Dear Ranjan,

Congratulations. It was good to meet you and Aditi at NID and see this
beautiful and much awaited volume, which I believe is a must for anyone
interested in Indian handmade crafts and textiles.

I have been reading with great interest the discussion initiated by Prof.
Margolin and I may be diverging from this a bit, but I would like to
contextualize some aspects of that discussion to your mail below about
NID's large body of research in the crafts sector and similar work done
by other undergraduate design schools in India.

A review of the crafts documentation at the undergraduate design college
in India that I am associated with reveals mostly descriptive
documentation. These reports include fairly detailed descriptions of the
crafts motifs, designs, process, history etc. The crafts history that the
students include is mostly reproduced from our college or other library or
the internet and often with little or no critical analysis. The oral
histories of the crafts practictioners and their living cultural
traditions that the craft is part of are often ignored. While problems
faced by the artisans that the student's worked with are documented, they
do not contain voices of the artisans or other stakeholders and it is
often not clear if the problems were expressed by the artisans or the NGOs
that work with the artisans or the author of the book they read. They also
fail to include an appraisal of policies and development practices or the
other wider socio-cultural, economic and environmental factors that might
be influencing the transitions in the "traditions" that they are
documenting.

They include images of the traditional motifs, design and products and its
current practitioners as well as a documentation of the student's own
design interventions with the NGO or crafts community- i.e. final products
designed by the student after his/her return to the college or co-designed
in the community with the artisans.

I am curious to know how many of the 800 student and faculty research
documents at NID on craft traditions have gone beyond descriptive
documentation.

What percent have described/critically appraised state policies or
previous designer, NGO, state interventions in these crafts communities?

What percent have done an impact study of their own designs/products on
crafts communities cultural traditions as part of their internship or
research project?

Or is this beyond the scope of undergraduate design education and is it
something better left to masters or PHD design students or those outside
the current design disciplines in India?

Warm regards
Uma

> Dear Friends
>
> We have been discussing the lack of research into many aspects of design
> and design research and I agree that this is quite true from many angles.
> However It is also true that many areas of research do cover the
> intentions and the outcomes of design action although these may not be
> percieved as an area of design research by many in the field as well as
> outside.
>
> At NID we have been doing sustained research into the crafts traditions of
> India and these have so far been only available to NID schollars who have
> access to the single unpublished copies in the NID Library, over 800 study
> documents if you do not include the ones on textile crafts and the design
> projects. These have remained unpublished both due to a lack of funds and
> also due to a lack of vision that thse are of great value to our design
> movement in India and elsewhere.
>
>
> However, I am happy to inform you that we have just recieved an advance
> copy of the book "Handmade in India" that was researched and created at
> the NID based on 40 years tradition of crafts documentation and the last
> five years of intensive research by over 50 teams from NID and it is
> published and produced by COHANDS and Mapin Publishing Pvt Limited with
> the support from Development Commissioner Handicrafts Government of India.
> I am one of its editors and the first copy is at hand and we are quite
> pleased with the results.
>
> I have posted a note about the book and its design intensions on the
> Design for India blog at this link below:
> <http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com/2007/08/handmade-in-india-handbook-of-crafts-of.html>
>
> There is another post about the information architecture used for the book
> at the Visible information India blog at this link below:
> <http://visible-information-india.blogspot.com/2007/08/information-architecture-for-handmade.html>
>
> We hope to have the books out in bookstores in India by early October 2007
> and you can see more about the book at the Mapin website at this link.
> <http://www.mapinpub.com/Handmade_in_India>
> Mapin proposes top make the book available globally when the second
> reprint is released later this year.
>
> RMIT produced a book titled 'Design Research" by Peter Downton and the key
> premise here is that every design project is a platform for research and I
> do agree with this point of view but we do need to find ways of publishing
> these design research findings and perhaps the web based approaches to
> publishing that are being achieved by portals on design may actually help
> us bridge the gaps that we are discussing today.
>
> What do you think?
>
> With warm regards
>
> M P Ranjan
> from my Mac at Gandhinagar
> 7 August 2007 at 4.15 pm IST
>
> _______________________________________________________________
>
> 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)
> 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
> blog: http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com
> _______________________________________________________________
>
>