Crowdsourcing a Planned Economy for India
by Aditya Dev Sood
They say that everything that will happen is already written down somewhere, perhaps on the fading and brittle
bhojapatra leaves of a lost manuscript, perhaps on a kernel of rice, perhaps in the subtle realignments of the planets, barely visible in the nights’ sky. One other place to look is in drawers and filing cabinets of Yojana Bhavan on New Delhi’s Parliament Street, where the sages of the National Planning Commission sit down to work, and where, every five years, a new plan for the economy and society of India emerges.
I went down there last week to talk with Harsh Shrivastava, Consultant (Planning), with the Planning Commission. I was interested in exploring where and how the government might be open to using ethnography, design thinking and innovation processes to do its work in future. I was surprised to learn that the twelfth five year plan (2012 - 17) has been prepared using a rather radical and innovative approach. First, a number of core areas of focus were agreed upon during a kind of collaborative workshop or retreat, which the entire staff of the Planning Commission attended. Then these twelve areas of focus were organized into a large spreadsheet where different groups were responsible for articulating the needs of society and the policy mechanisms that would achieve those ends. There are some three hundred and forty cells currently being updated and cross-referenced in this large matrix by teams of analysts now working at the Planning Commission, all of which will all be synthesized in order to generate the initial approach note for what will later become the twelfth plan.
Shrivastava also told me that the twelve core areas had already been uploaded to the Planning Commission’s Facebook page, where they are now open for comment. Check it out at:
www.facebook.com/twelfthplan. People have left all manner of comments, which have been lightly moderated, expressing a range of emotions, including surprise, encouragement, pride, cynicism, and doubt. Some wonky surfers have left links to news articles or to other kinds of online content that might contribute to the conversation regarding the particular area of focus. All in all, it is an unprecedented and potentially revolutionary approach to citizen involvement in government planning and thinking, which could dramatically transform the way Indians think about their relationship to the state machinery.
Elections are only the beginnings of democracy, not their end. The kind of government which is truly
for the people must routinely ask after the welfare and needs of the people, and invite those views into the process of governance. This experiment of the Planning Commission, of putting their draft plan up for public scrutiny is brave and bold, for it could establish a precedent that can then be emulated by diverse government departments at every level, district, state and union. Instead of being governed by a
mai-baap sarkar, Indian citizens would now live in a state that was continuously responding to the minute pings and clicks of each and every citizen, offering feedback and commentary, expressing preferences and offering more ideas for how things might be done better.
With mobile phones available to Indian citizens in every part of the country, it is increasingly possible for citizens to express opinions, to respond to questions and questionnaires, and to express themselves collectively. The very same configurations of technology and society which have allowed people to organize themselves in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya this past month can also allow people to collectively shape and inform the rather more subtle work of the Planning Commission. This is, after-all, the age of the Wiki, wherein efforts of a large distributed collective can often trump the efforts of a small, specialized few.
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When One Technology Mashes Up Against Another
by Aditya Dev Sood
It has been growing slowly, adding new lines and nodes year after year, snaking outward in all directions for almost a decade now, transforming the relationships between this city, it's space and it's people. Last year, the Delhi Metro swept right through South Delhi, changing even the relationships between Gurgaon and the rest of National Capital Region. But somehow, I failed to connect with it, and wasn’t able to make it a part of my life, livelihood and personal style. The challenge for me has always been that from where I live, the Nehru Place stop is some three kilometres away, and the Hauz Khas stop is maybe four. It's too far to walk, and if you're going to have to take a taxi or auto just to get to a station and you have the option of driving, you might routinely cop out and just drive.
One day, it struck me -- what if I had some kind of folding bike that I could ride to the Metro, take it on board with me, and then keep riding it out on the other side as well. It's the kind of lifestyle option one routinely encounters in European and American cities, but one never imagines being able to adopt in one's own life. I went bike hunting on and offline, discovering several different kinds of folding bikes that would work well for this kind of commuter use. There was the Firefox Kompac, with retro colours and styling, the BSA Foldman in electric colours, and the Dahon Vitesse, which I eventually chose. The Vitesse runs about three times as much as any competing bike, but it has several features which make the investment worthwhile. Key among these is the ability to lock the bike into the folded position using magnetic hubs, which further allow you to roll the entire bike to be wheeled behind you, just like a strolling piece of luggage.
I rode my new bike around all weekend, and on Monday morning, when I had a meeting at the Ashoka Hotel, I rode out to catch the Metro at Hauz Khas. I folded down and grabbed the bike close to its rear wheel, precariously crossing the zipping four lane traffic. Inside the station I used my metro card at the turnstile and stepped up for a cursory security check. Your baggage in the machine please, said a burly sardar policman at the X-ray machine. I thought he meant my bike, but no, he just wanted my computer case. In ten minutes I was in the heart of central Delhi, exiting at Jor Bagh with what looked like scrap-metal-moveable-sculpture under my arm. Up top and streetside, it was a few quick clicks to make it a bike again, and I was on my way, cruising through the streets again, zipping past Nehru Park, feeling like I was in school again, on some kind of excursion or picnic.
I pulled up at the Ashoka, where a security detail was periscoping every car for bombs under their chasis. Where should I park, I asked? Their leader joined his hands together to say, Sorry, sir, but there is no bicycle parking at all... but you can use the two wheeler parking.
To ride a bike in Delhi is to rub up against structures of status and class hierarchy expressed through our respective modes of transport. Bicycles are symbols either of labour or else of youth, and so cyclists are prone to be infantilized on either or both of those counts. In the past, perhaps there really were no options available to us, but to replicate and perpetuate the auto-vehicular logic of the city. But now, with Delhi's metro in place, we have the opportunity to re-script the street culture of our city in ways which are more healthful, less polluting, more inclusive and ultimately more efficient. See you all on your wheels or else underground or both! .
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The Market for Meaning
by Aditya Dev Sood
It was a tremendous weekend at Pragati Maidan. The air was crisp and light, the sun was bright and wan. Delhi has never looked so beautiful this short, sharp winter. In its third year, the India Arts Summit is operating at an unprecedented scale, attracting galleries from Europe and east Asia and every city in India. Delhi’s art mela was clashing with Dalrymple’s bookish darbar in Jaipur, and yet there were so many interesting people to run into, with new projects and propositions, the one more fantastic and provocative than the next.
There is such a variety of shape and form, colour and surface, mediatization, interaction, irony, mystery, and even silence. It seems rather impossible to take it all in at once, to capture any direction or trend or overarching meaning to it all. The sheer presence of all this life-energy, expressed in visual and material and interactional forms, is elevating to the spirit, I’m all smiles at being in the midst of it. I walk about amiably, camera in one hand, masala chai in the other.
My friend Vibodh, who’s a social scientist and a reader at Jamia, pulls me aside. Yaar, I’m trying to figure out what all this really means, he says. On the one hand this is really good stuff, many people are really trying to say something, I mean it’s not just passé. But on the other hand it’s just like an auto-show, you know, except there are no models draped over the products, they’re all just trying to sell stuff. I’m sympathetic to Vibodh’s confusion, though his perspective would seem bizarre to most all of the people around us, who survive and prosper on account of the art market, which undergrids and makes possible the continued creation of new kinds of meaning by individual artists. The art market, like all other transactions in this leela we call life, is a lamination of means and meaning. And however rational the art market, art doesn’t appeal only to the intellect -- it speaks to all those regions of inner madness which are kept barely restrained, barely sane, by the intellect.
Soon after, I ran into Ashwini, an old friend from Bangalore, whom I’d first known as a dancer, then as a writer and translator, and now as a sculptor. She had an enormous ceramic piece called ‘Queen’ on view. Shorter than man-height, it sits like an enormous bell, or maybe a chess piece, with a crescent shaped head, its terracotta body marked with so many slight fissures and layered with splashes of glaze. I felt such tremendous presence and power from the piece. She took me weeks to make, said Ashwini, then months to dry, looking for cracks everyday and fixing them, and then finally I moved her into the kiln for firing. Working at this scale is such drama, such tension, you never know what is going to come out of the kiln. It’s becoming addictive for me, she trilled.
There is such deep pleasure in making things, and it is so fundamentally a part of what it means to be human. And yet in these modern times, this secret of human life hidden for most of us. We transact with thing-concepts all the time, often unaware of where they came from or what will happen to them after they have outlived our use. Amidst this mela of art, surrounded by so many collectors, investors, gallerists and dealers, who cumulatively make up this market for art, one must consider every one of them impoverished, at least when compared with those who can actually experience the joy of facture, of realization, of being able to give form to new meaning in matter -- artists, I mean -- those who extract and unveil new dimensions to reality.
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The Way We Will Live
by Aditya Dev Sood
Imagine you go to sleep tonight, and wake up tomorrow in a city of fifty million people, the largest city in human history. Will that place be a wonder of human ingenuity and design? Will it be a woeful disaster that limps along because no one can think of a better idea for where and how to live? Make no mistake, this future is coming to all of us, only it will not come tomorrow, but many tomorrows hence -- perhaps in twenty years, perhaps in twenty-five. But this is a reasonable horizon for people to make plans, take steps, invest in solutions. Architects, designers, and social thinkers of all kinds have a special responsibility to think creatively and optimistically about this shared future, which will surely come, as certainly as the sun will rise tomorrow.
The first truth that you must accustom yourself to is that with that kind of human density it will no longer be possible to live with the earth below your feet and the sky above your roof. Housing will almost invariably comprise of multi-unit dwellings, i.e. apartments. But what kind of apartments? Can we imagine apartments in a completely new way in the future? Can we promise a kitchen garden to each family so they can grow their own vegetables and herbs, recycle their own kitchen waste, and develop a personal relationship with the cycles of nature? One can imagine this way of living, but we will have to make large changes to our building industry, our construction technologies and our housing codes and regulations to ensure that most if not all urban inhabitants can live this way with ease, without having to make tremendous efforts of their own.
A second major change that can make our future urban life more livable will require us to re-imagine the kitchen. I’m often struck by how much space our appliances take up when they are not being used. Ovens, microwaves, washing machines, even refrigerators and gas-cylinders. This was all very well when these things were the pride of every middle-class homeowner, but in the apartments of tomorrow the ultimate luxury will be space. And so one must imagine all these appurtenances to disappear and collapse, in one way or another. For example, they might merge into walls and cabinetry so that the kitchen is altogether invisible when it is not being used. Or they might become smaller and thinner and lighter and more ergonomic such that they allow an increasingly small kitchen to also be an efficient one. Or they might in fact collapse and fold in and out of one another in ways that have yet to be devised. Like the flat-screen television, all these appliances have only use value, and no longer any display value, and so they must, in one way or another, disappear, to give us more space in which to live.
A decade ago, I recall that urban Indians were not terribly worried about solid waste or recycling. But our times have changed so fast, there is no choice but for our values and attitudes to keep pace. The landfills overflowing outside Delhi and Mumbai and Bangalore have mostly been generated in our kitchens and homes, as we dispose of packaging of every kind, cartons of milk, eggs, flour, pizza, and every other item large and small that comes so promisingly into our home. It is hard to imagine this, but bear with me -- if food were to flow into the home in a new way, and be stored within the home in a new way, and if kitchen waste were managed in a different way within the home itself, our lives wouldn’t be so wasteful or full of waste. This is not to cause guilt or angst, but to call for real innovation in our food systems so that we can live smarter, eat fresher, and tread more lightly upon our vast urban footprint.
I cannot let you go without saying something about your bathroom. There is nothing you can do about it, but every time you flush, you set in motion a swirl of fluid movement that churns round and round the city ending finally in that dirty treacle of sludge you call a river. There is another way to deal with human waste, which involves removing the sewage from water at source, and then purifying and recycling the grey water so generated. It’s just the smarter thing to do, but it’s an approach that will require us to make so many major changes to the way urban systems are designed. These changes will be necessary, in order to make urban life livable, just halfway down this century that we are claiming as our own.
Along with these technical and technological changes within the home, I also look forward to some interesting transformations in our social experience of the city. For much of the 20th century, Indian metropolises have been structured as more or less discrete enclaves, colonies of refugees, lawyers, journalists, and civil servants that enjoy only accidental proximity to one another. In the last two decades, this logic has exploded, in the form of new gated communities, almost at the scale of cities themselves. These private developments function as self-enclosing bubbles of social life, keeping the rest of the mess and grime of the city out and at bay. While this may seem India’s permanent urban future, I have more hope than that. I’m thinking that in just a single generation, our social lives in the city will have become so complex and interpenetrating that these private enclaves will have no choice but to become integrated into the pulsing life and rhythms of tomorrow’s gigapolises.
One’s private life may still be enjoyed in one’s personal kitchen-garden, but we will all also have urban, public personae, with which we will navigate bars, restaurants, cafes, parlours, salons, galleries, and other civic spaces, in which will thrive bustle and chatter of the urban hive, our collective mind.
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Will This Be India's Decade of Innovation?
by Aditya Dev Sood
These are early days, in this year and in this new decade. Who could have known how swiftly and certainly this last decade would unfold, or how far forward it would hurl us. Standing here, now, and looking forward, I’d like to take a moment to ask if this will, in fact, be India’s great leap forward, if this will be our decade of innovation.
Some observers are confident that this period of innovation has already begun in India. At an international conference on innovation last year, I heard R. A. Mashelkar of the National Innovation Foundation define innovation as the search for new solutions that do
more with less for more. That is to say, they should provide more value using less inputs, be they cost, energy, effort or time, and serve more consumers and users than was hitherto possible. This kind of approach to thinking about innovation for India and similar world regions was pioneered by the late management thinker C. K. Prahlad. If we think about innovation in this way, several success stories from India immediately come to mind.
Consider the Tata Nano, a small car that uses less materials and more inexpensive inputs than regular cars, that is cheaper to manufacture, which sells for less, and which therefore can reach a larger potential market than any other existing car. Consider the Tata Swach, possibly the world’s cheapest and most widely available water filtration system, which will ensure that no matter what kinds of impurities exist in the water near your home, you can always have access to cheap, plentiful drinking water. And consider Tata’s chain of Ginger hotels, which guarantee a lower cost business hotel experience that will be clean, reliable and affordable, and which is now growing across India at an astonishing rate. C. K. Prahlad’s advisory relationship with the Tata Group would appear to have given great value to its companies, which may well claim to have a head start and perhaps even a growing lead in India’s future innovation story.
Impressive though these examples are, how do they stack up against the most important innovations of the last decade? Here we should think of things like online search, social networking, personal media devices, personal mobility solutions. We have yet to encounter anything like India’s Google, Facebook, iPad (or iPod, take your pick), or Segway, which is to say, a technology enabled experience which fundamentally transforms the way one can experience reality, live one’s life, interact with one’s peers, traverse the city, or make new things. Unfortunately, we have not really reinvented the car, or water or a hotel room-night, but just made it more accessible to more people by making it cheaper.
In the new decade I would be looking for solutions to the everyday life problems and challenges of our people. This might include, for example, better ways of warding of mosquitoes and pests from one’s home. Cheap yet customizable pharmacological and nutriceutical products that promote good health for all. Alternative energy solutions that come to be integrated into our building technologies, construction practices and regulatory codes. Radically new ways of effective waste and water treatment right within the home to promote water recycling. Collapsible-folding living space and transportation solutions. Ways of controlling urban sound pollution, either at source, or else through personal or domestic envelopes. More user-friendly, calmer, and more efficient urban mass transit and transportation solutions.
We need to start thinking about innovation in terms of being able to do things that were hitherto not only not possible, but
not even conceivable. This is a considerably higher benchmark to work towards. And it is sobering to acknowledge that if we use this higher benchmark, we have not yet been architects of innovation in a true sense. I take heart in the fact that this new horizon seems possible and available to us, in a way that it never did before, even just a decade ago. We would seem to be entering exciting times.
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In The Future, We Will All Be Balinese
by Aditya Dev Sood
The deck of our villa here in Bali faces a garden-orchard that rolls into the ravine below. Different kinds of trees, palms, crotons, ferns intersperse, and at their centre preens a crazed
monstera, whose fronds fan out at all angles like a dancer's hands tracing the arc of the sun. Beyond the garden there is forest for a hundred miles at least, climbing small mountains up into a live volcano. The water from hot springs flows into small pools in the garden for bathing before running off into a hidden mountain creek. It strikes me that between forest, garden and the hard architecture of the villa, there are three different degrees of human intervention: the forest is mostly untouched, the garden represents a lightly-curated nature, but within the small villa there is no earth, no greenery -- ideally no life at all -- except for us human inhabitants.
