — passed down through centuries of architectural teaching — and preparing them for the digital skills needed by the professional marketplace upon graduation. Before joining architecture school, I had worked as a CAD draftsman in an architecture firm for a year, and in those days many offices had specific employees (sometimes students) who were responsible for preparing all computer-drafted drawings based on hand-drawn sketches and notes given to them by older architects who weren’t proficient in the software. Firms would manage the skill disparity by striking their own balance between older and younger designers, who had varying levels of competency in the software used at the time. The typical office space had just as many drafting tables in the studio as bulky computer workstations.

Fast forward two decades, and the profession is still trying to negotiate the balance between digital tools and manual skills. The actual physical tools may have changed, but if you ask any designer practicing today whether they value digital skills or manual skills, they will undoubtedly say that both are required, in different degrees. Where does that put people like me — design educators who are also trying to straddle the right line between these teaching these seemingly opposing skills? Given the limited time we have to prepare students for an increasingly competitive industry, where should we focus our energies in teaching? Students in Indian design schools today express a strong desire to learn digital skills, whereas the employment market is looking not only for people who are conversant with software, hardware, digital fabrication tools, prototyping, and so on, but who can also sketch and model by hand. That’s not to mention the ongoing important need for critical thinkers and problem solvers.

One of the common discussions I have with design students is managing their expectation of learning software. Savvy students know quite well that the industry will require them to be fluent in various software suites upon graduation, and they often demand that we teach them how to use the important software in the classroom. But this presents a two-pronged problem: (a) Are design schools simply software training institutes? And (b), what happens when the software (and other technologies) become obsolete by the time they graduate? Which is increasingly common these days, with the rapid, almost monthly, upgrades and innovations in technology.

The answer to the first problem is that, no, design teachers should not be software trainers. There is already a huge (and low-cost) market for that. Students paying high fees for quality design education would be better served learning software from technical training centres (or even learning it themselves online), while design colleges should focus on the aforementioned need to develop conceptual skills and critical thinking. Colleges should instead be concerned with teaching software approach rather than instruction. In other words, design teachers should avoid spending valuable class time teaching how to navigate menus of specific (perhaps soon-to-be outdated) software suites, and instead focus on general approaches to digital visualisation and prototyping. This should be independent of the brand or version of a particular software or technology.

The answer to the second problem is that, along with genericising the teaching of technological tools, design curricula should be flexible enough to allow for rapidly changing technologies. Embedding a specific software brand or suite by name in the curriculum is a mistake. In fact, assuming that the design process is dependent on that specific type of digital tool, which may not even be relevant in a few years, is misguided. An example is 3D printing, which is all the rage these days — not just in design, but in other walks of life; 3D printers were one of the first high-tech tools we purchased for our campus. But this technology undergoes new innovations almost every few months, and the applications for 3D printing increase rapidly across many disciplines and domains. So embedding a design class in the curriculum writeup that’s strictly about 3D printing, using only the technology we have at hand, is short-sighted.

Design curricula must not only be adaptive in its language, but a good design school should constantly be revisiting and revising the curricula to update against new innovations and trends in the profession. And they must manage resources, too, which is in many ways more difficult because the cost of quality equipment and infrastructure is very high. Realising that the expensive tech that was purchased last year is going to be outdated next year causes anxiety for many college administrators who are setting up and upgrading workshops and labs. The approach is to follow a more data- and research-driven process to understanding and forecasting trends in tech innovation rather than taking a knee-jerk reaction to buying the latest fashionable tools.

In the design school where I teach, we revised our curriculum and purposely removed any mention of software suites, brands, or specific technologies. The learning outcomes refer instead to generic and innovative ways to use the software and tech tools, with exploration taking priority over proficiency. Our assessment system rewards students who show initiative and ingenuity in finding the most suitable software for their particular needs and using it in innovative ways, often exceeding their own teachers’ expertise and expectations. We’ve also taken a more progressive approach to technology, and attempted — as best as possible — to train students for future technologies as well as existing. We have also worked with digital partners to provide software subscriptions to students at low cost to avoid the ethical (and pervasive) conundrum of digital piracy.

Managing these expectations — the students’ demand to be technologically dexterous and up-to-date against the constant flux of changing technology — against the desire to keep the focus of design education on critical thinking, theory, process, and problem-solving is the task of the 21st century design educator, and it’s not an easy one. But a way forward is to understand — and help students understand — that technology in any form is a tool, and is not the solution itself. No amount of cutting edge technology on its own is going to solve design problems… that has been, and always will be the domain of the intellect and talent of the designer’s mind and spirit. Just as a pencil is only useful in the hands of someone who knows how to use it skilfully, through long practice, with failures followed by success, so is any high end technological tool. It has to be used — and taught — wisely.

