Dear Ethel Leon
You have made a very important post on the PhD-Design list and the issues
that you raise are as true for India as they would be for most "peripheral
countries" to borrow and use Gui Bonsiepe's terminology. There is much work
to be done and many that are available but not known to a wider audience.
For instance when we were working on the Handmade in India book, my wife -
Aditi Ranjan - and I as editors, we met up with Ram Guha, an eminent Indian
historian, in Bangalore and he gifted us a book by K T Acharya on the
evolution and technology of the Ghani – traditional oil expellers – used in
our villages in India. The book published in 1993 is a gem and covers all
kinds of oil expellers and their historic development across several
regions of India.
K T Acharya on Wiki <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._T._Achaya>
Ghani (out of print) on Amazon <
http://www.amazon.com/Ghani-The-Traditional-Oilmill-India/dp/0917526058>
Our own book "Handmade in India" has been designed to be an access book for
design and architicture students and covers India's hand crafts sector
across 600 clusters and on each page we provide lists in the margin of
keywords that could be used to garner live information from the web based
search and this covers all geographic and cultural regions to one who is
not aware of the terminology to begin with. I mention this here in the
context of history of design since I believe that such a format could make
history very accessible in a contextual manner if we were to assemble such
a resource and have it available online. You can download the full book as
a searchable pdf file from my blog at the links below and read more about
it if you wish from my posts listed here. However, the paper edition is
available commercially in bookstores across the world as well as on Amazon
but students (and others) can have it free from my blog. :)
Handmade in India download 337 MB <
https://www.dropbox.com/s/j3lnkd6bp0rw95b/Handmade%20in%20India_Book.pdf>
more about the book
<
http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.in/2008/11/art-book-centre-launches-handmade-in.html
>
<
http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.in/2008/07/handmade-in-india-team-and-mission.html
>
<
http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.in/2008/07/handmade-in-india-book-launch-in-new.html
>
Another very useful history resource that we have made available online
happened when we conducted two conferences in India in collaboration with
the HfG Ulm Archive. titled "Look Back-Look Forward - Hfg Ulm and Basic
Design for India" (Kolkatta September 2010) and first one in Bangalore
(March 2010) titled "Look Back-Look Foward - Hfg Ulm and Design Education
in India". Read about these here below. However, we also made available the
complete set of HfG Ulm Journals for all the participants, design teachers
at these conferences, a digital copy of the Ulm Journals since only one
copy of these Journals was available in India at the NID library. These
were shared with endorsement from its editors/authors Gui Bonsiepe and
Tomas Maldonado. This set can be downloaded as a zip file from my blog here
as a 968 MB zip file that reproduces the full interactive DVD. This also
has archival material and books on NID and my own papers on design
thinking. Take a look and share with your students as well.
Download Look Back ... DVD <
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ihrxs0840n6u2m/Look_Back_Look_Forward_DVD.zip>
Read about Kolkatta event <
http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.in/2010/08/hfg-ulm-and-basic-design-conference-at.html
>
Read about Bangalore event <
http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.in/2010/04/look-back-look-forward-bengaluru-event.html
>
There are other resources here in India that would be available in local
languages, but alas these are not accessible even for me since we have as
many as 14 major languages and over 800 dialects that make up the complex
matrix of India and to study history it is a major venture that may take a
very long time. However, there are new papers and publications coming out
of India and as Bonsiepe had predicted the evolution of design competence
is accompanied by a increase in published material and India is approaching
a more advanced stage in this structure that was proposed by Gui Bonsiepe.
Indian school are now offering the PhD degree in Design and Design Studies
and this too will make a lot more new material available from here I am
sure.
I visited Milan in 2010 to attend the D4SB conference at IED, Milan and
used this opportunity to continue m=y ongoing research on HfG Ulm and its
impact particularly in India. In 2005 and In 2008 I had visited the Ulm
Archive to further my research. But the Milan visit was special since I got
to meet Tomas Maldonado and spend quality time discussing his views on the
past and future of design education and I am still to develop these
discussions into a published form. He is amazing and his book Design Nature
Revolution (English 1972) clearly tells me that design is a political
activity and we discussed some of these dimensions which I will write about
sometime, hopefully soon. These are unknown thoughts even to design authors
and scholars it seems since I find no mention of Maldonado in the new book
and very good book "Adversarial Design" by Carl Disalvo from the MIT Press
in a series on Design Thinking and Design Theory edited by Ken Friedman and
Eric Stolterman. There is so much that is not known and there is much work
to be done here.
