We all know that IIID is uniquely different from other Associations in its openness and inclusivity which not only promotes professional solidarity and broader reach within the design fraternity but also resonates with contemporary workplace culture where practitioners with varied backgrounds and training collaborate routinely. I am therefore so excited about this ambitious publication marking the 75th year of independence and the 50th year of IIID’s founding. The production of locally grounded knowledge and diligently composed professional literature is vital to advance India’s design journey further. For long, this country’s designers have (correctly) complained that foreign texts are often less relevant for design work aligned with India’s many realities and rich urban and suburban contexts. 

This essay focuses on the latter and posits that compared to much of the recent history, India is having a ‘design moment’ currently. Indian architects and designers today, for instance, routinely conceive and build fabulous buildings and world-class spaces matching the highest standards anywhere. It is now increasingly common to find fantastic examples in an impressive range of new developments like hotels, hospitals, schools, and residential communities spread across the length and breadth of the vast country including many regional places, which largely escaped designers’ attention until recently. 

Sustained commitment and lifelong work of enterprising design entrepreneurs have gradually yielded well-known success stories like Neemrana hotels or Fab India in turn motivating emergent design practices to rearticulate the country’s rich local traditions as well as indigenous crafts for a contemporary cosmopolitan clientele at the world stage. Not surprisingly, and often hidden away from the limelight, India’s designers seem to excel in many other less-prominent domains of design with deep local roots such as furniture, jewellery, and metalware.

How did India’s ‘design moment’ happen? What can we do to add momentum to this moment to advance the journey forward?

As a young architect at Jaipur, with a multidimensional practice, I was into India’s ‘design scene’ in the early 1990s, just around the opening of the country’s economy, and learned the field’s ropes and tricks and was quickly successful in line with the growing national economy. After about a decade of intense consulting work, it was my turn to study India’s approach to planning and design in university settings via methodical research and systematic fieldwork. Living, working, and studying in different parts of the world over the next couple of decades offered divergent perspectives and a deeper appreciation for diverse peoples and places. The quest included a variety of ecumenical works of literature exploring the meaning and purpose of design and planning work, analysing hundreds of city plans and policy documents, visiting divergent places, and interviewing prominent practitioners and policymakers while parallelly practising ‘participatory observation’ at diverse professional venues in different countries and cultural regions.

What I discovered is a rich confluence of powerful factors supporting the rise of design and planning work in contemporary India. The first and main reason seems growing national prosperity. While some of the features of the new economic activity such as real-estate development are ubiquitous across urban India, others vary in different places (e.g., the high technology industry in Pune and Hyderabad, automotive manufacturing and ancillary activities in Chennai, and tourism in Kerala and Rajasthan) giving rise to many new patrons that appreciate the importance of professional design work which is often collaborative by nature. The Hussain-Doshi Gufa at the CEPT Campus is one such confluence of Art and Architecture comprising captivating spatial experiences articulated via a play of shadow, light, and art.

In a design-privileged worldview, underpinned by utopian imagination, all these disparate developments can ideally be conceived complementarily and integrated holistically.

The Bauhaus Campus in Dessau, Germany comes to mind as it showcases careful design thinking from the desk knob to the surrounding neighbourhood. An excellent educational place for designers to visit, by the way. Closer home, CEPT Ahmedabad is a fantastic homegrown example intellectually centred around the notion of holistic thinking delivered via higher education covering many major design areas including interior design, architecture, landscape, regional planning and more.

Another interesting finding of the research was that the interior space quality is frequently better than the quality of outdoors in urban India. In intentionally designed places, I discovered that designers shaping interior spaces frequently display a sharper understanding of humans’ comfort and feelings around physical space, perhaps due to the detail-oriented nature of their work. Although at some level, all professions involved in the built environment deal with human-environment interactions, designers of interior spaces seem to have the major advantage of operating at the powerful 1:1 scale that offers an intimate appreciation of the actual human experience at the true anthropometrical scale embodied in Le Corbusier’s Le Modulor. 

In this sense, space design is fundamental to contemporary living. Easy to visualise how it moulds and influences all the major spaces where we think, work, play and live to cradle and enable much of the human experience on this rapidly urbanising planet. 

Acknowledging that India is having a design moment, which is also in a project in progress, we need to invest in a couple of critical areas of potential improvement in the education field. 

Building and sustaining a healthy body of design knowledge that matches India’s needs top priority currently.

We have no excuse!  In a recent study mapping the scholarship on urban India in some of the top academic journals, we found that the country’s design scholars as well as practitioners publish more widely today than ever in these venues. So that’s good news! Nonetheless, substantial gaps remain in our understanding of the Indian ‘design scene.’ We need to theorise, for example, Indian designers’ firsthand design experiences as well as analyse, illustrate and explain ongoing, creative work in India’s regional contexts creating a relevant, meaningful body of scholarly literature useful for Indian students and young scholars.  At some level, this task goes hand in hand with the strengthening of professional and educational institutions that foster learning opportunities and intellectual space to pursue and propagate pertinent pieces of knowledge further. 

Second, infrastructure and curriculum development for training large cohorts of Indian designers. Large, diversified countries like India recognise the need to train professionals matching the growing demand for design work. For instance, India has done relatively better in recent years than in the past; establishing new as well as better funding existing institutions teaching design and allied subjects. IIID’s educational outreach in itself represents an important step forward in this direction even as much remains to be done on this front.

To summarise and conclude, despite a wide range of challenges and impediments, I see the glass more full than empty. The field of design, like many other human endeavours, does well with better patronage. An urbanising country needs better-designed places, and in today’s India, this urge comes clear in the generous society-wide support for the design professions. Better still, the votaries for better design include many powerful patrons like governments, corporate firms, state bureaucrats, and elected officials. 

However most important and abundantly clear is that the toiling masses of India deserve a better quality of life that professional associations like IIID seek to promote for everyone. The IIID Design Yatra symbolised a small but important step in that direction. Guidance for Indian design practitioners from this critical perspective seems straightforward: Shaping better spaces diligently remains an urgent task into the foreseeable future.      

References:

Dehejia, Vidya. 2008. Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj. Mapin.

Hoch, Charles. 2019. Pragmatic Spatial Planning: Practical Theory for Practitioners. Routledge.

Vidyarthi, S. 2014. “Building A ‘World class Heritage City’: Jaipur’s Emergent Elites and New Approach to Spatial Planning,” in Gavin Shatkin, ed. Contesting the Indian City: Global Visions and the Politics of the Local. Wiley-Blackwell.