[A version of this article was previously published in the March 2018 issue of Silicon India magazine.]

towards divergence in the age of automation

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A CASE TO RECONSIDER THE GRADUATE PROFILE OF YOUNG DESIGNERS IN 21ST CENTURY INDIA

A large number of articles and research published globally in the last few years have spoken about the looming threat of automation having a major impact on employability in the near future. Automation — or industrialisation as it was known back in the early twentieth century — is, in fact, no new threat. Countless historians, both contemporary and latter-day, have talked about how the Industrial Revolution changed the way people work, and how the imparting of skills and knowledge in higher education took a radical shift towards better understanding of mechanised processes and of mass distribution of both products and ideas. Automation in this century has a definitively digital flavour and is akin to the previous century’s shift only in the quickly pervasive way in which entire societies and cultures were dismantled and created anew. We are in the midst of a major transition towards complexity and uncertainty in human interaction.

Research by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that “Indian workers have a technical automation potential — the overall share of activities that can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies — of 52 percent”. This is tempered by the same Report’s suggestion that, due to India’s infrastructure gap and other social issues, the change will be sectoral and evolutionary — not revolutionary. This implies that Indian industry has some time to adjust, and that job roles in the near future may not be replaced so much as changed. Working alongside automation will necessitate different learning at all levels of Indian education, particularly in professional studies at institutes of higher learning. This change is already being noticed at design institutes in India. A quick tour of any design school will reveal that workshops using traditional artisanal tools are not disappearing but are existing alongside more modern labs with cutting edge digital media and equipment. A lathe machine very likely sits in a room adjacent to a motion capture studio.

The Link to Academia

The impact this has on design education is at once significant yet unclear. The design industry in India is still widely divergent and no one is quite sure which direction the country will ultimately take with regards to specific employability factors. There are design firms partnering with local skilled artisans to promote dying regional crafts, and there are firms harnessing the power of computational design for rapid prototyping and production. Often this spectrum of work happens in the very same office, within the purview of a single design associate. Thus, design institutes must prepare graduates for this full spectrum of skills — they must appreciate the old with the new, often in less time than before, since employers have less and less time or resources to devote to the type of apprenticeship model that companies followed in the past. Employers want graduates with these attributes already baked in.

Where does that put academia? There has always been a perceived skill gap between academics and industry, no matter how many colleges partner with industry for live projects or to impart professional workplace skills. Does the gap widen with the necessity of adapting to automation? What exactly are the skills needed for this adaptation? What if the skills quickly become obsolete?

The report on Future of Jobs in India recommends embracing active learning, learner-centricity, and life-long learning. However, these attributes have been fundamental to design education from the start, so the implication is that design graduates are better prepared for the future than other disciplines. Further, the same E&Y reports suggests that Indian workers are well-primed for the ‘leapfrog’ effect in technological advancement, in which traditional evolutionary trajectories that the West followed may often be skipped entirely by the Indian marketplace. The telecommunications industry has been a good example of this, in which a large majority of Indians embraced cheap mobile phone technology well before landline networks were in place nationwide. Most of rural India skipped landline networks entirely and a majority of Indians across the socioeconomic spectrum now use mobile phones directly. This required divergent thinking.

Convergence and Divergence

Traditional learning systems in India have been largely convergent in nature, focusing on single, linear solutions for problem-solving. There is a correct answer somewhere and memory and logic will serve to find it. Design education, using divergent thinking, replaces this approach with an open-ended system of problem-solving, where the answer may lie in multiple and perhaps infinite solutions. Artificial intelligence now has the potential to do both our convergent and divergent thinking for us. Traditional computational algorithms use memory and logic to solve convergent problems far more quickly than the human brain, so fixed and formulaic solutions can be easily solved. Jobs reliant on this ability are already vanishing — counting, sorting, calculating, producing, searching, etc. are now firmly in the purview of simple computing systems (bin sorters, for example) as well as artificial intelligence (internet search algorithms).

As illustrated in an article published in The Atlantic, “[w]hen most people think of AI’s relative strengths over humans, they think of its convergent intelligence. With superior memory capacity and processing power, computers outperform people at rules-based games, complex calculations, and data storage… What computers lack, some might say, is any form of imagination, or rule-breaking curiosity — that is, divergence.” But advanced AI may even achieve this. As processing power improves and better understanding of machine learning and quantum networks leads to closer simulation of the human brain, then even divergent solutions can be managed by AI.