All Bali seems to be defined by a gentle dance with nature, human intervention arising only when strictly necessary, and then with that light curatorial touch to plants and trees that easily incorporates them within the built environment. Along the island's country roads short trees and shrubs line short walls. The traditional Balinese courtyard home consists of a series of small temples and human shelters organised within a garden, framed by an ornate ceremonial greeting, in whose form I can't help but see a pair of hands, folded into the namaste greeting. On either side of these entrances sit pairs of temple trees,
champaka-s as we call them in north India, adding grace, beauty and vibrance to these iconic doorways of Bali.
From a strictly Anthropological evaluation of human settlements, this must be some sort of evolutionary ideal for human kind, whether projected forwards or backwards. To live amidst greenery that we have ourselves created and ordered, to have installed architecture only where we must, to have ready access to running water for individual and collective bathing... This is surely the way our human settlements would ideally be, if only we could imagine them so precisely, if only we could coordinate our activities and resources more perfectly to achieve them.
Just before leaving Delhi last week, I was at the CII-NID National Design Summit, where my friend William Bissell spoke about how Delhi would be growing into a gigapolis of 50 million people over the next few decades. There was an urgent need for innovative thinking at all levels, he argued, to address the large challenges that we will all face. Today, I calculate that to be ten times Bali's population on a comparable land area, including Gurgaon, Faridabad, NOIDA, and other immediate surburbs. Will that future city be any good at affording ready and pleasurable access to greenery, water, and lightly-curated nature? Is there really any way for us to imagine providing a Balinese future at that intense human density?
Socio-technical innovations in the ways in which our multi-unit dwellings are designed may offer one set of solutions. One can imagine narrow strips of kitchen garden at every level of every apartment building, along with rooftops gardens, vertical gardens along the south and west facades of buildings, all designed to give back to the dweller some sense of participating in nature, instead of having to be imprisoned within a concrete jungle. Developers like Total Environment, based in Bangalore, have already created buildings of this kind. Alongside, we will have to have new kinds of kitchens that consume less water and energy, new approaches to recycling and to food packaging, all to ensure that life in our urban environment better emulates the biological cycles of nature.
While some of these innovations are already being considered in state-of-the-art housing developments for the affluent, what is also required is socio-political change, the will to say that urban habitation must become humane, not only for a small section of society, but for all classes of people in all parts of the city. This is a grave but necessary challenge to our imagination. We must become capable of envisioning a more egalitarian and inclusive future for ourselves in order to make our cities places of pleasure. This is my wish and benediction for all of us this New Year, who must live out our everyday lives within the choked and dusty highways of Delhi-NCR.
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Design and Innovation in Indian Classical Musical Instruments
by Aditya Dev Sood
I was at an evening of violin performances some years ago, where a multinational company had invited a French virtuoso along with a leading Carnatic musician. The Frenchman disdained the microphone, and even stepped off the stage to be closer to the small chamber audience that we represented. He held his violin in the crook of his neck and shoulder even when he talked to us and gesticulated with his arms, waving his bow around. The Tamilian sat with his son and other musicians on the
gaddi-s on the stage and effectively turned the violin upside down in order to play it, holding its body against his shoulder and locking its scroll-end into the fold of his knee. He also attached the microphone directly to the body of the violin, so that it was fully integrated into the amplifier and sound system, no less than an electric guitar. Their instruments were the same, but nothing else about how they held and used their violins was alike.
There is such an extraordinarily intimate relation between a musical instrument and the body of a musician. The form of the instrument so clearly anticipates the caress of his body, while its multiple points of interface, whether for tuning or for actual performance represent the highest achievements of human craft and design. A musical instrument, moreover, is that perfect fusion of functionality with beauty: it must work, yet it must also appeal to the hand and eye. These dual, perhaps ultimately inseparable goals of design must be combined in any fine instrument. Poetic similes often express the homology between the human body and the divine sound generated by musical instruments:
Tana rabaab mana ki giri / so ragen bhayeen sab tar // Rum rum swar dayat hai / so bajata naam tihar // My body is a rabaab played with the bow of consciousness, this muscle and sinew are its strings; Every space within my being reverberates, and so your name resounds!
While Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cultures have embraced Western Classical music as their own, a more complex situation appears to obtain in India, where many of the technical and instrumental innovations of the West have been embraced, yet they have come to be domesticated through patterns of use and continuous modification, which have a different logic altogether, one which seems to follow the larger unfolding of India's own culture of music.
Despite its Vedic antecedents, Indian Classical music has changed and evolved continuously, with some of its most vibrant periods of innovation coming during periods of cultural contact, synthesis and fusion. In the time the first Sultanate courts of northern India, the sitar and the tabla were invented, if not by Amir Khusrau himself, then in his era, and in ways which he formally recognized and endorsed. In a later era, the European harmonium washed up along the shores of Calcutta. This instrument was subjected to diverse experiments and adaptations, which eventually led to its becoming the instrument of choice for teaching, practice and vocal accompaniment. Most recently, we have the case of the 'mohan veena,' a kind of fusion sitar-guitar, named for Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, who has been forever immortalized for his innovation. Like the violin, the mohan veena is played not like a regular guitar, but rather like a sitar, horizontally, rested on your lap while you are seated cross-legged.
I'm tempted to posit that there is something intrinsic to the nature of Indian Classical music, which either allows or in fact promotes and rewards innovation with regard to musical instruments. The absence of large academies of music and complex organizations like symphonies as exist in the West, and the entrepreneurial autonomy of musicians once they are trained, may permit such innovations to arise. But interpretation, variation, and improvisation, which represent core values of Indian systems of music, may also be playing a role. The musical training that the minds of Indian classical musicians receive may actually be driving them to experiment with new and different kinds of instruments, and then to further modify and transform them into new vehicles of sound, to make them anew in the image of the human body, that original vessel of sound and musicality.
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Designing for India's Emerging Skymen and Skywomen
by Aditya Dev Sood
The contemporary Indian frequent flier is slowly coming into our field of vision, the features and form of this type becoming more and more clearly defined. Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, in no particular order, these are just titles on the circuit, part of the contemporary Indian Grand Slam that our traveller may already have hit this week. Our traveller is not frenetically texting with both hands into his CrackBerry, she is not talking into her cell phone a mile a minute, nor pacing about the terminal -- but rather like the flaneurs of Paris a century ago, these citizens of the skies may be strolling on by, absent-minded and good-natured, walking their laptop and carry-on luggage through the long terminals now only nominally administered by the Airports Authority of India. They are at ease in motion, entirely at home while arcing through the sheltering skies of India's new landscape of aviation.
From the moment a skyman is dropped off at an airport, he and his strolley make for an indivisible and symbiotic whole. They roll up to and back from the check-in counter, before shuffling and parting awkwardly through the X-ray machine and body frisk, ending up back in line at the coffee bar, and then quickly gliding towards their boarding gate, through the aerobridge, and now once gain the last one on board, always right on time.
This master of the four directions, this frequent flier, this mile-high club-member and prized patron of the travel industry has emerged as a type on account of an emerging culture of Indian aviation. It is a culture that has been co-created by airports, airlines and passengers all working together, contributing different elements to the fantasy and fatigue that is travel in this late portion of the jet-age. The social patterns of our society shape our built form, but conversely, our built social and physical infrastructure also shapes us.
While private airlines have been with us for almost two decades now, it is only recently that we've seen comparable changes in the design of Indian airports, with first Bangalore and Hyderabad, and then Delhi and Mumbai building new privately financed and administered terminals, each one brighter, faster, and more jauntily optimistic than the last. The airport itself is a rather unique building type, bearing the impress of the twentieth century, just as railway stations and ports speak to us of the nineteenth century. In each case, they announce their city in advance to the traveller, eager or weary, travelling onwards or coming home to stay. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas famously celebrated airports as embodiments of globalised, fluid motion through space, of a kind that is impossible in most other kinds of architecture.
From the bleak PWD construction that was once Palam airport, to the aggressively branded T3 of Indira Gandhi International, Delhi's airport has come a long way. In the early 1980s, when New Delhi first hosted a summit of non-aligned nations, Indira Gandhi handpicked Rajeev Sethi to design a VIP reception area in which to receive visiting heads of state. Given the slower, more gentile rhythms of time and motion in those days, it made sense that he chose arts and crafts from Gujarat to Bengal, inlaid stone tables from Agra, and a couple of enormous hand-painted swings, or jhula-s, in which Fidel Castro presumably cooled his heels and smoked a cigar, while the minister-in-waiting got his passport stamped.
This precedent was surely on the mind of the designers of the new T3. After all, what says 'Welcome!' better than a rust-coloured carpet? And sure, why not ensure that it stretches all the way through the long corridors of the terminal, all the way up and through the jetway? But now passengers can no longer glide across terminal, for their strolleys have ceased to work, being bogged down in the high-friction carpeting. People now que up, then cluster in front of the narrow moving-sidewalks, creating small crowds at various points along the terminal.
The carpeting of T3 terminals is a design disaster, a Pyrrhic victory of symbolism over ease-of-use, and an unfortunate adangi, tripping-over, of the strolley-men and strolley-women of the Indian skies.
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On the Design of Public Water Interfaces
by Aditya Dev Sood
I was walking about a public garden in this city the other day, when among the shrubs and ornamental trees, I suddenly came upon a brass tap. Bright, gleaming in the winter sun, the gently turned tips of its handles seemed to be inviting human touch, which might then generate such a stream of water as would have been sanctified for having been touched by its brass body. When it comes time to close, the rounded beads on the handle provide exquisite degrees of affordance and friction to the thumb and ring finger, creating a perfect moment of force, a couple, which turns back the cock along its precise screw threads, causing it to rise and then close with satisfying certainty. I suddenly felt mildly thirsty and made as if to reach for it, but then caught myself -- I didn't dare drink from it!
Na is for nalka, we learned early on in school, which was easy to remember because the Devanagari character also protrudes out and away from its central stroke and then bends down, making the whole letter look like a piece of plumbing, the horizontal line above leading away, left and right, to a geyser or an overhead tank. It is tempting to think of the tap as something particularly Indian, for it has become so familiar to us over the past century. It is actually a universal artifact of 20th century plumbing, 'invented' in the 1880s in Industrialized England and continuously improved in iterations and variations around the globalized world. The knowledge and technology of taps, faucets, mixers and stop-cocks now flows freely in the public domain throughout the world. And while our hygiene and sanitary standards have risen, along with the quality of water that we seek to drink, our taps remain pristine, unchanged in form or technology for more than a century.
Here in India, we have developed culturally specific techniques for using and interacting with taps, which are based on our prior cultures of drinking and sharing -- or not sharing -- water. At any publicly located tap for drinking water you must bend down and make a kind of cup or receptical out of the palm of your right hand and receive the stream of water into it. The shallow pool you have so elegantly created will also quickly overflow, but you may lap or slurp the water that remains. It is a kind of
mudra or hand-sign for drinking water that is universal in India. In school, when those ahead of us in line at the water cooler didn't drink this way, we'd catcall out to them, accusing them of either putting their mouths to the tap (gross!) or else drinking like dogs (grosser!).
Less elegant, but arguably more sanitary, is the American culture of water fountains. This uniquely American technology comprised of a small refrigeration unit upon which might be installed a stainless steel sink with a push-button to start a small jet of water. Now you must bend down and over it, allowing the water to shoot into your mouth, perhaps using your tongue as a baffle to control how much water trickles down your gullet. The American water fountain was a symbol of equality and of institutional power and optimism, for you could always trust it for a cool, clean, and free drink of water. Its recent decline, in my view, in favour of the consumption of water from disposable plastic containers, speaks of a regrettable transformation in American cultural and societal values.
For centuries in India at temples, shrines, and outside the houses of the prosperous there has sat a
piyau, or water dispensary, often consisting of a few earthen pots and a glass left out in the shade. Despite this legacy and culture of public drinking water, we too are now burdened with so many crushed plastic water bottles, stamped for example by the Indian Railways or else by myriad private manufacturers. This is a large contemporary systems design challenge that we must find new and collaborative ways of thinking about and rapidly solving.
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The Design Legacy of the Ambassador Car
by Aditya Dev Sood
In the India of my childhood, we socialised with two kinds of families, Fiat and Ambassador, depending on which kind of car they drove. I guess there was a subtle social gradient there that only becomes visible to me in retrospect: Premier Padminis were in fact cheaper, smaller and generally less visually-inspiring of fear and awe than Ambassador cars, with their growling grill of a face and their rotund, bulbous, sprawling form, like your pan-chewing uncle who wore only white cotton safari suits and couldn't easily cross his legs while seated on the floor.
We were a Fiat family, and perhaps that explains my lingering fascination for the Ambassador. Every year, it seems to grow further out of date with these liberal times, and yet it boldly motors on, solid as a house, and as impervious to the passage of time. It is, I suppose, one of India's 'Design Classics,' an artefact of technology so iconic of our shared material and visual culture, that it resides within our shared imagination like a minor deity of the modern Indian pantheon. And like any deity, it is ours because we have loved it, and not because we were the ones to give it life.
As you may already know, the Ambassador car was designed in England by the Morris Motor Company as the Morris Oxford III, and only later built in India by Hindustan Motors of the Birla group. It is, in some sense, a younger brother or cousin-once-removed of the Morris Minor car, which still serves as the taxicab of choice all around London and the other cities of England. Both cars were designed by Alec Issigonis, who also designed the Mini, that other famed and classic car that is still in extended production through continuous redesign and technology retrofit.
Since I returned from Architecture school in the States, I have dreamt of a maroon-metallic or burgundy Ambassador, perhaps with an ivory bonnet. Or maybe customised with a cabriolet pull-down roof which might fold into the boot. White walled tires. A classic grill and retro-styled rear-view mirrors. Over the last couple of decades of growth and adaptation, there has never been the right time, it seems, to invest one's time and to indulge one's idiosyncratic tastes in this way. And yet, this fantasy of mine seems only to have grown deeper, rather than fading slowly away like the other intense and fleeting desires of youth. And I know I'm not alone, for so many other friends I've talked to over the years will nod and grin in wonder and want as I spin out this scenario over a rum and cola.
Time may finally be running out, both for me and for the Ambassador. Sales are flagging for the upgraded 'contemporary' version of the Ambi, and even
neta-s and afsar-s are giving up on it, in favour of white cherry-topped SUVs and other more variegated forms of official vehicle. Rumor has it the senior management has been in upheaval, but that a new new retro version of the car is in the works, perhaps for launch late next year. I am not optimistic, but I still hope this new version of the car works out, for a classic design conjoined with a classic brand is a rare thing in India, and its death would be a shared loss for us all.
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What Does Design Mean in Emerging Economies?
by Aditya Dev Sood
Some years ago, my fellow researchers at the Center for Knowledge Societies began thinking about India's place in the wider world. We happened to be working with international clients that seemed to be looking at India in a wider global context, which they collectively described as 'Emerging Markets.' It vaguely struck some of us that this classification of India and India-similar regions of the world merely as 'markets,' and not a producers, providers and innovators in their own right, was somewhat neo-colonial. Of course, in 2003 Goldman Sachs published its ground-breaking 'BRICs' report, which predicted the rise of the economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
But Goldman Sachs' analysis of the world's four future world economies did not do justice to other diverse and variegated regions of the world where economic development was also proceeding apace, albeit without the benefit of an integrated market, as occurs within a single large nation-state. In our view, the Goldman study was also insufficiently attuned to the difference between economies based on the production of goods and services, like India and China, versus those based on extractive industries that ultimately exhaust the coal, gas, and oil reserves of the nation, for example Russia. Beginning in 2006, therefore, CKS embarked on its own Emerging Economy Report (EER), which focused on seven countries from around the world, each selected not only for its own economy, but also for its representativeness in respect of its wider region.
Also, unlike the Goldman study, our EER study employed a new and significant operating definition for identifying describing an Emerging Economy: We defined Emerging Economies as those regions of the world that are experiencing rapid Informationalisation, under conditions of limited or partial industrialisation. In other words, these are primarily agricultural economies which are nevertheless experiencing explosions of media and communications. We also identified several other key features that were common to these Emerging Economies: 1. Higher than world average GDP growth; 2. A large agrarian sector with limited industrialisation; 3. A large and dynamic informal economy; 4. Inequitable income distribution; 5. Lower than world average energy consumption per capita. The countries we eventually chose to include in our study were: India, China, Indonesia, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt and Brazil.
