Uday, you mentioned the disconnect between the producer and consumer in our present economic reality. Would you say 'making the connection' is separate from the act of designing? Isn't this connection today being made by marketeers, advertisers, middlemen, retailers and so on who serve as the link, which once was a direct thing, perhaps. Is the designer also serving as a link, just as all these marketeers, advertisers....,etc. are? Isn't the designer just competing with all the others serving to bridge the producer and consumer? Then shouldn't all those making the connection internalize the 'end user experience' too?

 

In the current economic model, is it viable to talk of all producers producing in a direct response to the consumer? Is 'co-creation' (you, Prof Venkatramaswamy and CKPrahalad talk of it) where you bring producer and consumer together virtually and physically the way to do it? Can the designer be like a craftsman and really, internalize the end user experience, if only to make the connection to the consumer? In a multiple stakeholder driven world, can you isolate such connections, and by extension, internalize so many connections?

 

So is design about 'designing the experience', which 'helps' the end consumer 'create and experience the "experience"'? Now, are you raising the bar for the designer's performance?  

Actually, it will be nice to hear your response to the last question, which is the one question I really have for you. The others are a context. At least I hope so. 

 

Regards,

 

Sridhar Dhulipala

PD 1989-93, NID

Bangalore

 

On 8/2/05, Uday Dandavate <uday@...> wrote:

Design is  not defined  by the sector of industry it is churned from or
by the type of products but by the desire to humanize the process of
creating the  objects, information and environments of everyday use.
The realities on the ground in the West and in our world are different.
Levels of technology in a given product (e.g. a high tech medical
product) may determine the universality of treating the technology, but
the congnitive structure and emotional needs of people in different
culture may impart their own considerations on the design approach. The
point is to evolve a design through intimate understanding of the
person who will use it. In India, the craftsman has done it long ago,
until the crafts too became the victim of commercialization and mass
production and got removed from the hands of people who had intimate
knowledge of the community they served with their hands. The owner of
an export house who mass produces products for exports at the dictates
of a buyer has minimal empathy for the person whose house it would 
ultimately endow. There is very little connection between the person
who shops in the emporia of Delhi and the craftsman who creates the
products that are placed there.

The big gap is in making the connection between the hands of the person
who produced and the hearts of the person who uses the products of
everyday use. I do know from traveling around the world that  designers
tend to be universally self serving. We meet each-other at conferences
and evolve a form language and a value system of our own. How many
designers, no matter which sector they belong to, get an opportunity to
closely obsever and learn from the everyday experience of people for
who they design? Belive me, even in more advanced economies, designer
believe they can imagine the experience of the end users and are
impatient towards the process of internalizing the end user experience.

The classics will evolve when in different sectors of the economy the
designers, the producers and the marketers will gain sensitivity to the
end user experience and drive the design concepts from that sensitivity.

Uday

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