With warm regards
M P Ranjan
Professor - Design Chair, CEPT University, Ahmedabad
from my iMac at home on the NID campus
20 August 2912 at 9.55 pm IST
-------------------------------------------------------------
*Prof M P Ranjan*
*Design Thinker and author of blog -
www.Designforindia.com<http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/>
*
E8 Faculty Housing
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380 007 India
Tel: (res) 91 79 26610054
email: ranjanmp@g <[log in to unmask]>mail.com
<http://www.ranjanmp.in/>blog: <http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com>
(current and with downloads)
education blog: <http://www.design-concepts-and-concerns.blogspot.com>
(archival)
education blog: http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com (archival)
web site: http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp (disabled by Apple)
<http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp>web domain: http://www.ranjanmp.in (disabled
by Apple)
<http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com/>
------------------------------------------------------------
On 20 August 2012 00:41, Ethel Leon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
>
> The following lines are a trial of sharing my anguishes and doubts on my
> professoral practice in design history awakened by E. Stolterman request
> for good and shsort overviews.
>
> It is very hard to choose design history texts as it is hard to define the
> teaching perspective. I think this kind of dilemma is shared by all
> historians, not only design ones.
>
> For sure, there are few known books on design of 90% of the world.
>
> Fallen 2010 book is a very good one for historians, but not for those who
> intend to become practitioners, I think. It' s much more historiography
> than design history.
>
> I run a 48 weeks (3 semesters) course and try to understand the situation
> of peripherical countries, specially my own, Brasil. Because probably that
> will be my students reality (although I have ex-students working in
> Germany, in the USA, in France). To do so, I must make sure that design
> history is one (specially if we are talking from the 19th century on)
> because the history of the world became one. In the sense that what happens
> in Sweden has its counterpart in Ghana.
>
> When car industry established itself in Brasil in the fifties (American,
> German, French industries) their lobby destroyed the national weak
> automobile industry and also many initiatives in public transport. So what
> was a resistence perspective from design point of view?
>
> But of course I have always many doubts on what I am teaching. If I choose
> following as Adrian Forty, Heskett and others to lighten some aspects or
> situations of design which prove a kind of thesis - in fact in my case the
> problematic situation of design in peripherical countries, specially those
> whose Gini index are so bad as in Brasil - I will let aside many chapters
> of canonic history taught by many authors, somee of them having a kind of
> post-pevsnerian narrative ( but not a very critical one). I have already
> done it, 'forgetting' entire periods of this canonic history, but my
> students frequently came back to tell me I had not taught them enough about
> Bauhaus etc..
>
> From this point of view it's extremely scarce what we have researched to
> build a world design history.
>
> Beat Schneider in his design overview states the postmodern concern of
> gender, peripherical countries etc. But in his book ther is almost nothing
> written or photograpahed on these subjects. There are many good studies
> regardidng particular practices, but the big narratives are still attached
> to Positivist history.
>
> I think general social, political, economic histories (with great limits)
> could and still can be written because there were many regional and
> specific history narratives to feed them.
>
> And this is one of our problems. When T. Love says we know nothing about
> design in Middle East countries, that is truly a big hole for all design
> historians. And when I say peripherical I mean Russia, Portugal, Slovenia ,
> Albania...not only Iran, Thailand, Vietnam, Colombia and Senegal.
>
> In Brasil, although we have very good anthropology courses, few people
> studied Indian artifacts from design point of view. I always admire the
> 'zarabatana', a weapon which launches poisoned arrowes built with one of
> the toughest woods of the world. This is a very interesting
> design/technical artifact and a good research on it would illuminate many
> aspects of South American Indians design practices and their differences
> regarding our colonial invadors, Portuguese mainly but also French and
> Dutch.
>
> This kind of research is understood by many colleagues like pre or proto
> design and is directly implicated in epistemological cross roads like
> those discussed by R. Buchanan (Rhetoric Humanism and Design 1995). And
> this is another big question of design history. May I start it from the
> invention of fire, from paleolithic era, from Renaissance or...?
>
> I think a great effort and collective effort will be necessary to build a
> more comprehensive design history, not slicing it by countries (Design in
> Italy, design in Brasil etc.) but understanding relationships inside the
> history.
>
> As I said these are doubts and anguishes.
>
> All my best
>
> Ethel
>
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