While these fundamental insights may have many consequences for the marketing and distribution of consumer goods and services of all kinds, here I would like to discuss only what bearing these features of economy and society may have on the discipline and practice of Design. Design was born in the Industrial Age, out of the split between the act of making an artifact, and the process of visualising, conceptualising and continuously improving it, which were hitherto conjoined in the artisanal mode of production. Design was both a means of enabling industrial processes of manufacture, as well as a means for diverse regional cultures to adapt to its by now changed mode of production. Designers were visionaries who had seen that techno-industrial future, and who could lead others, consumers as well as industrialist patrons and clients, towards achieving it. In the famous words of Le Corbusier, for example, the house was a machine for living, a chair was a machine for sitting, and so forth. The role of designers was therefore to sufficiently technologise one's culture, so as to it make it compatible with patterns of industrial production and massified consumption that defined modern urban life in industrial societies.
Design in the context of an emerging economy, however, proceeds in a context where society has not yet been aligned with industrial processes, but still operates through largely informal channels and mechanisms. The ongoing challenge of Design in Emerging Economies, therefore, must be to achieve alignments between new informational systems, services, experiences and platforms and existing and prevalent economic and social forms of life. Design in Emerging Economies, therefore, must not only serve the growth of the organised and industrial sector, but also become a means for the informational empowerment of small and micro entrepreneurs, the corner-shop vendor, the sales, repair and delivery-man, the everyday heroes of the informal economy.
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On The Role and Meaning of Brands in Society
by Aditya Dev Sood
In the left-leaning days of my youth I was very much against brands. Against advertising in general, in fact, and against capitalist media and technology of every kind. As I saw it, consumer culture was being driven relentlessly forward through the construction of impossible fantasies that most people would never experience. One’s individual distance from the actualization of those fantasies also described one’s place in the strata of modern society, namely socio-economic class. I would have argued that the instruments of mass media, including this newspaper you’re holding in your hand, cause us to be alienated from one another, from ourselves, and from our collective species-being.
Turn on your TV and attempt a brief survey. So many of the most commonly promoted brands appear to celebrate consumption. They are associated with products that provide sugar, water, carbohydrates and some nutrients to thirsty-hungry bodies and minds. I have in mind Coca-Cola, Nachos, Pizza-Hut, but also of course, Rasna, Electral, Glucose-D and even Kwality and Nirula’s.
Open a magazine and you will find the fashion brands, associated with the flamboyant visual display of disposable income on and through the body- Nike, Levi’s, Diesel, Armani Exchange, though here we may also add Khadi, Tussar, Bhagalpur, Kanjeevaram, and even Charagh Din.
Roti, Kapada, Makaan, and Vaahan. This seems to be the natural progression in this series, but until recently the branding of
makaan was restricted to the kind of colony or part of city that you called home. With the explosion of private sector development, of course, the branding of space has come to be completely integrated with complex lifestyle elements, values, aesthetics, colours. Thanks to these, the branding of a housing development must now promise a certain kind of
experience that the space may perhaps eventually allow and afford.
With regards to transportation, I could talk about automobiles, but I’m also interested in new forms of mass transit, of which we now have some very interesting examples. The logo and identity for Delhi Transport Corporation was designed sometime in the 1960s at the National Institute for Design in Ahmedabad, which was then the default port of call for most new public sector entities that needed to be given a new kind of identity, emblem, symbolic marking. The infamous Bus-Rapid-Transit or BRT, the Delhi Metro, and the recently launched T3 are other examples of transportation brands.
There are times when I must bow down and concede some parts of Maslow’s theory of hierarchical social value, which posited that it is only when lower forms of need are fulfilled, that higher order needs are felt, experienced or understood. So it is with brands, that it is only when these immediate needs of the body, of one’s social identity, of one’s place, space and locomotion are met, that higher forms of social imagination can arise, which can be associated with public goods, utilities, resources of which we can all partake, without diminishing one another’s share.
I cannot provide a detailed account of how it was that I moved away from my original aversion to the murmur of the marketplace, from the continuous seduction and enticement of consumer messaging. I think I gradually came to realize that the array of desires and fantasies, encoded into our media messages are the net product of the aspirations and values of the very people who create and receive them. If we find these to be lacking in some way, it is because those deficiencies are within us, and around us, in the society and the architecture of its media, within which these messages reverberate and resound. This is why branding must be considered one of the highest callings of the post-modern age- it gives focus to our longings, it expresses our aesthetic, it gives voice to the values of our times.
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What Indians Want When They Fly
by Aditya Dev Sood
Some years ago, my company was approached by an international aircraft manufacturing company to help them design aircraft cabins that would be better appreciated by Indian passengers. Their thinking was sound: more Indians are flying than ever before, Indian passengers from lower and lower income thresholds are going on their first airplane journey, Indian carriers are likely to prefer aircraft that offer experiences that are better suited to the needs and cultural preferences of their passengers. And so began a crazy summer of in-flight design ethnography, when all of us in the company would fly to more destinations on more flights across India than we could have ever imagined.
The first most important thing we learned is that flying is boring. And studying something boring makes it even more boring. Unlike, for example, studying how people use mobile phones, or how they think about colour, or whether they love their fridge or their washing-machine more, in flying research our subjects would stare back at us with a groggy stupor, as if this aluminum tube were an enormous cocaine den barrelling down the sky. “So, how do you feel about flying?” was a spry conversation starter that would most often be met with incomprehension and indifference. People didn’t want to think about flying. They wanted to think about whether Kareena is prettier than Karishma, or what they should with their stock-market portfolio, or last night’s dinner, anything, anything but that they had no business being up here, 29,000 feet up in the air, and now that they were, there was nothing to do, up here among the clouds, with another two hundred strangers, cooped up like the human payload that they were.
We also learned that flying is stressful and that flying can be scary. But you already know that, so let’s skip forward to the interesting part -- did we come up with any good ideas that might actually improve the flying experience? Well yes, we did. We thought of gender-segregated seating, as in many Indian buses. We thought of gender-segregated lavatories. We proposed that lavatories go to the back of the airplane and that kitchens be brought to the front. We proposed family sections and handicapped seating near lavatories. We thought of front-back seating so that people could talk to each other and socialise while passing their time up in the sky. We thought about sleepers and berths, of course. We imagined serving
bhelpuri-s, pao-bhaji-s, chila-s, papri-chat and other fun, interactive foods that people would enjoy eating together. We thought about serving food to a group of passengers rather than to each individual one, as a means of ensuring that some group dynamics might ensue. We considered karaoke flights, sound and light shows,
tambola nights, lucky draws, and just about every other kind of distraction and diversion that you might imagine people might use to while away the time when they barely know one another but could be persuaded to interact, even if minimally.
So how quickly is this uniquely Indian chatpatta masaledar tamasha coming to the Indian skies? Unfortunately, not anytime soon. The truth is that what Indians want in the sky is the same thing every other kind of passenger wants in the sky: more room. More leg room so you don’t offend people to the left and the right nor graze your knees and shins. More elbow rooms so you can feel like you’re yourself, and not in continuous passive-aggressive competition with your neighbour for the square-inch of arm-rest you both share. More visual room, so you don’t have to close your eyes every time the guy in front decides to recline his seat. Indians, like everyone else, want to feel normal in the sky, which will only be possible once they have enough space. This requires not design but policy intervention, to guarantee a minimum amount of room for each passenger. If you have a stake in the future of Indians in the air, ask yourself what can
you do to begin making this change possible?
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Love for the Meaning of Form
by Aditya Dev Sood
It was sunny but cool as we drove into Budapest, and I had that kind of new city buzz that you can only get from having been in transit all night. We cut across one of the many bridges over the Danube that interconnect the Buda and Pest sides of the city, and at a traffic light something caught my eye. It was a sign for a taxi bank, bright yellow, vertical like a post and uncannily designed so as to be legible from almost all sides. There’s something about that sign, I said to Nita, that captures a lot about this culture. Later on, as we walked about the city I took multiple photographs of the thing.
In its formal inventiveness it vaguely reminded me of Bauhaus signage, of El Lessitsky’s posters and perhaps Russian constructivist and Czech avant-garde designs from the early part of the last century. But in its sculptural, volumetric, 3D-ness, there was something very particular about it. The design made the most of this set of letters, which are all bilaterally symmetrical, and therefore capable of being rendered vertically. I also saw the sign as an attempt at rendering the text legible from all directions, in a way that flat signage can never be, and it was interesting that this need or desire is intimately linked to the very idea of the sign for a taxi bank. What made this possible was the rendering the forms of the letters as cylinders, cones and discs with suitable cut-outs. The letters now seemed abstracted, as if they represented fundamental mathematical operations, or else belonged in a Chinese puzzle or a game of some kind. The configuration of the arbitrary forms of the letters of the Latin script into this elegant and meaningful three-dimensional sign haunted me as we walked around the city, and I kept looking for clues as to where and how this kind of thinking had come into being.
On the way home from dinner and we came upon a giant jagged apparition at some distance, which we wondered at, in that half-light, on the diagonal. It was really hard to tell if that was a giant ball or some kind of urban sculpture or what. It was only when we came closer, and were standing right across the building that it became clear that this was an intentional play of color and form, an invitation to indulge one’s pleasure in the visual experience of geometry. I came back later and took the photograph below.
As I learned later, this is a piece of trompe d’oeil inspired by the Hungarian modernist painter Viktor Vasarely, who had so fully captured the zeitgeist by about 1973, that you would know his work by his influence on everything from poster design to album art, even if you never knew him by name.
Vasarely was associated with many of the modernists, and part of his career was spent in Paris, yet Cubism and its aftermath does not fully explain his peculiar preoccupation with the illusionistic creation of three-dimensional optical effects using color upon simple compositions of cubes. He makes paintings that are carefully crafted grids that deform at critical junctures to break into the third dimension, or Escheresque, dissolve into unresolvable contradictions. He seems haunted by riddles of dimensionality, by the folding contradiction of the three dimensions and the pull of gravity. He makes, for instance, a composition of folding chess pieces, now straight, now flat, now folding into a cube-like chess board, whose uncertain post-Euclidean space captures the observer’s mind with force, eliciting complex emotions and wonder.
 Budapest is also, of course, the home of Ernő Rubik, the father of the Rubik’s Cube and sundry similar three-dimensional puzzles. Quiet and retiring, Rubik has worked as an architect, designer, and teacher of descriptive geometry in a long and singular career loudly punctuated by his sudden global fame thanks to his Cube. He is now staging a major retrospective exhibition on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his famous Cube, which is traveling around the world. Rubik’s original Cube itself has become such a ubiquitous token among children, geeks and gamers around the world, that it is hard, after all these years, to bring it back into focus: What faculties of mind and imagination does it actually represent?
Molded in black plastic with colored stickers in bright primary colors, the Cube is an abstraction of spatial configurations and possibilities. Unlike most objects of material culture, it is the rare thing that arose entirely within the mind of its creator, and then took shape in order to illustrate and instantiate, as it were, the riddles its inventor was posing to himself. To contemplate the movement of little abstract cublets of different colors moving around hidden sides of the Cube is to stimulate the mind to develop a kind of visual-spatial and kinesthetic sensibility that is not necessarily innate to all of us, and which is either deeply pleasurable or else chokingly difficult and ultimately defeating. I had a Rubik’s Cube as a child, and I derived the most pleasure from breaking the entire think apart and reassembling it in its solved form.
Rubik has spoken of his work as a kind of synthesis of design-thinking and space-research: "Space always intrigued me, with its incredibly rich possibilities, space alteration by (architectural) objects, objects transformation in space (sculpture, design), movement in space and in time, their correlation, their repercussion on mankind, the relation between man and space, the object and time." His approach appears to pull together scientific and artistic thoughts around form and space-making, an approach that seems rare and necessary to the development of such an odd thing as the Rubik's Cube. Rubik designed several other puzzles in his time, including Cubes of ever more numbers of component cublets, but none of them achieved the iconic status of the original cube. All of them, though, share a similar fascination for how two and three dimensional shapes can fold and twist and intertwine into one another, suddenly creating meaning or else always remaining twisted into a kind of noise or inelegance, inviting the gamer to intervene and so create the order of a solution.
The Dinner Party
 These were the thoughts playing on my mind when I came over to visit Adam, a friend of mine of several years standing from the media art and information design circuit. When last I’d visited him in Budapest, we’d been discussing ways for my organization, the Center for Knowledge Societies, to collaborate with a research lab he’d recently cofounded, called Kitchen Budapest. He’d then gifted me an odd little sculpture plucked from a media art work that hadn’t worked quite as he’d intended. As seen in the image to the right, it is a kind of three-dimentional pixel, which shows a different mix of Red, Green or Blue depending on the side from which it is seen.
We were at Adam’s place for dinner, on the Buda side of the Danube. It was a celebration of sorts, for it was the twentieth of August, Hungary’s National Day, and a holiday weekend. Adam had promised a view of the fireworks from the roof of his apartment building, and he was also going introduce us to Hungary’s different wine regions, beginning with this fine Kadarka, light bodied but full-tasting and spicy and warm to the heart. His wife Anita had made a beef stew in paprika
gulyás-style, so in many ways the evening really was shaping out to be a tribute to Hungary.
Up on the roof I ended up buttonholing Peter, Adam’s business partner, about the visual ideas I’d had over the course of the last few days on the visual culture of Budapest. I told him I thought there was a particular kind of approach to visuality that I was noticing in the city, a kind of preoccupation with geometric shapes and their transformation in various ways, for example from 2D to 3D. So what is your thesis again, Peter asked, that there are some funky taxi signs in the city where Erno Rubik lives? I told him about the Vasarely-inspired building we'd seen and offered up my still-nascent theory. There is a kind of spatial imagination alive here, in this city, which is unique, I said. There is a pleasure in spatial transformations as in Rubik’s cube, and from 2D to 3D, as in the taxi bank signage, and in the confusion or questioning between 2 and 3D, as in Vasarely’s visual constructions. That there is a kind of geometric imaginaire active here, which makes that kind of expression and communication possible.
 Well, I buy that, he said. And I might be able to think of a couple more data points for your argument -- when we get back downstairs you should ask Adam to show you his Gömböc. After we’d all traipsed back down to the apartment, Adam fished out a small presentation box that had within it a white metal mass, something like a paper-weight. He placed it on the dining table and it began to dance unsteadily for a few seconds, before careening over and falling into a long-term oscillation from one end to another. It behaves like a Russian doll, in that it however unlikely it seems to the eye, it comes back to a single point of stable equilibrium. But unlike the Russian doll, its volume is of uniform density. The Gömböc is a special class of convex shapes, with particular properties, the existence of which was hypothesized only in 1995, and which were proven to exist a few years ago. It has only one point of unstable and one point of stable equilibrium. This particular shape is the most interesting, visually and formally, for most of the other solutions are rather similar to a sphere. The tactile and kinetic joy of playing with a Gömböc cannot entirely be disconnected from the knowledge that it is its shape alone, and not some hidden artifice, motor or internal configuration which is responsible for it behavior.
The Gömböc was ‘invented’ by Gábor Domokos along with Péter Várkonyi. Adam said he’d enjoyed studying Descriptive Geometry with Gábor Domokos back at University. The very idea of studying such a discipline as part of an Architectural or Engineering education was novel for me, for it combined Engineering Drawing with Mathematics in a highly specialized way, not entirely disconnected from Aesthetics or from the cultural appreciation of form, just as one might encounter for example in Art and Architectural History.
 I’ve got something else for you to look at, said Peter. On Adam's computer, he’d opened up an article in Hungarian on Gábor Dénes, the Hungarian-origin scientist who is credited with inventing Holography. Gábor’s approach to Holography involved an attempt to capture light information emanating from an uneven surface in a predictable way, so as to be able to record the variable features of that surface. His work well pre-dated the laser, so in his time it was not yet possible to reconstruct the information he had recorded, but that was what he was trying to achieve. It was only in the later part of his life, when Gábor’s scientific life was largely over, that interest in his work began to grow, on account of advances in the visual reconstruction of holographic information, partially on account of lasers. Gábor became a kind of all-purpose public speaker and ambassador for Holography, envisioning Holographic films, and other innovative means for social communication that involved three dimensional imagery. Does Gábor's work and the entire field of Holography really involve geometry? So far as I can understand it, his work involved attempts at comprehending spatial information at minute scale, and innovative approaches to reconstituting lost elements of data so as to reconstruct the original. So his challenge did not necessarily involve geometry per se, but rather a
geometric imagination, which could imagine the relationships between surfaces and light information, and an intuitive-inductive ability which allowed him to arrive at a means for reconstructing that information in such a way that it might be experienced again. There have been important developments in Hungary since Gábor’s time, and it may yet turn out that your first Holographic Television will be Hungarian, at least in some way.
