Talkin’ about a revolution

There is news for subscribers of the open-source school who have been waiting for the day when tax-funded research will be freely accessible by all — mountain is about to come to Mohammed a la MIT open courseware. And the ministry of human resources development (MHRD) has chosen design education to test the waters.

The MHRD’s Rs15-crore digital design project, ‘Kalpa’ (Hindi for design), being piloted by IIT-B’s industrial design centre (IDC), aspires to be a passport for self-taught designers and grassroots innovators to India’s top design and art schools. To get in, inclination and an internet connection would suffice.

The project strategy will be three-pronged. It will gather courseware and lectures on all aspects of design — colour theory, typography, semantics of form  —  from IDC, the IIT Guwahati design centre, JJ School of Arts, MS University of Baroda, among others, and make them available on a dedicated website. Secondly, the portal intends to be a Facebook of teachers and students, who can actively seek feedback from practitioners. Lastly, Kalpa will document good Indian design, wherein it will take under its wing, IDC’s digital folk tales project that has been documenting Indian crafts and storytelling traditions.

The man for the job is Prof Ravi Poovaiah, co-designer of the electronic voting machine, and co-founder of designinindia.net, an information resource for design events, projects, reading list and industry info. Why Poovaiah? It’s because he concerns himself with impacting the entire design ecosystem in India rather than piecemeal interventions. Over the past years, he has pushed for design education in schools and for creating synergy between D-schools and the industry it caters to. Kalpa fits snugly into this big picture.

The project is timely, says Dr Ajanta Sen, international director, IIT-B, and moderator, designinindia.net. “Indian parents bankroll education; they mortgage their life savings to educate their children. And, people are realising that design has begun to play a big role.”

Since most design books are authored abroad, and are carriers of a viral western sensibility, Kalpa wants to build on Indian strengths. “Our art and aesthetics are very strong. Over the last 10-15 years, Indian design has reflected a sense of pride in our culture. There has been a lot of learning in the Indian context. But it’s hard to find books on Indian colour sensibility and Indian art history. There are documentations, but they are scattered,” says Prof Poovaiah. And since the project will tie lectures from IDC, NID’s Bangalore research centre, IIT-Guwahati, etc, traditions from all regions will find representation.

The project’s impact may be premature to gauge, but its potential can easily be seen. While initially the content will be in English — and translated to regional languages in five years — the mix of old content and new writings will be Copyleft: anyone can translate them and distribute them freely. “For grassroots one would need a multimedia, multi-language platform, but this is a move in the right direction. We talk of democratising knowledge. And when top institutes like the IIT talk about doing it, isn’t that a big thing? It will better the quality of education and add tremendous value to small entrepreneurs and semi-trained designers’ works,” says Prof Anil K Gupta of IIM Ahmedabad, who has been trying to give visibility to innovations of the ‘unlettered Indian innovator’ through Sristi and the Grassroots Innovations Augmentation Network.

Currently, Kalpa is in the planning stage and will be a pilot project for the first eight months to see if the investment is justified. In its second phase, the project will move into design studies. “Our intention is to not keep design education with ourselves but to find good teachers and get them on board, from wherever we can find them,” says Prof Poovaiah. ‘If’ isn’t a question; when the project comes through, and similar ones follow, we could well be moving towards a new, revolutionary paradigm in Indian education.