The Human Factor

Where humans still have a role is in experience, which is where divergent educational models come into play. With AI and automation increasingly being able to provide basic problem-solving skills, design students must grapple with the choice between specialisation and diversification, even if it’s just to remain ahead of the technology and innovation curves. Currently, there is a wide demand for design graduates to achieve broad, fundamental skills topped by specialised competencies in a particular subject area or market segment. Hence, we have architects who know how to draw, design, and render, and also have expertise in residential, commercial, or institutional buildings. A typical employer may, for example, be a specialist design firm for the hospitality industry and would demand architecture graduates to have some experience — even while in college — of understanding the needs of the user group related to hotels and restaurants. In India today, this characterises the bulk of the design industry — employers looking for graduates with fundamental skills in broad areas, with some level of competency in a specialisation (e.g., lighting, furniture, advertising, web design, etc.).

But this is starting to change. More and more design firms are starting to embrace the idea of ‘service design’, a divergent discipline in which the final design solution may not be known at all. So now, a design firm no longer gets commissions only from hospitality clients, but from clients who want a diversified solution to a broad-based problem. So, the solution is not just a beautiful hotel design, but unified designs for staff uniforms, menus, signage, amenities, fixtures, products, entertainment portals, websites, and communication systems, all preferably designed by the same firm, under the same roof.

In the past such work was distributed to a variety of consultants all working independently and not always aligned in purpose or even quality. Today, a client may request a designer to provide a brief for which the design solution is not known — it could be a space, a product, an app… What the solution actually will be could be one, some, any, or all of the above, and the designer must be ready to provide expertise in multiple disciplines.

The impact of this is profound and necessitates a complete change in how design education is currently conceived. A multidisciplinary approach cannot just be a feature of design curricula but must be its primary attribute. Students must be encouraged to be divergent thinkers by exposing them to design approaches outside of their chosen disciplines. Since the duration of design courses isn’t increasing to accommodate this wider learning, specialisation often has to take a back seat, but perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing. Specialisations that follow traditional silo divisions — lighting, furniture, web design, app design — are fading because design problems are growing more complex, and solutions are growing more divergent. Furniture is not just an object in space but can shape the space itself and can also have embedded technologies. Thus, a kitchen counter is not just a place to prepare a meal, but a place to have a conversation, with embedded screens and smart controls to provide information and data as well. The lines become blurred, so that a designer who sees a kitchen counter only as a piece of furniture to chop vegetables becomes quickly outdated and outpaced by the designer who sees many more opportunities for innovation.

Automation, for the time being, cannot fulfil such a function. Certainly, AI increasingly has the ability to observe patterns in human behaviour and suggest predictive outcomes, but the ability to use human interactive experience and associations still rests within the ambit of human designers. Prior to its launch in India, IKEA — a global company well-known for its innovative use of industrial automation — spent significant time in trying to understand the Indian consumer market by having individual employees visit 1000 Indian homes. This was not done by robots but by actual human beings who observed the way Indian families live and analysed the data.

The New Graduate Profile

There is clearly a need to consider both convergent and divergent thinking in design education. The traditionally desired graduate profile of a young designer — essentially a database of basic skills and knowledge — is no doubt important, but employers will soon rely on digital information systems for those attributes, and the young designer must embrace divergence in order to stay relevant — and employable — in the future. In turn, the design institute must develop curricula and pedagogy that fosters this approach and move away from stagnant models that require the student to develop specializations that may not even exist by the time they graduate. Forward thinking institutions need to amend their curricula now to accommodate this trend, and develop academic models that allow for not one, but multiple (and someday perhaps, infinite) graduate profiles that are flexible and adaptive enough to solve the multitude of problems that we can’t foresee. This in itself requires a divergent approach so that we can design the right design education for the twenty-first century.

[A version of this article was originally published in July 2019 in the blog for Pearl Academy, where I was until recently the Dean of the School of Design.]

the academics/industry gap in india

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A while ago, I was invited to speak at a conference session in Delhi conducted by CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) whose theme was Bridging the Gap Between Academics and Industry. Along with me on the panel were some important people in education from prestigious institutions, although I was the sole panelist from a design college. Their stimulating words gave me a lot to think about and my own talk reflected on their valuable insights. It was clear from the comments during and after the panel that many people from academics and industry believe that there is a wide gap between what students in higher education are taught and what the industry expects of them when they graduate, and that there’s an urgent need to narrow that gap significantly, considering India is cascading into a turbulent period of economic and social uncertainty. Admittedly, I truly don’t believe that anyone is 100% sure how exactly to prepare our students for the future when the future itself is so ambiguous.

