Dear Juris Mileston

Your note strikes a cord and it resonates with some thoughts that I have
had over the years about design education and who would be the ideal
faculty group to deliver great design education. I am a trained designer
but have strayed intellectually and in my readings and writings well
beyond what one would normally recognise as a good design read. As a
creative trespasser, to use the term suggested by Arthur Koestler when
he described himself in one of his books, I have wandered into many
fields outside the formal boundary of design as defined by traditional
design schools and this was found very puzzling for many design school
administrators and this condition is thankfully changing across the
world and not a day too late, if I may say so.

When I set about doing my research into bamboo in the late 70's and
early 80's I was steeped in Anthropology litrature dealing with concepts
that then blew my mind and these new ideas of structuralism, field-work
methods and ethics of human interaction to name only a few aspects gave
me and my team of two colleagues a sense of mission and drive that we
spent almost one full year in the field in the Northeast of India in
sleeping bags and in amazing days of new insights about traditional 
ethnic communities and their fascinating discoveries and living material
culrure that for us was the encyclopedia for a bamboo culture qhich was
at that time quite unknown to the design community which recognised
plastics, steel and wood and glass, ceramics and textiles etc as the
primary materials for industrial design and not the bamboos and grasses
and leaves and mud which are the living materials of everyday use in the
regions that we set out to study. We collected over 400 unique baskets
and recorded thousands of examples of local products, houses and amazing
structures in the field note books using designer skills of fine
drawings, photographs and notes, all of which formed the basis for our
years of analysis leading to the publication of my first book called the
"Bamboo & Cane Crafts of Northeast India" by M P Ranjan, Nilam Iyer and
Ghanshyam Pandya, that was released in 1986. However in 1984 when my
instutite got a massive grant from the UNDP and I was identified to take
up training in China under that programme my work was locally evaluated
and unfortunately labelled as not "Design" but some form of
"Anthropology" and I was quite stuborn about my position and did not
relent leading to my travel plans being cancelled at that time. However
after my book was published and we as a team were able to demonstrate
the value of our depp look into the local culture in the products that
emerged we could see a slow but definite shift in perception about all
such non-design activities at NID. As luck would have it the UNDP sent
me to China as their expert to study bamboo industries in 1999 and later
in 2000 the Chinese Government invited me to advise them about sympodial
bamboos in 2000 bringing the story to a full circle closure, very
interesting indeed!!

I have been an advocate for giving non-design exprets from a number of
fields including technology an increased influence in planning and
delivering educational conternt to design students but most of my
designer colleagues would not easily subscribe to this position and we
still suffer form a serious lack of publications about our massive
experiences at NID as aresult of the object oriented and product centric
art based pedagogy of design which is still prevalent in many schools
around the world including at our schools in India. However this is
going through a major change. On seeing your plea for a greater
involvement of research and science disciplines into design education I
cannot but agree fully with your position. I looked up some very fine
references on my computer that are reports and papers that I have ben
downloading over the opast few months as well as my own papers and
presentations I have found one pdf file that is a remarkable report
prepared by the DEMOS website in the UK <http://www.demos.co.uk> a
report titled "The Journey to the Interface: How public service design
can connect users to reform" which is an amazing study and promotion of
design as a tool for reforming service economy and not objects and
communications as has been the focus of much of design education from
the Bauhaus and Ulm traditions that dominate most schools of design
today. This shift to business models and service design promises to open
new doors and positions for many experts from outside the material and
communication dominated mindset and we can use this focus to try and
change design education and its very mnarrow interpretation by design
education administrators especially in universities and stand alone
design schools across the world.

I am copying this note to two of my coleagues whoo are handling
non-design portfolios at the NID where I teach as well as the Srishti,
Bangalore, both handle the respective programmes in science and liberal
arts which is still seen as a necessary but perripheral input to design
students. Shilpa Das from NID is coordinating our SLA programmes and she
may be drawn in to discuss this matter with you and the other colleague
at a distance is Uma Chandru of Srishti whio is a trained Anthropologist
working inside a design school full time. I do not know if they are
members of the PhD-Design list but I do hope that this note will draw
them into this grpou and that they will find time to reflect on their
experiences here on this list so that we can collectively bring change
to design education and research as it is handled in the days and years ahead.

I would love to get a pdf copy of your thesis and my papers and reports
cajn be downloaded from my website <http://homepage,mac.com/ranjanmp>
and I will be happy to send you my bamboo book which has now been
reprinted in a paperback format in 2004, almost 25 years after it was
forst written in the mid 80's. It took us all these years to add a claim
to the title of the book and the new version is now called "Traditional
Wisdom: Bamboo and Cane Crafts of Northeast India" suggesting that the
study is not just a documentation but a deeper analysis of insights from
research in the field using anthro tools and processes. We have not
changed anything in that book except add the qualifier to the title and
it makes sense in my opinion since we had originally included two
indexes at the back of our book, one a "Technical Index" and the second
a "Subject Index". the technical index includes insights about
structure, form, material and process related insights that could not be
atriculated in one book but they can be used by the reader to look into
the math, technique, material property, cultural expression etc, almost
rearranging the content into ten different orientations which we feklt
was necessary if the new material bamboo was to be understiood and used
by fellow designers across the world in our search for sustainable
approaches to material culture of the future.