 Perhaps the foundation stone for any argument around Hungarian approaches to Geometry would have to be the shadowy figure of János Bolyai, the mathematician and geometer who lived through the first half of the nineteenth century. First taught by his father, Bolyai apparently began questioning Euclid's parallel postulate, resulting in his discovery -- or creation -- of the "strange new universe" of non-Euclidean Geometry. Bolyai's work proceeded in parallel with that of the Russian Nikolai Lobachevsky, but it is a matter of some pride for Hungarians that one from among them is considered to have founded the discipline. If one thinks of Geometry as a kind of language, logic and notational system to describe the spaces, shapes and form that we normally inhabit and experience with our bodies, Bolyai was the first to use that language to describe spaces and objects that can only be experienced in the mind. He opened up the human geometric faculties to possibilities that are beyond visual experience, but not beyond conceptualization and even visualization, albeit in the analogical or suggestive manner of Vasarely's paintings.
Finally, and most recently, there is Prezi.com, the software-service venture that Adam and Peter cofounded. Prezi is a new kind of presentation software, which allows you to place and organize different kinds of media formats in an infinitely scaling virtual space, into which you can zoom in and out, so as to be able to explain to your audience how those different kinds of text or data interrelate with one another. Prezi is hard to describe and necessary to experience. It allows a kind of multimedia wall-painting that we have not been capable of since Lascaux, when I imagine the presenter used his torch to call our attention to the features and attributes of the different animals drawn and painted on the cave wall. Prezi uses a two-dimensional surface, but an approach to information that is profoundly non-linear and multidimensional. While it obviously operates within Euclidean space, its approach to information is scalar, allowing swooping descents in and out of the informational space. The software allows you to assemble different kinds of media formats, dealing with them through a new kind of grammar of visuality based on bracketing the gaze, a feature which allows the presenter to carve a path through the series of assemblages that she might zoom in and out of our visual field, and therefore our attention and shared focus.
The technology of vector drawing may be trivial, but the conceptual and cognitive virtuosity required to derive meaning from image, text, and spatial relationships is not. The underlying thinking or drive behind the conceptualization of Prezi seem to me spatial and kinetic in nature, perhaps as an attempt to be able to bring to realization and shared experience the inner experience of thought organized in the complex spaces and folds of the mind. It is in this spatialization of thought, I believe, the common thread of Hungarian geometric imagination is revealed. The geometry of Prezi involves a kind of approach to form and space that perceives them not as mute phenomena, but as critical means for encoding and deriving information
Prezi is a potentially radical cultural development, because the experience of use of it decenters and recenters our conception of topos. The battlefield of ideas may still be planar, but it is not bounded, it has become scale-independent. This one shift makes it possible for our footing to shift radically, within an instant, and for important relationships to be subsumed under ever larger intersections of forces and ideas. While the genius behind Prezi may be quite local, as I have been arguing above, if Adam and Peter's venture is to achieve any standing and success in the world, this may be because most people in the business world experience their everyday life and organizational and intellectual challenges to operate within just such a flux-ridden, volatile, dynamic and uncertain ground.
A Magyar Conception of Geometry?
The diverse cultural, commercial, scientific and technical phenomena discussed above would suggest that there does exist something like a Hungarian geometric imaginaire, a shared horizon of thinking, making, doing research and training, that is relatively stable across at least a couple of hundred years, and which reasonably interlinks different areas of specialized knowledge practices. At minimum, there are some shared proclivities for representing and experiencing folding, transforming, and zooming spaces, and consequently important technological and cultural artifacts that themselves become milestones for the further development of Hungarian visual, spatial and geometric knowledge and culture.
Howsoever it be founded, the Hungarian affinity for Geometry and geometrical thinking, appears to have been reinforced through institutions of higher learning in which a certain ideology of visual-spatial possibility came to be ensconced and reproduced generationally. The fact that Ernő Rubik and Gábor Domokos both taught Descriptive Geometry, a course of study that Adam, Peter and subsequent generations of bright young people might also pursue, effectively reproduces a live current of cultural and scientific thought that is still unfolding. These inquiries are informed by a knowledge of other major intellectual figures, who are worthy of emulation, and whose thought may still color or inform the new projects, cultural or technological or scientific that these new minds might undertake. In all these ways, and for these reasons, it is possible -- and possibly useful -- to speak of a Hungarian geometric imaginaire.
I doubt I would have pursued any of the above conversations, or indeed this entire line of questioning, were it not for the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. A sentence fragment from his posthumous book,
Language, Thought and Reality has been echoing in my mind, to the effect that if there were scientists from Native American tribes -- I think he had in mind the Hopi -- they might bring into being entirely new conceptions of reality and therefore of technological possibility than those which are known or current today. I went looking for the quote the other day, and was surprised to discover that he uses the example of Non-Euclidean Geometry as an example for how reality can be constructed theoretically in ways which are only glancingly related to what we may call Standard Average Indo-European models. In some ways, one might say, the Hungarian case might have been exactly the example he was looking for. Given this data and an argument around a geometric imaginaire, I believe Whorf would have wanted to look further, into the foundations of Hungarian geometric
imagination. That is to say, why do Hungarians especially indulge and enjoy visual-spatial representations, transformations and manipulations in the first place? Is it perhaps that there is some predisposition that the Magyars enjoy –- or suffer -– which makes them especially susceptible to visual thoughts, on account of which they have paid so much attention to the spatial-visual dimensions of their experience?
The first thing to say is that we have not demonstrated in any way that this is the case. Further research inquiry might do so, but that is not the data we have today. If, however, it were possible to show this, one may conjecture as to some of the factors contributing. Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, and it is likely that along with the Finns and the Estonians, these semi-nomadic peoples migrated into western Europe, perhaps on horseback, from the Ural mountains, now in Russia. Whorf would have liked to have known whether there was something about the Magyar language, which predisposes its users to understand their experience in spatial, geometric, notational terms. My limited and preliminary inquiries into the logic of the Hungarian language has not revealed anything telling, although the tendency for the language towards agglutination and compounding, the concatenation of words into indefinitely long sequences with a determinate syntactic meaning could have some bearing on the matter.
There is, perhaps, another factor around the Magyar language at play, which derives not from its linguistic structure per se, but perhaps from the phenomenology of inhabiting an island language, that is, a language all but unintelligible to others all around, unlike most other languages that are by degrees similar and glancingly intelligible to speakers of related proximal languages. All native speakers seek, to some extent, validation and ratification of the experience that they have, of the direct relationship between their words and the world around them. Speakers of vernacular languages with strong links to classical language enjoy the etymological relationship that governs the numerous words of power and moment, which invoke authority at particular ceremonial occasions. This particular experience of language would be denied to native speakers of Magyar, who would see rather that their own language captures a reality, which they cannot easily share with neighbors, even in degrees or gradations. In the absence of strong and repeated reinforcement for one's symbolic experience of reality, appeal may be made by the mind, to the deictic, to the realm of meaning that C. S. Peirce termed secondness,' the world of pointing, space-making, form and shape. If, indeed, this tendency towards secondness, towards the directionality of arrows and the parallelness of lines is indeed the impetus behind Hungarian explorations of Geometry, it is a happy accident that those inquiries have eventually led to new and increasingly imaginative conceptualizations and manipulations of reality, in which we can all now share.
Endnote:
I'm very grateful to Adam Somlai-Fischer for his several invitations to Budapest and for the conversations we've had together. So also to Peter Halacsy, for early interest and encouragement with this line of thought. Nita Soans Sood humored me in various iteractions of this argument and helped me organize the images for this article.
Some images here have been taken by me, while the copyright may be held by others in other cases. Sources for images in this article may include:
www.img2.oneartworld.com
www.tate.org.uk
www.fineartamerica.com
www.acgtech.co.uk
www.nickshell1983.files.wordpress.com
www.gomboc-shop.com
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The Colour of India's Collective Unconscious
by Aditya Dev Sood
How did you chose the colour of your clothes today? It's not an easy question to answer. Did you even think about them as having any colour? Perhaps yes, and perhaps no, for a pair of denim jeans is intrinsically blue, and one can just as easily have chosen 'jeans' and not 'blue.'
And yet, almost unconsciously, we do think about the colours we wear on our body, and the colours of our accessories, appliances, and home spaces. I have sometimes observed a husband and wife step out perfectly matched in colour, despite them having never consciously thought about, nor discussed, their colour choices.
Some years ago, at my company CKS, we embarked on a large multiyear project for a client seeking to understand how people's preferences on colour were emerging and changing in India. We quickly found that people could more easily talk about colour in combinations or colour palates than as single colours. And then they could readily associate such palates with particular attitudes, cultural trends, movies, books, poetry, music and emotions. Far from being something abstract or irrelevant to people's lives, combinations of colour could trigger deep responses, of which people may not have even been conscious. Which is to say, colour choice may actually reside in the unconscious mind.
Every year, we have invited scores of designers and design students from different streams of design to create collages out of a large archive of contemporary design, style and media images. No one can predict what patterns different individuals and groups will see in these images, but in years past we have seen some repeating patterns: There is escapism, for example, from the pressures of everyday urban life, into other cultures and holiday destinations, both East and West. There is a retreat into nature, through a celebration of leaves, bark, woods, fruits, nuts and flowers. There are classic Indian palates, from the colours of saris, embroidery, jewelry and inlay-work. Then there are approaches to technology and media that suggest that they might provide a kind of mastery or control over the messiness of modern urban life. And of course, we often catch a glimpse of romance, sensuality, and a return to the edge of innocence: sweet sixteen and old Bollywood glamour.
This year, I see something different emerge. There is less escapism and more forbearance. There is an appetite for contradiction and complexity that seems more mature, even realist. There seems to be an understanding that we can never turn back from the functionalist cities that we are building in Gurgaon, Whitefield, Lavasa, and that we have no choice but to mould our selves and our lifestyles in response to these new forms of urbanity. This complex mood of resignation combined with determination holds all kinds of contradictions, and we therefore see sophisticated and layered imagery along with darker colours, in greater tension, balance and poise with one another. It is as if the Indian colour imagination has suddenly grown up and acquired more adult, sophisticated tastes.
Our collective unconscious appears to take all the different kinds of stimulus available and then churn and churn and churn until something orderly, digestible, comprehensible arises. All the messiness of road and metro construction, all the traffic and redevelopment, all the asymmetries of income, status and access, all the changes in business culture and family dynamics that attend our ongoing transformation and emergence on the world's stage, are being channeled by our collective mind, and being rendered, eventually, as an aesthetic. It is still early days, but a coherent world-picture is beginning to emerge, a definitive Indian aesthetic, which may still grow darker before it glows brighter.
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The Parable of Metatechnology
by Aditya Dev Sood
Last night I had a dream so vivid it can only be called a vision. Its specificity and purpose seem also to demand a name, and so I shall call it
The Parable of Metatechnology.
I dreamt of a Hungarian technocrat and polymath from the late 1800s, whose name is too complicated to remember. He had helped design many of the bridges that crisscross the Danube, interconnecting Buda and Pest, and so creating the twin-city of Budapest. He had consulted on the design of the city's underground railway, only the second in the world after London, and the only one on the Continent. In addition to his Engineering practice, He had a scholarly career in the field of Descriptive Geometry, so he was a kind of mathematician. He was an amateur linguist, and toyed with representing sentences in a simplified code -- he was a kind of programmer, long before there was something called software.
Right around the end of the ninteenth century, his milieu, the city as a whole, was trying to figure out how to advance the pace of its technological development, how to ensure that Budapest would become the center of the twentieth century. He had a vague notion, a hunch, that there might be something beyond technology, which if it could be discovered, unlocked, unleashed, could predict the now uncertain pattern of the unfolding of technology. Just as two dimensional spaces can be projected into three, and as three can be projected into four and more, perhaps a modeling of metatechnology would allow him to resolve the technology layer through which his city was passing.
He asked for funds, of course. He set up his laboratory on one of the empty hilltops across the Danube, on the Buda side. From his window, he could see the last of his bridges being completed over the glistening Danube. His bright young assistants projected each of the known sciences and applied disciplines onto the other, struggling mightily to generate a unifying theory, trying to map this new field of metatechnology. The years passed quickly, but by the time the Archduke was assassinated there had been a few conferences and some papers circulated, but still no breakthrough. Metatechnology was proving to be a big failure. Perhaps as a result, the twentieth century was not kind to Budapest: wracked by two world wars and then shackled by the cold war, the city is now still struggling to find its feet within the EU.
Why did the Hungarian polymath fail? Why can't there be something like metatechnology? A moment's introspection will suggest to you that perhaps technology is a hybrid and complex thing, made up of culture and materiality, science and commerce, design and commodity. And so there may never be something higher or lower than technology, but only two surfaces folding over and over and over each other, again and again. To aspire to go somewhere above and beyond technology is to go beyond the conceptual and cognitive powers of human societies.
Still, the dream of metatechnology is a common collective fantasy, and it has migrated like a virus to different cities around the world: Shanghai 1990, Bangalore 1999, Sao Paolo 2014. In the grip of a particular wave of technology, the city forgets itself and remakes itself in the image of a particular, fleeting configuration of people and their systems, often acquired from someplace else. The form of that logic is stamped all over the city, but its underlying cultural, creative, and entrepreneurial energies are never really understood.
In these contemporary times we do not talk of metatechnology, but rather use the word ‘innovation’ to refer to the process of creating new technologies, new ways for matter and meaning to be configured. Innovation is that holy grail which is common to the discourses of business, management, policy and governance, though it remains as mysterious to its seekers today as it was for the Hungarian polymath from the last century. This is because it resides not beyond the different realms of human activity, but as a resonance and harmonization of them, a flow state in which a society can experience being and becoming at the same time.
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The Layman
by Aditya Dev Sood
Brownian motion at a macro-scale. That's what my working week feels like these days. On Monday I flew from Delhi to Ahmedabad, the next day to Bangalore, a couple of days later to Patna via Calcutta. And now, after a tense hour's delay in Patna, while this decrepit Air-India plane was late arriving into that one-room box of an airport, we're finally off and away. We'll land in Delhi with just the right sliver of time for me to catch the only direct flight to Goa today. We'll be going for a friend's 40th birthday bash on the beach this holiday weekend.
There's hardly anyone on the flight, but they've bunched us up in some artificial pattern near the middle of the fuselage. The whole thing is like a too-vivid dream from my childhood, from the yucky yellow-orange of the seats to the squat, curvy stewardesses in saris that remind me of my teachers in elementary school. They're coming around now with a meal cart. Sir, veg or non-veg for your breakfast?
shakahari, the guy next to me says, and then leans over me to receive his tray with shaking, uncertain hands. I'm thinking I'll have the
parantha-s as well.
How does one open this, he asks me, holding up the micro-package of jam. I demonstrate by separating the aluminum layer from the plastic layer of my own packet and slowly pulling them apart. He's still going at it several times before I offer him my own packet. Now he's got the same problem with the butter serving, but instead of struggling with it he just offers it to me to open for him. I go back to my
parantha-s, when a few minutes later he offers me his ketchup packet. I put my
parantha down, wipe my greasy fingers and try to find the entry tear in the packet. The slit I'm making curves away from the pulpy body of the packet towards its edge, making no wound in the sac of ketchup. I hand it back to him wearily, knowing I won't be able to do any better.
nahin hua bhai, kya karen? He puts it back down on his tray despondently.
Now he turns to me holding up the fruit cup, and I'm wondering if he's for real. I mean it's just a plastic airplane service cup, aged and flecked and speaking of that misplaced parsimony that only Air-India still excels in, but elegantly taped up all round with saran-wrap.
iska kya hai, bus phad dijiye, I tell him. He looks at the object like its form, meaning and logic are only now becoming clear to him, his mind is reading it, and his whole body nods, yes yes, I can just tear the plastic and get to the fruit inside!
 I've never been on a plane before, the man is saying, perhaps to explain his befuddledness, perhaps for sympathy. You know, I am just like a layman, an innocent one. This morning, early morning my son called from Delhi, he said Bapuji please you must come to Delhi. He had forgotten his passport and my wife's passport as well. From Delhi itself he had organized the ticket and sent me the number on my mobile phone. So I went to the airport and there they just gave me a ticket.
Is he leaving today itself? Does he need it to get a visa?
Now, I don't know why he needs it, but it must be urgent, that's why he called me. Today I just go to Delhi and then come back again in the evening. So much expense, but it must be urgent, that's why he called me. He is a doctor in New York. And my daughter is married into a family in New Delhi. But I have a simple life.