The panel at the CII conference on”Bridging the Gap Between Academics and Industry.

What did became clear to me were two things: First, that our traditional educational systems are designed for the present situation (and arguably even the past), and that we need to significantly overhaul the entire structure and prepare students for uncertainty by making them more adaptable to new paradigms. Second, I felt that the Academics/Industry Gap is actually more a perception than reality.

To address the first issue, we need to reevaluate existing educational models from top to bottom — in the private, non-profit, and governmental sectors, and in both schooling and higher education. Society seems to demand that traditional paradigms — degrees, fixed curricula, and numerous rules and regulations — lead to academic quality, but that is clearly not the case. Requiring all new higher-ed teachers to have PhD’s, for example, is not necessarily going to improve teaching in the classroom nor produce better graduates. Such teachers may have more domain knowledge, but does that necessarily mean they are better at teaching? I don’t believe so. Look to sports and you can find numerous examples of average players becoming excellent coaches, and vice versa. Society should start to accept that many of our recognized educational models are often outmoded and are designed for a fixed set of outcomes based on known scenarios, whereas the current need is to embrace non-traditional approaches plus different ways to produce and measure quality.

And I don’t automatically think we need to look only to the West for this, by the way. India’s own rich and ancient history has numerous examples of adaptive teaching methods, so as a start we can certainly look within in our own culture for the answers.

As for the second issue, I believe that Industry (although there is hardly such a monolithic thing anymore called ‘capital-I’ Industry) has to reassess their expectations of a graduate and abandon the idea that a fresh graduate must already have a full checklist of skills and knowledge, ready to become a professional the moment they take off their graduation cap and gown. Particularly in the design disciplines education has, for centuries, been followed by years of apprenticeship where the learning continues, and where professionals have taken on the onus of continuing the education of young aspirants. In addition, there is no longer a fixed graduate profile; every employer has different expectations and requirements, so a single fixed curriculum is not going to fulfill all workplace demands. So, if the working environment is rightly considered a natural extension of learning, the ‘gap’ between academics and industry is seen as more perception than reality.

Even so, there are ways to reduce this perceived gap, and I’d like to highlight four strategies that we have been practicing in my own institution:

Industry Accountability

As I’ve said, professional firms and companies of all shapes and sizes need to consider themselves as equal partners in education rather than just ‘recipients’ of skilled and trained professionals. Employers needs to be willing to spend the time and effort to continue the training that begins in college and provide a seamless transition to workplace learning by acting as true mentors to young graduates.

Adaptive Curricula

Academic institutions should move towards designing curricula that produces graduates of diverse profiles rather than assume that all graduates in a discipline fit a fixed outline. Allowing flexibility and student choice in the curriculum via electives and open learning, and not worrying about how much there is to ‘cover’ in a given semester is important. No teacher is able to actually ‘cover’ whatever is needed anyway, so we should give students the freedom to chart their own learning pathways. Institutions should also allow more students and teachers the flexibility to adapt to wider varieties of industry collaborations which don’t necessarily coincide with academic timelines and structures.

Embedding Industry Early and Often

Institutions should rethink the traditional internship model and think of ways to include industry from Day One of a student’s college experience. The involvement of working professionals can start small and get progressively higher so that a student’s skills also grow professionally. Moving from basic industry masterclasses to intensive workshops to live industry projects and consultancies is one way to make this natural progression happen. This mitigates the culture shock of moving directly from classroom to workplace and the ensuing distress that often gets in the way of learning performance.

Value-based Education

Finally, both teachers and employers need to strive towards creating not just better professionals, but better citizens and better human beings. Curriculum and pedagogy on one side and industry practice on the other must both be infused with sensitivity towards ethics, compassion, cooperation, integrity, and honesty. Technical skills will always be important but human skills are absolutely essential towards preparing students for uncertain futures.

Going Forward

The academics/industry gap, whether perceived or real, can be bridged with just a little bit of effort and a whole lot of mindset change. The notion that education’s purpose is solely to serve up a steady supply of workers to fill standardized positions in industry is long gone, but current practices and systems in India don’t seem to reflect this. Acknowledging that our students and graduates are diverse young talents with differing abilities and different learning preferences is an important first step towards creating a more seamless integration between two worlds which actually serve the same purpose.

(This article was previously published on Medium on 22 Aug 2019)