Dear David

I understand your question partly perhaps and the huge implications that 
it has for the design journey. In India, and at NID, we have been 
constantly in touch with hugely varied groups of people whom we would 
consider users, particularly in a development setting and we have had 
numerous engagements in the past with some very perplexing questions 
that have needed to be answered before we could justify any solution 
that the design team would have to offer. The diversity is truly 
enormous since we have linguistic variety, cultural variety, educational 
level variety, economic disparity as variety and belief systems in 
religion, race and caste which may not be the case in many other parts 
of the world. In a development communication situation dealing with 
information products the task is even more ominous since we would have 
to try and discover many of these intangible attributes by actual field 
work and numerous iterations before we can even claim that some degree 
of resolution has been achieved. I recall many such projects that were 
done at NID dealing with economic, educational and health related issues 
in particular regions of the country in the 70's and 80's that gave us 
an insight into the complexity of the situation that we were dealing 
with but I cannot claim that we have an adequate body of research that 
can be taken up and used elsewhere, unfortunately. One project that 
comes to mind is the book which was finally produced at the end of a 
long design exercise, called "Learning from the Field" which documented 
the work done by a team of faculty and students from the Graphic Design 
discipline at NID when they had traveled to Rajasthan at the request of 
the Family Welfare department to look at communication strategies for 
population management as well as women's health and reproductive 
processes which is a very delicate subject in the tradition ridden society.

The graphic innovations and the processes of finding design approaches 
were a huge area of learning for those involved but other than the book 
mentioned above there is very little discourse on the many many 
dimensions that were studied and explored during the project which was 
quite a massive exercise. The book is still available from the NID 
Publications and can be seen at this link below which is a amazing 
resource for anyone who may be interested in these complex dimensions of 
health communication in India:
<http://nid.edu/research_pub_leningfield.htm>

One of the authors, Laxmi Murthy, has done some sustained work after 
this project and her work with the women of Southern Rajasthan can be 
seen at these web links below:
<http://www.vikalpdesign.com/>
<http://www.vikalpdesign.com/home.html>

The other author of the book, Ashoke Chatterjee, was formerly the 
Executive Director of NID from 1975 to 1985 and he has been personally 
responsible for keeping NID and its graphic designers in particular  
focussed on the social commmunication agenda for many years and through 
his sustained committment brought in, UNIDO, UNESCO, the World Bank and 
many other international and national agencies to NID, with design 
challanges to be handled  in the area of social communication. Ashoke 
Chatterjee was the recipient of the Sir Misha Black Award and he got it 
on behalf of NID for excellence in Design Education and it was Prof 
Bruce Archer of RCA who came to India specifically with the task of 
conferring the award on Ashoke Chatterjee who presently lives in 
Ahmedabad and is active in the field of crafts and development as the 
President of the Crafts Council of India. There were literally hundreds 
of small and large projects that were done in this space which have not 
been adequately documented or discoursed about and this research work 
can still be done if someone is interested even today, albeit historically.

The role of crafts and economic development was another avenue that 
brought us (from industrial design disciplines and textiles) into 
contact with very complex issues of both economic deprivation in our 
villages as well as social and cultural continuity of local communities 
in the throes of massive change while we were trying to use design as a 
means of creating change and this showed us that we needed to build a 
sense of responsibility and accountability not only to the sponsoring 
agencies who were our clients but also to the user groups who were the 
ultimate beneficiaries of the design action or I should say who would be 
directly affected by the fallout of the design action and it taught us a 
whole lot about humility in the field. This led me to look at the role 
of ideological positions in design education and in this search we came 
to include value systems and attitudes as core offering as part of our 
very unique educational culture at NID in the 70's and 80's when a lot 
of time and discussion centered around the ideological foundations of 
design instruction and evaluation processes within education. While many 
meetings and discussion sessions were conducted on this theme we have 
very little published material to show for all this deliberation, 
unfortunately. Our student evaluation system that was innovated in those 
days did not have a comparative grading system since the faculty and the 
founder administrators of the school felt that students must be 
benchmarked against themselves and not against their colleague and 
attitude and value system was always a part of the discussion which has 
changed in recent times in order get the Institute more aligned with 
global and university systems of evaluation, and I believe that we have 
lost something very precious through this shift.

To get back to your question of how does one know where one stands in 
the systems diagram of a complex situation, all I can say is that we 
will never know for sure but if we are sensitised enough to be open to 
see feedback from the unstated traumas of the user groups we will be 
able to correct our course (hopefully) just that little bit to make a 
real difference. Sounds like magic, but design synthesis (when 
everything just falls in place) is a bit of magic too, dont you think?