As I went through the security checking the guard said to me, why old-timer, you've got a knife on you? I said no, really, I have no knife, but I showed him this -- now he pulls out a
janeyu, his sacred thread, from under his shirt which to which he's tied a key. If you call this a knife how can I take it? This is my house key. I had to lock everything up this morning after my son called. In any case I was all alone, he's convinced his mother to with him to New York.
My gold and silver, the jewelry, they're in a bank locker, so that's safe. We have three hundred and fifty
bigha-s of land, and mostly our servants are trustworthy, reliable. But there are bandits, dacoits, you can't be too safe. I've been going on quite a bit -- what is it that you do?
Well, I say, I am an architect, of things like mobile phones
Oh, so you must be a very high officer! Things have deteriorated in Bihar, you know, despite all the propaganda. Nitish Kumar says he's brought about development, but I say it's only maintenance. He is only maintaining the things in the state they are. Bihar had gone backwards under Laloo, but now the corruption is all out of proportion. And now it is becoming legal. What is that English word? Con-con-consulting? Ten percent of all projects go towards consultants.
Our annual property tax comes to one point two lakhs. But the officer will not give us a receipt for it. He wants two lakhs or else he says he will report it. Now what can we do? We will pay it, there is no one to look out for us, with my son in New York.
My son tells me he wants to give me every happiness in life. I told him there are only two joys for a man -- to have a son, and to have him with him in his life. Now my son tells me to go to New York with him. But I won't go. I have seen New Delhi, everywhere life is jammed up, on the roads, in the houses. How can there be joy there. One day, when I was in Delhi, I said I'll go and get some milk. They said to me, Baba, how will you get milk without money in your pocket. And then I saw, yes, you need money even for milk in the city. We don't need money at home. We have our own cows and buffalos and as much milk as we want.
He bangs the seat in front of him. These cities feel like jails to us! Back home it is open, in fields, in the orchards.
My son earns good money in New York. He earns twelve lakhs and spends seven lakhs. One day I calculated that he spends more on his son every month than I had spent in all the time I brought him up, from his cradle to his medical college. He said to me that one's standard, one's status in life depends not on what one earns, but on what one spends, consumes. Now how can one respond to that?
I don't know if you can understand our way of speaking, but in our village we say you cannot live with a son who wants to keep you as a servant. Whatever we do in this life will determine how we are born in the next. If your hands are dirty with karma you will come back as a dog or a pig. In our family when you die your body is taken to Ganga-maiyya in Varanasi. Abroad there is no Ganga, then what will you do? I worry for my son and for his son.
What is your good-name, I ask him. Nand Kishore, he says, but I have a village call-out name, Baccha-Babu. I ask if I can take a photograph of him and he says yes.
Is the flight going to stop in Lucknow? No, I tell him, it is going straight to Delhi. We'll probably land at about 11.30.
How come you've brought your bag on board? Well, a small bag is allowed, I tell him. Oh, what a shame! I should have just brought it with me. There was no one to tell me what to do at the airport! And it has the passports in it! How much time before we can get our luggage? Will my son be able to come into the baggage hall?
What's going on with the ears, he ask me. We're probably descending, I say, you should put your seat-belt on. Just pop that in there, and then pull the loose strap.
The ears… he trails off in complaint. Shake them with your thumb, try opening and closing your mouth, I say. It'll be fine. As he begins shaking out his ears I see a fineness to his his hands and fingers that I hadn't noticed before, they are somehow loose and untrained, the way he himself comes off as a person, as a whole personality. A petty landowner of his generation might never even have attended school.
The plane rumbles into the tarmac, and we look out onto the crazy zoo of airplanes parked at Delhi airport. Have we reached? We've gotten off the skies, I tell him. His cell phone immediately starts ringing, for he'd never turned it off. He explains to his son that although he's not yet on the ground, he's no longer in the air either -- the plane is moving on a kind of track.
He gets out of his seat and makes as if to cross me towards the aisle. I tell him it is not allowed. But I just want to stand near the doorway until we stop. No, I tell him, it is not allowed. He'd better put his seatbelt back on. Once we finally stop, he glides past me and swiftly positions himself against the doorway, the better to be the first to rush out of the plane and complete his mission.
I’m not really sure what, if anything, I learned from my meeting Baccha-Babu, which is why I thought of sharing the experience with you.
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In Visible Cities
by Aditya Dev Sood
Bangalore: I am writing from the backseat of a call-taxi, which is stuck in a traffic jam on J.C. Road, en route from the airport. But I could be anywhere else, and the situation would be the same. We are all on the road to somewhere, together in this city, joined in our frustration at one another, for we ourselves are the traffic, the noise, the pollution that we despise, and the stuff of cities that we love.
It was not always this way, say the old Bangaloreans. This was once a beautiful garden city, almost a hill station, before you, we, the whole madness began. That IT boom, intensified by the whole Y2K scare. The dotcom boom and bust. The IT-Enabled Services craze. The BPO industry. The KPOs that came right after. The rearticulation of the Bangalore phenomenon as an R&D cluster. No point even mentioning Biotech. Whatever the acronym or jargony excuse for young men and women to arrive in the city, it has never abated in this decade, nor will it in the next one.
Young men and women from Wazirabad, Aligarh, Muzzafarpur and small towns across the north of India, and from every state in the south, have been pouring into take their place in the new jobs that the Bangalore phenomenon made possible, always a couple of years ahead of every other Indian city. And for them, there are new flats under construction, new workstations at new technology parks and SEZs around the city, and new car loans -- but not necessarily any more roadspace, nor schools, nor museums, nor swimming pools, nor parks -- urban physical and social infrastructure that helps one get around and make
life worth living in the urban compression of a major Indian metropolis. Most of us who have arrived in the great churning of Bangalore's participation in the global informational marketplace have long since been brutalised by the annual intensification of traffic, the delays and the ever increasing distance that makes the city once again a place of long waits and long separations.
There is, however, new hope in the form of an informal working group of Indian and German architects and urbanists working together with a simple set of propositions: We cannot change what we do not understand. And we cannot understand what we cannot map, capture, see, measure, visualise, envision. Indian metropolises, meanwhile, generate infinitudes of data, much of which is never organised, so as to promote human understanding or civic dialogue. The group is called 'MOD,' and you can find the outcomes of their initial workshops and mapping efforts at
www.workshop.mod.org.in. All the content is open source, and open for online comment and further public dialogue with you.
Are these MOD people utopian? Will they succeed? Will our cities ever get any better in our lifetimes? It is really hard to know hope in metropolitan India today. All the 'solutions' to the problem of traffic serve only to rend the city up into so many bits and parts. The planning process can seem draconian and disconnected from community aspirations. Our metro-rails are still not entirely functional, and even where they operate, they have not alleviated the pressure on the roads.
And yet, we know that it is possible for cities to be things of beauty and meaning, repositories of collective consciousness, spaces that mark the shared passage of our time on this earth. As the MOD people say, if we cannot
see the city in a new way, as a complex sum and in all its component parts, we have no prayer of being able to rebuild it in our own image, as something purposive and beautiful.
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On the Need for User-Centered Governance Innovation
by Aditya Dev Sood
In the winter of 2000, almost a decade ago, I got off a train at Ratlam junction in Madhya Pradesh, and went looking for my ride. A white Gypsy with red flashing lights was parked near the entrance to the station, and its driver came out to greet me and grab my bags.
aap ko circuit house le jane go kaha hai. aap fresh ho jaiye toh collector sahib milenge aap se. As we drove the hour or so from Ratlam to the circuit house in Dhar district, my driver was eager to tell me how impressed he was by the charismatic personality of his boss, for which my visit to Dhar was obviously only further evidence.
Rajesh Rajoura, the district collector of Dhar, and his colleague Anil Aggarwal, the District Magistrate, had noticed a circular from Madhya Pradesh inviting districts to begin implementations of information technology for their routine activities. Rajoura and Aggarwal received permission for an innovative plan they called the Gyandoot project. The pair held a series of meetings with diverse local organizations, including panchayats and quasi-governmental agencies to establish their needs and their receptivity to using computers as a platform for their transactions and interactions. Using a consultative process, they then set up a network of information kiosks at different locations around Dhar district, through which they provided an array of innovative services and transactions, including requests and complaints to the district administration, land record inquiries, applications for various government subsidies and welfare schemes, local classified advertisements, typing and computer training.
The information kiosks of Dhar district were now being visited by state and national-level teams. Soon after my visit, the Worldbank came calling, and made the district into a global case study for e-governance. Rajoura and Aggarwal, the joint progenitors of the project, went to Stockholm to receive an international award. Several features of the project were incorporated into national policies on networked villages and e-governance. It was looking like Dhar district could serve as the template for a new and networked form of rural administration across India.
A decade on, while e-governance has become a normal mode for governments and agencies in India to transact, and practically represents a sub-sector within the IT industry, the provision of services at the district and village level has not appreciably changed. The promise of Gyandoot remains largely unrealized, and the reason for this lies not in the medium but the method that Rajoura and Aggarwal used. While most studies of their work focused on their use of computers, what seems now to have been critical was that they sought out local opinion and held consultations with groups that do not normally find a voice in governmental decision-making. Computers and information technology merely served as an opportunity or an excuse to imagine new ways in which governmental services could be delivered. The interactive dialogue and inclusive decison-making that was employed in the Gyandoot project was in fact its most radical and innovative element!
Where do our regulations, the processes of our government, the systems and architecture of the state machinery all come from? Do we ever get to invent them, or must we always inherit them from the past, like so many vestigial organs that no longer suit these contemporary times? The very concept of a District Collector and a District Magistrate is an innovation dating from the colonial period, designed to allow English officers of the Indian Administrative Services to collect agricultural rents and other surpluses in the countryside. So many other elements of the machinery of the Indian state similarly date either from the colonial period or else go back further, to
Mughal mansabdari, jajmani, zamindari, and other petty Maharaja and feudal architectures of power.
Whenever we think of changing the way governmental systems work, we tend to speak of ‘reform,’ as if this part or component of the state has become corrupt or dissolute or lost its way. Others have no patience even for reform, but seek to bring private sector ‘standards’ and ‘best practices’ into the state bureaucracies. We should recognize that state apparatuses are always legacy systems lumbering into a present where they may or may not belong, and that they require continuous innovation and renovation in order to ensure that they are, in fact, in alignment with contemporary society. The way to make governmental processes responsive to the needs of its citizens and users is through the continuous application of user-centered governance innovation, of the kind that Rajoura and Aggarwal demonstrated more than a decade ago.
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What India’s New Symbol for the Rupee Means
by Aditya Dev Sood
In the
early pre-dawn of India’s liberalization, I was once
returning from college in the US for the summer, when I
missed my connection and had an unplanned stop-over in
Singapore. I had very little money on me, perhaps a
hundred dollars and about a thousand rupees. As I roamed
about the city in those early morning hours, I came upon
a small, seedy change-money shop, whose proprietor had
put examples of all the currencies of the world under
his glass table. I was surprised to see a conversion
rate for the Indian rupee also listed, among so many
European and ASEAN-nation currencies. So, I asked him,
can I get Singapore dollars for my rupees? He laughed at
me, saying that that rate was only for selling rupees,
which he sometimes did for returning Indian workers.
From me he could buy only hard currencies – the $, the
£, the ¥.
What a long road we have
traveled since then, with incremental changes to our
financial institutions, the opening of our markets,
foreign investment in every part of our economy, and the
emergence of a global consumer class in our metropolitan
cities. The long night of India’s isolation from the
world, which stretched, roughly, across the decades of
the seventies and eighties, is not just over, but it has
given way to a period of prosperity and growth that
shows no signs of abating in our lifetimes. Few
societies have known such ascendance after such neglect,
when the scale of their poverty seemed unfathomable. And
few nations in the world – one can only think of China –
have walked their own path out of underdevelopment
towards investment and growth the way India has. The
strength of India’s entire economy, not just its
currency, is captured by the new symbol for the Indian
rupee, .
What makes a currency hard is not merely stability
and growth, though these are important – it is rather
faith in its ability to reflect value transparently and
reliably over time – or at least more transparently than
other available instruments for encoding such value.
Whether it rise or falls in the short term, although
ideally it should not fall too much, a currency must
accurately reflect value over the longer term. This is
the central conundrum of all attempts to artificially
shore up currencies – the more intervention, the greater
the softening of the instrument. The
symbol would be meaningless without the past two
decades of economic and financial sector reforms, which
cumulatively stand behind the promise of this symbol to
strive to reflect value truly, both within India as well
as in the outside world. This is no small thing.
The word
‘rupee’ is said to derive from the Sanskrit
rupyakam, that which can be given another form.
The sense of this word
rupyakam is often taken to refer to the silver
in which rupee coins were first stamped, often with the
likeness or sign of the king. A deeper set of
associations is also already at play, for with his
likeness or seal, the king makes promises as to the
purity of the coin, its capability to reflect true
value. Moreover, the Rupee is capable of giving such
value to one who possesses it on account of its
malleability, its capability of being translated into
another form through exchange. The mutability and
translatability of the Rupee is itself now signified by
its new international symbol.
Most specialized glyphs,
diacritics, punctuation marks, acronyms and
abbreviations emerge through repetition, popular usage
and the perception of a shared need for a shorter,
simpler means of signification. The establishment of the
Rupee sign by the Government of India could allow this
logic to work in reverse: the availability of the sign
will promote the increased use of the rupee, both in
India and abroad. After all, the money form emerged out
of a need to signify and communicate the value of goods
and services more easily and effectively, a goal that
this new symbol will also facilitate. By giving visual
form to the concept of the rupee, the symbol introduces
a new category of currency into the consciousness of the
world, for versions of the Rupee are now in use in
several countries across South and South East Asia, and
in the past, the Indian Rupee has been used as legal
tender in the Gulf states and in parts of Africa. One
should not be surprised if these other forms of the
Rupee come to be symbolized by an adapted or qualified
version of the new Rupee sign.
The most striking feature of D.
Udaya Kumar’s winning design is the way it combines
Latin and Devanagari scripts with the ubiquitous double
stroke of other global currency symbols. Unlike, for
example, the awkward logo of the Ashok Hotel in New
Delhi or Manish Arora’s manic brand, this fusion works
because of its minimalism, because of what it leaves
out. The vertical stoke of the Latin R is merely
suggested, the mind has to work to complete the meaning
of the symbol.
There is, however, tremendous
tension between the two horizontal strokes at the top of
the form, which together represent another kind of
visual pun. The double strokes seen in other currency
symbols is overlaid upon the shiro rekha,
that nearly ubiquitous top stroke of the Devanagari
script. Kumar has explained this element of his design
as a reference not only to the exchange value of the
currency, but also as an abstraction of the Indian
tricolor, which is perhaps one alibi too many. Finally,
while the upper portion of the symbol is curvilinear,
with the variable width suggestive of calligraphy, no
such flair is seen in the diagonal lower stroke, which
is again a source of some visual confusion to the
discerning eye. Overall, however, Kumar’s presentation
of his design is striking and unitary, and no element of
his solution can be fundamentally altered without
diminishing it.
Abhishek Hazra, an expert in
Fontography, points out that the Rupee sign might better
have been presented not in this single rendition, but as
a symbol expressed in multiple fonts. As seen in the
illustration above, the symbols for other currencies can
vary a great deal depending on the font in which they
are rendered. As seen in this series, the cross strokes
reduce from two to one in several cases, sometime drop
out in the middle, and otherwise vary according to the
stylistic convention of each font, and yet their
significance and meaning remain unchanged. The design
presented by Kumar, therefore, should be seen as one
typical presentation of the Rupee sign, and not as its
only allowed or allowable rendition symbol.
As the Rupee sign comes more and
more into usage, we should expect it to vary in each
instance, and thus evolve into something that all its
users can share in. Perhaps some users will write it
without the top-bar, in the style of the Gurmukhi
script. Perhaps others will bring flourish and elan to
the way they arch the lower diagonal stroke of the
symbol. The authorities should allow the Rupee sign to
fluctuate slightly in these ways, for such liberalism
has already shown itself to be sound policy.
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The Techno-Future and Pre-History of Toes
by Aditya Dev Sood
 I was riding the 2/3 to Brooklyn the first couple of days I was back, when I saw this guy in a baggy pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and these kinda shoes I’d never seen before. They wrapped around each toe, exposing the toes basically, through the thin skin of the shoe. Years ago, I remember reading a children’s encyclopedia on Surrealist Art, where I saw a charcoal drawing of an empty pair of boots with laces whose burnished, buffeted folds drew further and further down to reveal toes. There was something spectral and scary about the catch in the mind, which confused shoe for feet, with the after-image of the even grosser idea that the skin of one’s feet might someday serve as the boots of another. These bizarre shoe-things with toes brought all that to mind and more. The mind understood sandals, it understood shoes, but these things were total genre busters – like the Sporks of footwear. They were somehow unseemly, uncanny, desirable. I had to have ‘em!