Do send me your postal address offline and I will be happy to send you
my books and CD ROMS about our work in the field of bamboo and design. I
hope that this thread develops fully to give us insights of many many
diverse experts on this list and just this outpouring may be strong
enough to graft a massive change in the way design is being introduced
to schools across the world. Do not underestimate the power of such
sharing since last month the Time Magazine selected "You" as the "Person
of the Year" on their cover story which I believe is truly happening.

For instance in India we have been able to strongly influence National
policy of late by active exchanges online on the DesignIndia forum on
yahoogroups which brought together as many as 990 designers and design
researchers who are interested in Design in India anjd we were able to
launch a global initiative called 'Design with India" which is now
moving on to its second leg of influence through a strategic meet that
is planned to be held in New York on the 5th February 2007, next month
and I am hoping to be there as a stakeholder representing the Design
India forum and my Institute, the Nationalo Institute of Design.

What you have raised as an issue is central to many stakeholders and
planners and policy makers realising that design is changing and that
the doors and windows must be thrown open to invite and hole many many
non-design experts within the design education and design resaerch fold
if we are to make design the next big thing after science, technology
and management in the global scheme of things in the days ahead. For me
now design today represents a core human ability and thinking style that
started 2 million years ago when the first pre-humans used fire for just
one function that of keeping predators away from their campsites. this
definition of design that I draw fro Harrold Nelson and Eric Stolterman,
Human intentions that lead to value creation through thought and action,
is at heart of making design in the future a discipline that should be
inclusive and not the sole preserve of so called trained designers
alone. Design is changing and we must recognise and develop approaches
that can fit this new understanding. The politics education and of of
design education in particular must now recognise these far reaching
changes in our perception of design as a world changing discipline that
is yet to find its place in the sun.

Sorry for the very long post but as I said your note did touch a chord,
thank you.

With warm regards

M P Ranjan
fromm my Mac at home on the NID campus
11 January 2007 at 7.50 am IST

Copies to Shilpa Das, Coordinator SLA at NID and Uma Chandru, Srishti,
Bangalore with a request that they join the list and contribute to this
thread and stay connected in the days ahead.
_______________________________________________________________________
Prof M P Ranjan
Faculty of Design
Head, Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID (CFBI-NID)
Chairman, GeoVisualisation Task Group (DST, Govt. of India) (2006-2008)
Faculty Member on Governing Council (2003 - 2005)
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380 007 India

Tel: (off) 91 79 26623692 ext 1090 (changed in January 2006)
Tel: (res) 91 79 26610054
Fax: 91 79 26605242

email: [log in to unmask]
web site: http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp/
web domain: http://www.ranjanmp.in
_______________________________________________________________________

Juris Milestone wrote:
> 
> As a newly minted Ph.D. in anthropology (my ethnographic work was among professors of
> architecture, landscape architecture, and sculpture - all engaging in university-community
> partnerships doing urban design), I'd like to see more openness to hiring non-designers onto
> design faculties, or some further compromise thereof.  Perhaps my experience in the US is unique,
> but I've found that almost all the job descriptions I know I could fulfill, end up requiring a degree
> in design, which I do not have.
> 
> I studied designers, and wrote about design, but my contribution is primarily critical analysis of
> neoliberal consumer society, societies of control, and taste and class (by comparison, I am not a
> "design anthropologist", or an anthropologist who works in the professional, commercial world of
> design).  In seeking to offer critical analyses of "design" as a socio-historical phenomenon, and
> trying to understand how the ideas of design effect social order, which is always embedded in and
> constituting struggles over power (meaning, value, truth, control, profit), and in doing this by
> placing design within its cultural contexts, as well as symbolic and political economies, the
> "sacred" is often made to seem profane, and many designers (in my limited experience) become
> uncomfortable with this.
> 
> I'd say that one way to get design students to think critically, is to invite critical thinkers from
> other disciplines (preferably those that specialize in critical analysis of human behavior,
> institutions, and practice), by opening up faculties and curricula to those with an interest in
> applying their non-design tools to the world of design.  (Again, it appears that this has been more
> successful in the UK, but it is difficult for a young scholar like me to 'crack the codes' from across
> the pond!)
> 
> Juris Milestone, Ph.D.
> Department of Anthropology
> Temple University
> Philadelphia, PA