This was about the time that we discovered the body of work in semiotics 
and language and tried to bring it into design action particularly in 
the framework of social communications and film making for development 
al documentaries at NID that was looking at many kinds of communication 
problems in health, education and development issues. Systems thinking 
introduced our teams to semiotics but I think that the issue that you 
are raising is one that deals with ideology as well and this has not yet 
been resolved in any satisfactory manner since there have been many 
debates on ethics as well as many postures and positions held by 
individuals that were not stated but acted upon in very political ways, 
something which can be felt but not seen. We can recognise from this 
that design at this level is a very political activity but to master it 
would need many new skills and frameworks for understanding of its 
operation as a professional in the service of a client, many times the 
Government itself, since these issues are not dealt by industry usually, 
but in recent times we see some from industry leaning in this direction 
as well, as part of their corporate social responsibility, or may I say 
the guilt-redresel funding routes or the carbon-credit buying route. 
Design is not value free.

With warm regards

M P Ranjan
from my office at NID
31 July 2007 at 8.30 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
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://design-for-india.blogspot.com


David Sless wrote:
> Hi MP Ranjan,
>
> The extent to which I feel out of step is highlighted by your 
> reference to General Systems Theory and the HfG Ulm. Like you, I 
> avidly absorbed the work of all the authors you cite, but I took a 
> different direction. In my last post, I deliberately stopped with the 
> 1930s because I feel out of step with what followed.
>
> That leads neatly into what I wanted to say about the 
> colonial/imperialist debate which I alluded to in my last post.
>
> I don't want to get caught up in the 'apology' for or the 'accusation' 
> of imperialism. Imperialism happened and continues to happen. Some of 
> the less appealing actions and habits of mind that it encourages or 
> tolerates are as virulent and persistent in our time as at any other 
> time in the past. Norm Sheehan makes that eloquently clear. Our age 
> has no greater claim to being enlightened than any other. If there is 
> any difference in our time it is one of scale and reach. There are 
> more of us, we can successfully kill each other and other living 
> things in greater numbers at greater distances, and we can do so more 
> efficiently than in previous times. This, along with the internet and 
> good plumbing, is an aspect of what is incorrectly called progress.
>
> What I have been trying to do is open up a rarely regarded but 
> important space that gets masked by the none-space from which 
> imperialist points of view often speak.
>
> Going back to the original substantive questions I asked in relation 
> to designers' use of anthropological materialthough it could apply to 
> almost any area of investigation undertaken as part of a design project:
>> In so far that anthropological investigation is allied to any kind of 
>> problem solving, it's important always to ask whose problem is being 
>> solved, or whose description of the problem is being used, and who 
>> owns the data and the outcome.
> These questions PRECEDE and frame any data collected and subsequent 
> outcome. In turn, these questions are only asked if one begins by 
> trying to articulate the POSITION from which one speaks, listens, or 
> engages. But the articulation of which I speak is quite 
> concretedescribing the communication landscape from where I stand 
> inside it.
>
> I am not interested in the abstract articulation of relativism, 
> subjectivity, and situatednessthe post-modern angst. This is often 
> recited as a mantra, and then followed by yet another series of 
> imperialising abstraction about 'humanity', 'the environment', 
> 'sustainment' etc.
>
> My interests are quite concrete and specific. I assume I'm already 
> embedded in the world in a particular context (Whether I acknowledge 
> this in the abstract or not). How could it be otherwise! And from this 
> immersion (as Norm describes it) I am faced with a series of specific 
> practical questions. How am I to read what is being said to me by 
> people I talk to? How do I read the data that comes to me in a report 
> about what people have said to an interviewer? How do I read what a 
> writer tells me in a book about their own experience? When I look at a 
> system diagram, I want to know where I am situated relative to other 
> elements in the system, or where the person who drew the diagram was 
> that enabled them to see the system from this particular point of 
> view. Whose point of view are they showing me? These are human 
> questions about the relative relationship between me and the world I 
> have to deal with. They are at one and the same time practical and 
> moral questions, and the answers I give have practical and moral 
> consequences.
>
> Nothing in general systems theory, in the work of HfG Ulm, nor the 
> work on design methods, wicked problems etc. that followed, enable me 
> to answer these questions. Nor do the excrescence from hermeneutic 
> approaches help either.
>
> To help in my own work I created what I called the 'logic of 
> positions'. It helps in a formal mapping of the communicative 
> landscape in which I am immersed. This has been for me, and my 
> colleagues in information design, very useful in practically mapping 
> out our relationship to the material and people we work with and the 
> types of questions we ask of that material and those people.
>
> I would suggest that the questions I raise above are the types of 
> questions that individuals and teams of designers ask all the time, 
> and try to answer through their work. Whether they do it using some 
> formal tools like a 'logic of positions' or through some less formal 
> methods, it is the fact that much of the tone and content of design 
> research as discussed on this list avoids these questions which puts 
> me and  (possibly) other designers out of step.
>
> Of course, I cannot speak for others, but I am continually 
> disappointed by the absence of  a practical engagement with the issues 
> and questions of our time in which we are embedded.
>
> David