 I got online and found myself bang in the middle of a cultural revolution, where running is the leitmotif for a responsible and contemporary lifestyle. As many readers will already know, recent studies have suggested that human form emerges as a result of endurance running, whereby our distant ancestors ran and walk their prey to exhaustion and ultimate death. While we humans can easily be outclassed in a sprint and overwhelmed in a full frontal attack at close quarters, our intellect and genius for tracking was able to manifest a potentially overwhelming evolutionary advantage at long distances and over longer periods of time. Also relevant are recent pop-anthropological studies of Meso-American tribes who can still be observed running and hunting over long distances barefoot, perhaps evidence that we humans truly are born to run.
While there’s a small and
growing sub-culture of barefoot runners these days,
there’s also the view that this is a sure track to contracting Hepatitis C. This is because enough people have it, and enough of them are urinating out and about the city, so it is only a matter of time and chance for the moment when you have a cut on the palm of your foot, which becomes infected. But even in rural and remote regions of the world, walking or running barefoot can be a high-risk activity, exposing the body to hookworm, podoconiosis, and other neglected tropical diseases. Seen from this perspective, the shoe is a prophylactic, protecting the body from the diseases that may be locked into the loam of the earth. The goal of further design and innovation in shoes, therefore, should be to afford the flexibility and sensation of going bareback, while still ensuring that users enjoy safe sports.
 The success of the global culture industry rests on its ability, every so often, to spin out a new kind of consumer product or service that can offer up rich desirable experiences that could not have even been imagined just a few years earlier. I’m thinking of Levi’s, Nikes, the Walkman, the Spielberg blockbuster, iStuff, Social Networking. These foot-gloves approach these heights of socio-technical and cultural innovation, for they embody a new way of living in the very form of their product offering. No other company offers what they offer at this time, their brand is coterminous with the category they have created: five-fingered footwear. The foot-gloves are made by an Italian rubber soles manufacturer called Vibram, which has enjoyed long-standing repute among the hiking and mountaineering community. With the development of their uniquely designed sock-shoe-sandals, however, they are now funding biomechanical and sports-medical research, which in turn fuels fevered popular reception, discussion and commentary on how best to walk and run as a contemporary human. Vibram S.P.A. is understandably reluctant to make specific claims about the advantages of its footwear over conventional sports shoes, but the popular receptions of the product have discussed the natural splay of human toes across the ground while running. Five-finger footwear is perceived as being able to better approximate the putative bio-mechanical and evolutionary values of that splay, as the foot slaps the ground and spring up again.
Certainly, the products are made with a precision of design and manufacture that would have been unimaginable only decades ago, not only for the materials science involved, but also for the computer-aided design and precision joinery that the products require. Where other shoes from our own time may have heels made of wood and steel, and might even use nails to bang uppers and lowers together, these foot-condoms are almost seamless, just a series of cutting-edge materials circling in and around one another to wrap the foot with grace and precision.
While this is not immediately intuitive, it seems to me that Vibram’s expertise with rubber soles may in fact be central to its success with the toe-pocket design. This is because there is enormous variety in human toe forms, with the second toe sometimes being longer or shorter than the big toe, varying degrees of splay across toes and variations in the decrease of toe size from big to pinkie. The Vibram foot-glove, however, provides for an optimal pocket for each toe, while also creating an exoskeleton of sorts in rubber, which curves up and around the toe, even if it is incompletely filled. This is the central design innovation that makes the Vibram foot-glove workable in both functional as well as visual-aesthetic terms, rather like an underwire and padded bra. The technology serves to reorganize and re-form the flesh and bone of the body like an orthotic, but also to make it visible and consumable in a new way.
 There is certainly
something scandalous about a shoe that reveals the toes that it hides, like a male ballet dancer’s tights, revealing the form of his cod piece. Our mind’s eye should be forgiven the confusion, for as Freud noticed, the digits of our feet do poke out in rather the same odd way as male genitalia, and like the nose, may also serve as a substitute or transposition for the male penis. In Exodus, for instance, Sarah protects Moses from the wrath intended for the Egyptians by touching the foreskin removed from their son to his foot, or member, the text is obscure, thereby effecting a ritual circumcision. So also, diverse Shaiva rituals which are vestigeally preserved in caste Hindu households, require the bridegroom or the father-in-law’s toe to be ritually cleansed with water and milk, ritual symbols for fertility, potency, patrilinality. I’ve heard several people express both pleasure and unease at the visual form of the Vibrams, and I’m willing to propose that this does have something to do with the visual suggestiveness of these exposed-yet-cosseted human members which are also newly available to the eye because they have been cosseted.
To begin to use your Vibrams is to learn new ways of managing and inhabiting your body. It’s not all that easy getting your toes into the tiny spaces allotted for each of them without practice. It is like being a child again, and learning to put on your shoes without a shoe-horn. Or perhaps wearing your first pair of gloves backwards, and having to link the kinesthetic and tactile data from your hands with the good sense of your eyes, so you can align all of your digits into the fingers of the glove. Already something interesting is going on here: ways of using my mind that are supposed to apply for the upper half of my body are being applied downwards to parts which are usually not so well cared for, hidden, forgotten, and even abused.
 The recovery of one’s toes -- nay, the recovery of one’s feet as such, a hitherto concealed and forgotten organ -- gives one to have a new sense of one’s own corporeal construction. Our two sets of limbs have become increasingly asymmetric in their role and purpose, but foot-gloves bring back the kinship between our divergently adapted upper and lower members. The navel now marks the point of a horizontal line of symmetry between the tops and bottoms of our body. Now that I have foot-gloves, I want a set of hand-shoes as well, so that I can swing from the train bars, parkour in and out of the subway, live a little, beyond the repressive cultures of foot-concealment. There are millions of nerve endings, I remember being told, in each of my finger-tips, which are partially responsible for my gentle tapping on this keyboard, even as my toes wriggle in sympathy from down below. I'm beginning to want an end to this apartheid -- I only want for my toes what I enjoy for my fingers.
Do you not also worry about our toes’ uncertain evolutionary future? I’ve often thought that the pinkie is already so squashed and so nearly vestigial in its form that we won’t hardly miss it in a few generations. And really what good do our toes do us in the course of everyday bureaucratic life? They will surely be reabsorbed by the skin around them, giving us a kind of webfoot, perfectly evolutionarily adapted for wearing Gucci loafers, kick-powering office roller-chairs and balancing ourselves on Segways. There is a madness to this form of civilization that the barefoot runners’ contingent are right to reject, in favor of a closer, more direct relationship with the surface of the earth. For what’s still missing in these foot-condoms is the sweet kiss of grass, the dank cloddedness of soil, the grainy play of gravel, the full array of sensations of earth that our feet, those wonderful and underused sense organs, afford us. Thanks to toes, our feet are a fundamental way of knowing where we stand in the world.
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Towards a Post-Human Manifesto
by Aditya Dev Sood
The problem with Gregor Samsa
was not that he had become a cockroach, but rather
that his family members, and indeed, he himself,
found this revolting, disgusting, gross. The
protagonist of Franz Kafka's famous short story The
Metamorphosis found that he no longer inhabited a
body familar to him, but something alien to him, and
that in turn, this new arachnoid body alienated him
from his family and from the wider world of humans.
Is it natural for humans and
creepy-crawlies to be on such poor terms with one
another? Why do we not feel kinship with our
brethren of smallish size, who have exoskeletons and
multiple limbs? Perhaps the problem is that we are
constructed so differently at different scales, and
that we lack the right tools for interacting with
one another. We are so big, they are so small. And
if, by some miracle, we were to shrink down to their
size, they would be so strong, their forelimbs,
probosces, and jaws would immediately squish our
soft -- and now shrunken -- mammalian bodies.
Natalie Jeremijenko showed me a
unique solution to the pressing problem of
cross-species communication last week, in her
live-in studios and labs in New York City. As shown
in the image below, she has built a giant helmet to
wear on one's head, which has a long elongated
proboscis that curves down to the level of an
arachnoid, in this case the Horned Dung Beetle, the
the strongest animal for its size in the world.
Robotic sensors translate the movements of your
human head and jaw down to the movements of a little
arm that is the right size and shape for interacting
with the beetle. If you had ever wondered, with
Franz Kafka, what it would be like to have six legs
and a pair of pliers for a mouth, Natalie's
contraption provides an ingenious way to experience
this and to find out.
The beetle in the wrestling ring
below is eagerly awaiting your challenge, and
immediately grasps your robotic claw in his jaws,
pushing, clamping, biting, as if he has found
another mate to play with. You too, can now see how
much energy, style and intelligence goes into Horned
Dung Beetle wrestling, an art that was hitherto
prohibited to our species. To become an arachnoid is
no longer a dismal fate, but perhaps a lifestyle
choice.
Our experiences in this world
are necessarily constrained by these bodies which we
inhabit, bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical, with a
strong sense of the difference between up-down,
front-back, and a slightly less sure grasp of left
from right. In the early morning hours after my yoga
routine, when I am lost in shavasana, the position
of the corpse, these logics of the body evaporate,
and my life energies seem capable of reconfigurating
into any other corporeal form: hexapedal, octopedal,
amoebal. This body has been assigned randomly to me,
and for all its benefits, it is only one form of
life, not necessarily the best or highest or
ultimate form. This insight is the foundation of the
Jaina teaching of non-violence, not only towards
creepy-crawlies, but even to the microscopic
organisms that surround us.
The discipline of Anthropology teaches us that
technology is something uniquely human, and the
practice of Design assumes that we humans must be
the measure of all things built and constructed in
the world. Natalie's approach, however, shows us
that technology can be a way of extending our
experience beyond the human, out to the worlds of
geese, fish and beetles and that we can interact
with those life forms in interesting and pleasurable
ways. Using her technologies, we can glimpse the
truth of our being as just another form of prana,
life, and begin re-engineering our planet for the
collective benefit of all its prani-s, our fellow
living beings, with whom are only beginning to
communicate and interact.
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On the Creative Powers of Our Mind
by Aditya Dev Sood
The other day, I was visiting
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where I
happened upon a public lecture by Dr. Kurt Behrendt.
He was talking in a small room where Ramayana
paintings from Mughal and post-Mughal schools of
miniature painting were on display. Eventually,
Behrendt led our small group to a medium-sized
painting from the Kangra school, in Himachal
Pradesh, which depicted the visit of Ram, Sita and
Lakshman to the forest monastery of the rishi
Bharadvaj. The rishi is describing the forest to his
visitors, suggesting beautiful and hospitable places
for them to visit in these hills.
The rishi is seated before a
sacrificial fire, draped in a tiger pelt, while a
purple Ram dressed in leaves, and bashful,
completely-covered Sita sit on the hide of a deer. A
younger, respectful Lakshman sits beside them on his
knees. Members of Bharadvaj’s retinue sit further
away from the group, at the base of a bountiful
mango tree, that rises up and around, to fill up the
whole center of the canvas, its branches pointing up
and left, and then right, to other smaller vignettes
in the further distance, recessed among rolling
hills and mountain peaks. Ram, Sita and Lakshman
will have to cross a wide river by boat to get to
this beautiful valley, where herons and other birds
frolic among the lotus ponds, and hermits live
quietly in simple straw huts.
The reproduction below will not
do justice to the fine-grained brush work of the
original, where individual strokes delineate the
current of the water, the ripeness of fruit, the
swiftness of the wind through the shimmering leaves
of the tree. As the hills draw further away, still
more detail becomes apparent, smaller and smaller
trees, hutments, little winding streams. In the
perimeter of Bharadvaj’s settlement are dark,
perfect trees, each botanically specific, each
perfectly composed to give the group shelter. I
think it can be no accident that this scene of
Himalayan beauty comes from the Kangra school.
Even as Bharadvaj speaks, his
words are taken up by the unnamed and unknown
master’s eye, hand, and brush, to the upper folds of
his painting. This painting is itself an icon of
manuscript illumination, whose task is to give words
and narrative visual expression, to complement them,
to make the eye dance along the parchment page, to
trigger visual thoughts in mind of the one reading
and reciting, and those listening and enjoying. It
must have taken this painter such incredible focus
and empathy to have generated so much vivid detail
from just a few lines of Valmiki's text.
Have you noticed how intimately
the creative powers of our mind are interconnected
with our ability to see? The very word
‘imagination,’ in English, holds within it a root
metaphor of being able to make an image with one’s
mind. So also, in the Sanskritic tradition, the
early rishi-s, or seers, were so called because they
had the power of direct perception into the hidden
essences of things, from the root √rsh, to see, from
which we also get the modern Hindi drishti, darshan
and so forth. Each of us has the capacity for this
kind of creative vision, which we can either
develop, or else let fade away.
One way in which we can preserve
and further develop our creative powers, it seems to
me, is to allow ourselves to confront works of such
heartbreaking and insistent beauty, which challenge
the mind’s eye to try find any joint or edge,
between the imagination of the artist, and the
vividness of his reality.
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At the Intersections of Design, Ethnography and
Global Governance
by Aditya Dev Sood
At my table were two diplomats
and a cultural researcher. My own role was
designated as 'designer.' We were told that there
was a post-conflict situation in an African nation
where the U.N. had been called in. Local
institutions and forms of self-governance had been
eroded during the long and bloody conflict. Child
soldiers had been involved in the civil war on both
sides, and the competing ends of Justice and
Rehabilitation had both to be balanced. Our job was
to plan the series of activities that would result
in a contextually-appropriate program of activities
for the U.N. teams working in the region. We had two
hours.
We began by trying to itemize
all the different internal and external stakeholders
in the situation, from U.N. agencies to neighboring
countries to international investors, and gave up
once we got into double digits. Then we tried to
bound the problem by trying to establish what kind
of time-line and terms of reference we were working
with. It seemed foolish to try to do anything in
less than six weeks time, for meanwhile the country
was burning, and the U.N. agencies would need a plan
to start working with as soon as possible. But six
weeks was also nowhere near enough time to collect
meaningful cultural and socioeconomic data on twenty
or thirty million people. We agreed that we would
have to rely on secondary data from prior
sociocultural research, while also involving
regional and in-country experts. We also wanted U.N.
agencies to pre-pone our terms of reference to a
period well prior to the U.N. flag going up in the
nation in question.
So we revised our ideal scenario
again, to ensure that we had social and cultural
data as well as resource personnel at hand for the
region that would tell us enough about it before the
conflict started. We would then be able to do highly
targeted data gathering activities from the time the
U.N. became responsible for the country. Very
rapidly, we imagined, we would acquire preliminary
data on combatants, local cultures of masculinity
and violence, what in local terms were the cultural
valences of 'laying down one’s arms' ? What threats
to security were likely to be perceived by different
local stakeholders? What could we therefore do to
minimize the likelihood of their appearance? Even
with all these insights, the diplomats reminded us,
although we had established the possibility of local
knowledge, we still had no program for action.
The cultural researcher among us
proposed waiting for the data to come in, for in his
experience, sanding the grains of culture could
yield deep cultural insights, and these might then
guide the on-ground actions of the state machinery.
We conceded that such insights might arise, but
worried that we could not leave the U.N. agencies
hanging for weeks on end without a clear
articulation about what steps we were going to take
in translating that knowledge into a program for
their action.
This is where design entered the
picture.
I proposed a data review session
where local experts and U.N. officials would both be
in attendance. I suggested that based on
sociocultural data, we might be able to identify
representatives of key stakeholder communities, and
make life-sized cut-outs of persona, articulating
elements of their particular aspirations and
concerns. Based on prior work we'd done in other
areas, I suggested an innovation workshop, wherein
the data collected could serve as stimulus for
cross-functional teams to generate and propose
different governance and program implementation
solutions, no matter how outlandish or difficult to
realize. I suggested listening sessions, wherein the
same stimulus materials would be reviewed and then
discussed by different local communities, and
feedback rendered publicly as well as reported up to
the U.N. command. We discussed ways in which
proposed solutions could be visualized as
storyboards, and means through which feedback and
commentary might be solicited from local groups,
even as the reconciliation and accountability
concepts were prioritized and evaluated for impact
and feasibility. We imagined a design team to be
continuously involved, organizing the information
collected, visualizing it, reconciling differences
of understanding and perspective among different
players, imagining new common grounds for
understanding and creative action between the
governing and the governed.
