Hello, all:

I have been lurking on this Forum for a couple of days.
Time to jump in with a quick introduction and some musings:

Name:           Jayant S
Batch:          SLPEP-PD 1984-1991
Current Base:   Pune
Employed:       Tata Technologies Ltd, Pune
               (Deputed to Tata Engineering)
Nature of work: Automobile Design
Interests:      Transportation, Science and Technology,
                History, Classical Music and Jazz
               

There seem to be several interesting discussions happening
here and it has been fun reading through the back posts.
Good work, Sudhir, starting this up and keeping it going
with so much energy and enthusiasm !

Last month I was lucky enough to run into Prof M P Ranjan
at the Sanskriti Kendra in Delhi. We had a long and
freewheeling conversation during which Prof Ranjan showed
me a great deal of material from the ultimate descendant
of what used to be the old "Design Process" Foundation
course. I could see quite clearly that a certain qualitative
standard in the NID student selection process itself remains
intact, regardless of the (for some) controversial changes
that may have happened over the years in the curriculum. 

Talking with Prof Ranjan was a very refreshing experience,
thanks to his well-known capacity to elucidate clearly
and extensively, with a liberal helping of cross-domain
information. The course itself seems to have evolved into
a complex, enriching experience over time.

I visited NID in August last year on a sort of informal
student assessment mission, aimed at understanding what the
profession would be able to offer the Indian automobile
industry over the coming decade or so. Initially, I made the
mistake of "interrogating" students one by one in what is now
the Diploma Jury room, going through their formal portfolios and
so on. A Tata Engineering HR colleague with me was unimpressed
with the diffident responses and the "stiffness" in the work
documentation. A pale comparison, I suppose, to the
polished and articulate dissertations one hears from MBA
trainees.

Then it suddenly occurred to me what was wrong, so I just
called in the entire group and told them "I will be on campus
tonight, in the mess and at the guest house. I would like
to see your little doodles and your sketchbooks. Not the
coursework, but the stuff you guys do in your rooms."

They did turn up in the evening. Many of them had some really
interesting conceptual takes on automobile design. We ended
up having a group discussion late into the night, and I left
with a far better idea of the potential available at NID. I
hope they, in turn, were able to pick up some industry-specific
tips and a fair amount of encouragement. My HR colleague
was suitably impressed, too.

Somewhere in all this, there are pointers which could illuminate
(or further confound!) that entire involved imbroglio which I
could call the "design-industry-taste-culture-India-education-
profession-debate", avatars of which have occasionally been
showing up on this Forum as well.

It seems to me that NID and IDC-Mumbai are the only two institutions
in the country that are putting out potential industry professionals
with an inbuilt capacity for cross-disciplinary perception and rapid,
independent reasoning (call it the "maverick" factor). These abilities
would be valuable in other industry-related professions as well
(such as engineering and marketing), but human resource in these
areas is more of the cookie-cutter sort. All of which adds up to
a sort of negative tinge affecting the product design profession in
India. "Industry does not understand that design is good for it".

The onus for change lies on designers, I feel. Designers must
initiate change in others and they must also change themselves;
learn to acknowledge other disciplines, and learn more about them.
To comment on something said here a while ago - the Reva electric
car cannot win a design award because it is an environmentally
friendly vehicle (assuming that it is). Designers had nothing to do
with its means of propulsion - that is more to the credit of the
management and the engineering team (I will refrain from critiquing
design aspects of the Reva at the moment).

Prof Ranjan redescribed free thinking as "attitude", that "attitude"
which was practically a small-talk suffix for the word "design"
when we used to live on campus. Something which gives every
NID alumnus a strong strategic ability.

More in due course.

-JS-






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