We had worked through lunch, and
as time was called, our group stood up to present to
the other five tables, each with a similarly
constituted team. Our diplomats were sufficiently
excited by the prospect of having developed a
community-centered design mechanism that they agreed
to present it to the rest of the group. There was
something very heartening about seeing U.N.
diplomats talking about ‘innovation workshops’ and
‘storyboards,’ and ‘user-feedback.’ It very nearly
gave one faith again in the international system and
the prospect that it might actually empower and
enable the beneficiaries of its global
interventions.
Once, in a very long while,
there will be an occasion at which all that you have
been doing is illuminated, organized in new terms,
given new perspective. Something like this happened
for me last week at the Glen Cove Conference on
Strategic Design and Public Policy, hosted by the
United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research.
The event proceeded from a critique of the
modularity of U.N. discourses and practices around
peace-keeping, disarmament and security, which often
failed on the ground, because these international
concepts had not been adequately translated into
local social, cultural and political terms. The
concept of security, it was repeatedly pointed out,
was meaningful only in local social and cultural
terms to different local actors. Without an
understanding of the lay of this land, securing the
peace could only operate through hit-and-trial.
The second and more trenchant
observation made by the Conference organizers was
that such local socio-cultural knowledge and
insight, acquired through ethnography and filtered
through any array of disciplinary frameworks from
the social science and humanities, while valuable
and necessary, was also proving insufficient. This
was because cultural knowledge in terms of observed
behavior and practice was being presented as
observed fact, rather than dynamic operational
opportunity. To move from local knowledge to
programmatic action was still a challenge, and this
is where Design could play a critical role. Perhaps
Design and Cultural Research and Public Policy
really do fit together, as we had demonstrated to
one another in our working group. But if so, why is
there such a disconnection between these disciplines
and practices? A brief review of their disparate
origins and development will be necessary to
understand this.
The scientific study of human
practices, belief systems, and social structures is
itself a relatively recent phenomenon, albeit with a
deep prehistory, in the form of traveler’s accounts
of foreign lands and similar writings prior to the
early nineteenth century. The acquisition of
cultural knowledge since the Age of Discovery were
motivated first by the desire to proselytize and to
save newly Christian souls and then from the need to
effectively administer European colonies in the Old
and New Worlds. If one could not have effective
knowledge of local customs, one could not create
positive law for the colonized, one of the great
gifts of European Civilization, it was often
perceived, and a common justification for colonial
intervention in the wider world. The purpose of
colonial anthropology, therefore, was in fact to
acquire just the sort of local knowledges that might
aid exogenous authorities to proceed with their
programs of on-ground action -- to secure the peace,
to promote trade, and perhaps even to promote the
welfare of the local populations.
Much had changed by the late
nineteenth century. The emerging standardization of
International trade and governance practices in
multiple colonized regions of the world, thanks in
part to the establishment of Anglo-Saxon and
international law meant that local practices,
behaviors and customs were less of an impediment in
colonial governmental processes. Anthropology was no
longer necessarily an applied science, but could be
freed up to become an academic discipline, searching
for more and more fundamental truths about the
nature of language, culture, kinship, hierarchy and
other elements of being human. Training in
Anthropology no longer led to a career, however
peripatetic or erratic, in colonial administration,
but became a disciplinary specialization to be
pursued within the academy.
The discourse of Design on the
other hand had an entirely different origin. It was
born in the Industrial Age, from the split between
the act of making an artifact, and the process of
visualizing, conceptualizing and continuously
improving it, which were hitherto conjoined in the
artisanal mode of production. Design was both a
means of enabling industry, and a means for diverse
regional cultures to adapt to its by now changed
mode of production. From the beginning of the
twentieth century, emerging conceptions of
revolution, emancipation, and anticipation for the
future found expression in the artistic, visual and
material cultures of both Fascist and Communist
avant-gardes, such as for example the Italian
Futurists, the Russian Constructivists and the
German Bauhaus schools. In that shared,
technologically-inspired and factory-fabricated
future, local cultures were no longer relevant, be
they European or otherwise. Inspired by factories
and industrial techniques of manufacture, the
discourse and practice of design was a vector for
refashioning culture in the image of industrial
modes of production. In the famous words of Le
Corbusier, for example, the house was a machine for
living, a chair was a machine for sitting, and so
forth. Designers were visionaries who had seen that
techno-industrial future, and who could lead others,
consumers as well as industrialist patrons, to
achieving it. Modernity was therefore the desirable
condition of having technologized one’s culture, of
having made it compatible with patterns of
industrial production and massified consumption that
defined modern urban life. These broad cultural and
ideological trends are what we called Modernism, and
they achieved their apotheosis in the late 1960s or
early 1970s.
Lev Manovich has pointed out
that in electronic, digital and media art and design
activities that arrived at the demise of Modernism,
the exact reverse trend is observed. If modernism
was about the technologization of culture,
innovations in the world of electronic and digital
technology involved the acculturation of machines,
the better to situate them within everyday life, for
them to create value for their users. User-Centered
Design, perhaps the dominant mode of design-thinking
at present, was born as a specific response to the
challenge of making intelligent and interactive
products, complex systems, and distributed networks
easy, intuitive and effective for everyday people.
As objects of design became more ethereal,
insubstantial and distributed, including the design
of services, the means and mechanisms of design
became more collaborative, interactive, and
collective. More and more, to be a designer means to
be able to engage in role-playing, brainstorming,
dynamic visualization and to be able to see the
world from the point of view of those quite
different from oneself.
Between the late 1970s and the
early 1990s, further theoretical trends in
Anthropology and Cultural Studies, moreover,
excoriated these disciplines for having once served
as hand-maidens to colonial governmental processes
and for having been means and mechanisms for either
exoticizing or else objectifying or otherwise
subjugating various Others. In this context, of
course, methodological and theoretical approaches
which might actually subserve either State or
corporate interests were marginalized, in favor of
approaches promoting academic autonomy, the net
consequence of which was the effective divorce
between contemporary Anthropology and the pragmatic
ends of any apparatus of power and organizational
mechanism for change in the world. Even as
contemporary thinking in Anthropology was busy
evacuating the discipline of its original
epistemological foundations, Anthropology students
were finding work as corporate ethnographers, who
observed and described the degree to which new
products, technologies and systems could be adopted
and adapted by their users.
The first major challenge to the
application of Anthropology to contemporary global
challenges is the degree of unease that most trained
Anthropologists have with the idea of using their
knowledge for Cultural Engineering or, more exactly,
Cultural Re-Engineering, which non-specialists take
for granted as the normal practice of Governance,
Development or, in fact, Business. The persistent
gulf between Anthropology and applied sciences of
all kinds that must be addressed through further
conferencing, research and perhaps through
curriculum redesign. At the Glen Cove Conference, we
did address the challenges of effecting a
conversation between Humanities and Social Science
disciplines with the applied and professional
disciplines of Law, Management, Policy, Medicine
among others, and the further remove that the
discipline of Design represented. Perhaps to a
greater extent even than other disciplines of
practice, Design relies on a live, transactional
relationship within the world: To be a designer, one
must have found a client with a problem that can be
solved with a product, no matter how hard, soft or
conceptual that product turns out to be. For
designers, acquired social, technical or industrial
knowledge must eventually be put into motion, for
the resolution of actually existing challenges, that
real people or groups of people have.
Both Design and Ethnography
require one to look at the world in a visionary way:
to see with one’s mind’s eye the subtle and hidden
relationships that are not always visible on the
surfaces, but discerned in the interaction of people
and things. To see the way things are, however, is
not precisely the same as to be able to see how they
could be. I often think of the ideal dynamic between
ethnographers and designers as akin to the heat
cycle of the internal combustion engine. For the
process to work right, we have to be able to move
from people to product and back again, but as of
now, we mostly train people to become virtuosos of
material-cultural production with an amateur or folk
knowledge of culture and social behavior. Or
conversely, we train specialists in observing
culture, who are painstakingly shy of actually
producing new cultural artifacts in the world. To
extend the metaphor of the heat cycle, this means
that the sum of Design and Anthropology can be
plotted as a line that courses back and forth
without creating an area, a polygon, corresponding
to new value. In the professional sphere, of course,
designers and ethnographers do work together to
create such value, but they must first learn one
another’s languages and ways of working.
The second major challenge,
however, must be the nebulous self-understanding and
incomplete thematic articulation of Design in its
contemporary avatar. A leading design theorist among
us at the conference presented a conception of four
orders of design, beginning with the design of two
and three-dimensional objects (‘posters and
toasters’). The third order refers to the design of
human interactions, perhaps including the artifacts,
platforms and systems that enable them. The fourth
order of design, therefore, addresses the enabling
environments, organizational logics, social networks
and institutions within which human interactions
take place.
These orders of Design have a
familiar, perhaps Platonist ring to them, for they
move from simple, hard objects-in-the-world to
artifacts of increasing complexity to more and more
abstract objects of human construction, each
supervenient to the other. Such an organization of
the diverse activities undertaken in the name of
design is comforting because it brings a kind of
abstract order to a life-universe that appears
otherwise confused and promiscuous, employing every
different kind of business model and encompassing
the entire range of human material culture, while
dynamically, moreover, evolving and updating its own
self-understanding from decade to decade.
Notwithstanding the merits of
the orders of Design approach, this classification
nevertheless disguises deep polarities among the
different orders. Thanks to its origins in processes
of industrialization and massification, including
advertising, packaging, and product styling, Design
is still often viewed as an optional appliqué upon
more essential, more core elements of the business
process. This tension divides the four orders of
design into two halves, with the ‘posters and
toasters’ on one side, and the design of human
interactions and social institutions and networks on
the other. To this extent, the word 'design' may be
considered to operate as a pair of homonyms, the
first referring to non-essential and practical
presentations or representations of the essential
object, and the second to high-order conceptual and
cognitive achievements that make possible a new
proposition in the world and which are integral and
inextricable from it. In my own experience, when
such a situation of novelty and cognitive
transformation comes about, the mind immediately
grasps that there has been an irrevocable fusion
between process and product, that something new has
been brought into the world: an in-nova-tion.
Many things were accomplished at
the Glen Cove Conference, not the least of which is
the idea that what we should mean by Design
henceforth are always its highest orders, the means
and mechanisms of transforming systems,
organizations, institutions and the enabling
environments of people, under which lower orders are
always implicitly included, in supporting roles, to
tactical ends. The words 'Strategic Design,'
therefore, may now be read as redundant, for if it
is to have any value for the worlds of Policy and
Governance, Design must always be strategic, and so
far as possible, clearly named.
At the end of the conference, a
leading scholar and practitioner of participatory
and inclusive programs in Public Health offered up a
new conception of Design as a way for different
stakeholders to articulate their distinct interests
and aspirations and for these divergent interests to
be synthesized, as well the means and mechanisms
through which diverse extant knowledges could be
organized and integrated in creating a solution. She
had long been practicing Design, but she had just
never called it that!
Endnote
The Glen Cove Conference on
Strategic Design and Public Policy was organized
through the collaboration of several different
individuals and organizations. Derek Miller and Lisa
Rudnik, associated with the United Nations Institute
for Disarmament Research (UNIDR) specialize in
International Relations and Cultural Research,
respectively. Lucy Kimball teaches Design Leadership
at the Said Business School at Oxford. Gerry
Philipsen teaches the Ethnography of Speaking at the
University of Washington, where he is also the Chair
of the Center for Local Strategies. More
comprehensive documentation of the event will become
available in due course of time from the Conference
organizers.
The Conference followed Chatham
House Rules, which proscribe the attribution of
particular points of view to named individuals. This
convention, in part, is responsible for the absence
of specific quotations in the above article, which
is an account written from my own point of view. I
take sole responsibility for the inevitable errors.
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When Twenty Minds Work as One
by Aditya Dev Sood
Last week,
I was privileged to participate in a high-level
conclave hosted by the United Nations Institute for
Disarmament Research. The agenda was to explore how
design processes might help the U.N. create programs
for action in destabilized or post-conflict regions
of the world. In attendance were senior U.N.
functionaries, international development and policy
experts, academics involved in social and cultural
research, and designers from different regions of
the world.
The meeting was remarkable for
the sophisticated understanding that was already in
evidence regarding the meaning, purpose and nature
of design. While most people in the business and
policy world may still think of design as something
to do with posters and toasters, this group was
interested not only in the design of human
interactions, but also of the organization of the
enabling environment in which people interact with
one another and with systems around them.
The meeting proceeded from the
assumption that design could assist in humanitarian
and peace-keeping efforts to the extent that it
enabled the translation of local insights or
cultural knowledge into the specifics of
programmatic action. This movement, from knowledge
to action, which may at first seem to occur
spontaneously, or in the flash of a cognitive leap,
can actually be drawn out into a series of steps or
stages, and can also be externalized, into a process
in which many persons or groups can participate.
The ways in which design
processes can accomplish this were not only
discussed at the conclave, but also instantiated in
the very sequencing and logic of the event. By
ensuring shared focus on visual artifacts, by
promoting structured forms of group interaction and
participation, by requiring groups to present the
outcomes from their collaborative interaction in a
specific sequence, design teams can help organize
diverse perspectives and kinds of knowledge and
expertise into new and unanticipated outcomes that
could not have been arrived at through mere dialogue
and debate. There is often an inductive and
intuitive dimension to design thinking, which the
right kind of design processes can marshall and
organize in a collective way, for more effective
problem solving. When this happens, all participants
will agree that the designed outcome is superior to
anything that any one individual or group had had in
mind prior to the process, yet there is no easy way
to account for how the solution came into existence.
Some kind of collective magic held sway, briefly,
and the group was able to think as one, with the
power of twenty minds working in concert.
Contrast this, for a moment,
with the way most businesses and organizations work
in India, where twenty minds and bodies wait around
for one to tell them what to do. The top-heavy,
top-down structure and functioning of our
organizations is perhaps the most important
impediment to dynamic, effective, coordinated
decision-making in India Incorporated. Where did we
learn to be this way? What can we do to unlearn it?
There are many good reasons why
Indian organizations operate top-down, an account of
which would begin from the mansabdari system to the
logic of District Collectors through to the familial
ownership patterns of listed Indian corporations.
And it is, perhaps, a decade long challenge for
Indian organizations to come to reorganize
themselves in ways that more clearly identify the
responsibilities of individuals within a team,
allowing each to own their individual
responsibilities rather than leaving their time and
effort to the command and discretion of their boss.
To allow each mind the freedom to dedicate itself to
its own specific task area is a basic prerequisite
for it to be able to work freely and collaboratively
with others. Until this happens, it will be
difficult to envision design-thinking and
organizational innovation on a sufficiently large
scale in India.
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The Question of Scale
by Aditya Dev Sood
Back when I
was in Architecture school, our professor brought in
an old-style film projector to class one day. He had
with him a short film made by the American designers
Charles and Ray Eames, called 'Powers of Ten.' The
stock was not yet grainy, though well it could have
been, for the film was made in 1968. It opens with a
family of four enjoying a picnic in a park,
whereupon the film's optic zooms out tenfold, again
and again, showing the park, the city, the state,
the continent, the whole earth, and the dark beyond
at tenfold increases of scale. And then the film
zooms back down again, to the picnicking family,
zooming back down into the man's hand, ending
finally in a visualization of a part of a carbon
atom at ten to the power of minus ten.
The film remains a visual
delight, and only grows more sublime with every year
that passes. I've had occasion to think of it again
these days, while thinking about the role of design
in relationship to things that can and cannot scale
up, tenfold in a single year for example, just like
the camera did in the Eames' movie.
Here is the thesis: Design has
to be about particularity, specificity, presence.
There is but one Rashtrapati Bhavan, and it took all
of Lutyens' and Baker's training and experience to
create it. There is but one Corbusier, and one Villa
Savoy, that best and most gem-like of his buildings.
Yes, there are many pieces of furniture, designed
for industrial manufacture since the days of the
Bauhaus, but all of them are copies of the same
Platonic original. Every copy reinforces the ideal
form of the chair, the one true design that cannot
be improved through any modification. So also,
Design must always be about discovering and
resolving the minute challenges of materiality,
form, posture, use, the critical questions that
pertain to any designed object. Design cannot be
about marketing or distribution and payments
recovery, or any other modular and repetitive
element of a scalable business model.
This idea has consoled me on
numerous occasions over the last decade, while new
Indian start-ups in software consulting and
IT-enabled services have grown exponentially year
upon year. My friend Naresh in Bangalore, himself a
major architect, has commiserated with me over many
an Old Monk and Thumbs Up. Don't worry, he would
say, we don't have that kind of IT brain -- we have
design minds!
For antithesis, let us consider
the example of Usman Haque. An architect, artist and
designer of media who lives and works in London,
Usman has been building interactive media
installations for almost two decades. His work often
required environmental and other electronic sensors
to talk to one another for those innovative media
effects to arise, so that the works could respond to
their context and to their audience. After years of
jerry-rigging balloons, doors, solar panels, and
motion sensors together again and again, he
discovered the need for a way to patch these diverse
products together through a new and common software
platform. His software product has solved this
problem once, so many others can benefit from his
efforts, and go on to create unimaginable varieties
of art, architectural, design, and service
innovations. Without really planning for it, he
suddenly finds himself at a moment of being able to
take his design solutions to impressive scale. Yet,
he has also gone from building unique media art
installations, to seeking venture capital, hiring a
Chief Technology Officer, and creating a platform
for social innovation, rather than an specific media
artifact.
What kind of synthesis can we
draw from this brief discussion? Usman's movement
from piece-meal art and design to platform-thinking
seems to me an excellent parable for the
relationship between design and innovation. Design
can be an everyday, thankless task, which must also
often be its own reward. And yet, there can come a
time, when all that effort and the array of
knowledges acquired through dealing with the
particularities of a set of problems can lead to a
new and unprecedented product, service, or business
concept. Scalability is not on designer's minds all
the time, the way it might be with venture
capitalists, but design thinking can sometimes lead
to innovations that grow tenfold and hundredfold,
well beyond the limited scale of our everyday life.
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Design and the Redressal of Social Challenges
by Aditya Dev Sood
Earlier
this afternoon, I'd had my head on my table, and was
drifting in and out of wakefulness, under the cool
embrace of the air-conditioner hovering directly
above my head. There was knocking on the door and I
dimly registered it opening slowly. Foreigner log
aaey hain, the guard said. Slowly, very slowly, I
got up and out of my chair, shook my head awake, and
went out into the conference room to greet these
unknown visitors.
Timo Backer and Johann Schorr
turned out to have a long-standing appointment with
me. They were design students at the University of
Kassel in middle Germany, and were on a global quest
to interview designers and design thinkers on their
views on something they were calling 'Social
Design.' By this term I think they meant the role of
design in reconfiguring social and interactional
relationships so as to ameliorate the human
condition. They wanted to begin audio-taping our
meeting, and so I let them, with the proviso that if
they were going to write about me, I would also have
the opportunity to write about them.
Timo and Johann embodied the
kind of earnestness, seriousness and clarity that
one only ever finds among the youth. Over the course
of their education and training in design, they had
developed the hunch that the way mainstream design
was being taught, and the way design is understood
by most people, was off in some way, from a deeper,
partially hidden truth. Where they encountered so
many of their peers toying with colors and forms and
shapes in the name of design, they felt that there
was a deeper link between design and social
responsibility and social meaning. But this intuited
link had yet to be brought to theoretical
expression, which is why they had begun their global
series of interviews.
Over several cups of tea and
nimbu-pani-s, I talked to Johann and Timo about my
own training in Architecture and Anthropology, and
in the many accidents of life that had lead to the
establishment of the Center for Knowledge Societies
almost a decade ago. I talked of Bangalore in the
days of the dotcom boom and bust, of the difficulty
of articulating an approach to technology, product
and service design back then. Of the very recent
past, when the idea that we could use information
technology to improve our own infrastructure,
governance, social and welfare services and overall
quality of life seemed a distant dream. I described
our work in areas as diverse as Color and Healthcare
and Mobile Financial Services. I explained our
processes and methodologies, how we moved from a
documentation of social phenomena to a description
of possible solutions. How we made those possible
solutions better by involving experts in innovation
workshops and then validating protoype solutions
with end users, those who will eventually use the
product.
Do people in government see the
value of design in solving social problems? I looked
back at Timo and tried to find a way to answer him.
Ten years ago this was not even on the agenda, I
began. Today, it is clear to many people that just
taking a half-baked, off-the-shelf technology
solution, and throwing it out into the landscape is
not going to work. You need to move gradually,
step-by-step, from a crude, ready to hand solution,
to a more sophisticated, contextually-appropriate
solution. Most people I talk to recognize that. What
they don't know, or are not sure of, is that the
name for that very process is the word design.
Johann and Timo represent a
whole new generation out there, in Asia and Europe
and in the Americas, who understand design in no
other way, and who are actually going to reshape the
social contours of our urban, economic, virtual,
mobile, and interactive experiences with the tools
and techniques of design.
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What Makes Designers Different?
by Aditya Dev Sood
So long as I
can remember, I was always aware that there are some
special people, who are responsible for the form and
character of all these things in the world, these
buildings, the layout of these neighborhoods, the
width of these roads. As a student, I thought it was
important to become like those people, so as to be
able to have a say in the way things are. In my
youth, I imagined that architects and designers
served as expert authorities to whose judgment
others would defer. I thought of design as the
accomplishment of grand agonistic and ecstatic
challenges: the making of the Taj Mahal, the
creation of an Eames chair, an Aldo Rossi coffee
pot, Tom Ford's new collection.
Some years ago, when I was still
establishing my practice, I was struggling to find a
credible vocabulary for color, material, texture and
form for our work. I sent out teams of designers all
around Bangalore to look for objects and artifacts
that appeared to embody that kind of
distinctiveness, which would serve as inspiration
for us. The results of that effort forever changed
our approach to design.
Mahesh, junior-most in the team,
brought back photographs of a mechanical typewriter
from the 1950s, which was still being used in a law
clerks' office. It had three parallel lines of
Sandalwood paste markings on its front and sides,
together with a red vermillion dot at each place.
Sitting right above the highest row of keys was a
postcard from the Tirupathi temple. As the
stenographer drummed at his keys, he was also always
worshiping, at a mystical altar of alphabetic and
literary meaning.
Sayalee, a senior designer,
visited a family that prided themselves on their
ability to create inventive solutions to everyday
life problems. They had taken their old rotary dial
television set and installed a new infra-red
receiver into it, which meant that they too could
experience the joys of remote channel switching.
Over the round hole left by the obsolete rotary
dial, they placed a sticker of a soccer ball,
testimony to the family's passion for the game. But
the TV still needed to be turned off at night, when
the family was already tired and lazing in bed. For
this they set up a long cable wire, stretching from
the mains of the TV set to a point right above their
bedside table. This was a television set the entire
family could take pride in, one which they would
never trade in, no matter how flat and thin and
slick the category would get in years to come.
In another field visit, we
discovered a gentle middle aged man, who had
recently had his old wedding photos remastered into
a digital album in the contemporary style. He showed
us images of his own youthful self, along with his
wife in 1985, superposed onto images from the
Meenakshi Temple in Madurai. He hadn't been able to
make that pilgrimage then, but with a few
instructions to his desktop-wallah, he had been able
to make that vision real.
These illuminating yet humbling
case studies taught us that designers are in no way
special, but that innovation, visual expressiveness
and inventiveness are in fact human fundamentals.
All of us take pride and pleasure in smarter, more
elegant ways of doing things, and it doesn't take a
credentialed designer, per se, to arrive at a better
solution. Nevertheless, designers may still have
years of training and some experience tackling
particular kinds of challenges. If they're very
lucky, they may even have some innate abilities,
visual or analytic, though of course this is never
guaranteed!
So what should designers be doing
with their professionally-acquired or inherited
abilities? My still-emerging answer is that
designers should allow decisions to emerge through
collective consensus, by being part of the
conversation, contributing to the final judgment,
without trying to be the one who actually renders
it. It is by unleashing the creativity of others
that designers can best redeem the special
opportunities and insights that they have been
given.
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The Design of Experience
by Aditya Dev Sood
After about a whole day's
driving, we finally arrived at Rainforest House. The
resort sits on the banks of the Ganga, north of
Rishikesh, just a few kilometers north of Lakshman
Jhula. The photographs of the place online were
provocative, and the place had received good
reviews. Steve, an Englishman who runs the place
with his Marathi wife, showed us to our rooms and
promised to be around in the evening, in case we
wanted anything.
We showered and changed, and then
climbed down the rocks along a stream at the edge of
the resort to the river. In the late afternoon light
we could see a pale human form doing an advanced
surya-namaskar, across the river, on the sand of the
opposite river bank. Around us there were so many
yelling and chattering river rafters in helmets and
life-jackets, many of them climbing up to a rock
out-crop to jump back into the river, several meters
down. We looked back up to the resort to see the
facade's rich colors reflected in the nether light.
Steve's wife Trupti is an architect, and the
building is her creation. A kind of Khus Green, an
Ochre yellow, and a flat, Sandstone Red, combine in
ways I've never seen before, to form a modern facade
rising a couple of stories out and up from the
rising mountain, just next to a rustling brook.
Despite all the bustle around us, the place made you
feel silent from the inside, sensible of this time,
the flowing river, the setting sun.
A simple vegetarian dinner was
served in a courtyard with low seating, partially
enclosed and partially open to the night's sky.
Steve's wide collection of Indian classical music
gave the evening rhythm and mood. We chatted with a
financier and his family, an anthropologist, and a
yoga instructor who was also interested in political
theory. Steve and Trupti floated in and out of the
social space they had created. I remember thinking
of how the soul of a resort, or any hospitality
venture, rested in the personality of its
entrepreneur. Steve's serenity anchored and
organized the feeling of this place, and allowed its
patrons to feel comfortable with themselves and with
each other.
How does one design experience?
It seems a fundamental problem, for our mind's
processes and therefore the business of the world
seems so much focused on objects, products, things.
But things only give us value, meaning and pleasure
through their experience, and this is where life
seems always to break down. For which architect can
guarantee that your house will always be full of
music and pleasant conversation?
Our lives are filled up with
increasingly intelligent objects, each of which
promises more and more complex experiences, each
designed by a consortium of technical, marketing,
and branding gurus, to capture our distracted,
wandering, attention, to fill up the stillness and
composure of our being. Their products are all very
well designed, but what of the design of our
experience?
In this intensely mediatized
life-universe, I think each of us has a new
responsibility to ourselves, to monitor and manage
our own experience. We must think and act as
designers of our own life-experience, seeking out
the right balance between signal and silence.
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In India Fashion Week, The Future of Indian Culture
by Aditya Dev Sood
The history of Delhi can be told as a series of tents. The encampments of the Turks, of Babur, of Sher Shah Suri. Our architecture is the story of shamiana-s and kanath-s turning to stone, each bamboo becoming a flute, tapestries being inlaid into walls, canopies being frozen permanently into rising, undulating domes.
So also the future of Delhi can be read from the tentage of our own times. Tents are necessary when no permanent place exists in the city for a new kind of activity, which cannot be housed in any existing architecture. This is the situation of Delhi's version of India Fashion Week, which was set up in enormous white air-conditioned tents, right on the corner of Okhla's Industrial Area. Getting in and out was the usual jhamela of uncertain car parking and security frisking, but once inside, something new, something now, about to be real, came into view.
The tent felt as large as an airport, but perhaps one from the future. Stalls are selling cappuccinos and canapes, demoing Segways, and desperately repositioning varieties of technology as fashion. Men and women of all nationalities, races and ages, are dressed like a good acid trip, all happy and smiley but bizarre, a wide spectrum of ways to be normal. The Europeans are being edged out by the Koreans these days, who seem to on to this hot new Indian thing.
Walking about the stalls of the trade show, I made notes on some of the challenges that our designers seem to be grappling with:
First, there is the legacy of the past. The courtly traditions we have inherited from Mughal and Raj durbars are a major drag on Delhi's still neo-feudal social scene. How to pep this stodginess up, without completely giving up on one's fabric, textile and sewing history? No definitive revolution can be reported yet, but the days of Indian designers serving as high-achieving Ladies Tailors are surely over. One must still do it, to keep operations alive, just as one must serve the bridal market, but that's surely not the road ahead.
Second, what do we do with the received sets of color palettes and motifs that make up India's fabric, tapestry and visual imaginaire? Here, regrettably, the answer is not new -- one must remix them, more violently and maniacally than Manish Arora, and then use them to create costumes that are familiar but dystopic.
Third, what to do with the churidar-kurta and the sari? It's all very well for retro films set in the sixties, but really now, is that what we'll be wearing in the future? I saw one woman, perhaps a buyer, walking around in a salwar held up to her shoulders with fabric tape, like a pair of dungarees or maybe an inverted parachute. Abraham and Thakore showed churidars whose crotch slung way low, around the knees, like maybe a Dr. Seuss character might wear. Payal Jain showed a memorable sari-dress, which wound around itself and clasped tight on the shoulder, to offer a modern and flowing vision that still evoked the classic female silhouettes of Raja Ravi Verma.
I'm beginning to see that there is a particular way to be Indian these days, that is cool the way American culture must have been in the early pre-dawn of its globalization, cool like Sinatra in his Rat Pack days. Achieving this kind of ineffable vibe, indefinable attitude is what Fashion is for. That's what it's trying to get out, express. Can you hear it calling?
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Fashion as a Metaphor
by Aditya Dev Sood
Your correspondent has wrangled a place in the first elevated row, just behind the backless futons reserved for buyers. The Three Quarks Daily seat is adjacent to the New Indian Express (Calcutta) and The Man (monthly). Black bleachers cascade all along on either side of the runway. There are bells suspended above one end, just above the backboard with Payal Jain's name on it. On the other end, the jostling mosh-pit of camera men in five, no six layers, like the green toy soldiers that you may remember from childhood: sniper flat on the ground, aiming and firing on one knee, mortar loader, aiming while standing, platoon leader yelling.
The lights go brighter for a moment before dimming, the music starts thumping, a thrill ripples through us all, and four models appear on the far end of the catwalk. Your correspondent has never been so aware of the dramatic tension between camera, focal length, object and field. The contemporary, globalizing fashion show, of course, is a media practice, which requires the collaboration and participation of so many players to create this sense of the new, the now, the it, which one can either be with, or else clueless about.
Payal's models are wearing hoodies and head-scarves of many designs, and occasionally smocks that look also like Iranian chadors. Her literature says that the collection is inspired by the monastaries of Laos, which God love her, is surely exotic territory for all of us. The music is vaguely Enigma, perhaps remixed by Laotian monks.
All is expectation while the model is still walking towards you, but nothing prepares you for the odd way in which she walks right on past, going on vogue the cameras, which crackle like crickets in the darkness. Notwithstanding a couple of thousand years since the natyashastra defined abhinaya, the art of communicating emotion through facial expressions, the model is a blank slate and cipher. Perhaps it all makes sense, for the point is the clothes she is wearing, not the character she is playing. If her expression means anything at all it means I have something very important to tell you, but it's slung from my hips.
As readers of this newspaper will no doubt be aware, the social life of clothing is estimated to have begun some 90,000 years ago, based on a reconstruction of the time taken for the strains of human head and body lice to have diverged from one another. This is also the point at which the first pigments, line drawings, visual representations are believed to have occurred. That was when we realized that bodies and things could adorn one another with meaning, creating socially individuated selves. And this is the eternally deferred, which is to say betrayed promise of the runway, that there is someone inhabiting that A-line smock, as opposed to a human mannequin, a professional zombie, someone who has trained herself so carefully to constrain her natural aura, to give off no scent of personhood.
The lights come on, and just like that, we're done. The models are well choreographed, the clothes were structured into several layers and variations upon one another, and the show seems a success. Payal comes out at the end to take a bow with a small smile and folds her hands, namaskar, which might be the only tell, giveaway, that this is an Indian fashion show. It is an oddly formatted dramatic experience, about as long as a sit-com, with the musicality and vividness of a music video and without breaks for advertising. There is a mood and a set of associations conveyed, with neither character nor plot. It sits like empty calories in the gut, leaving you hungry, but for something more substantial.
Payal comes from a family that has long been involved in garment exports. In the early nineties a series of billboards came up around South Delhi that announced her spring-summer collection. The idea was strange then, that some one in Delhi should proclaim themselves to be a fashion designer. For that you would have to go to New York or Paris, her classmates and cohort would have thought. Over time, though, Payal's collections have proved routinely innovative, continuously evolving, and responsive to the cultural trends and flows that have constitute India's present. Garment, Apparel and Trade Shows have meanwhile given over to Fashion Weeks and runway extravaganzas, more professionally organized by the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI), and more avidly consumed by the public through an Indian media industry that is still exploding, fragmenting and pixelating. And so, like so many of her fellows at the FDCI, Payal has moved from commodity manufacturing to intellectual property creation in a single generation. Fashion can serve us as a metaphor for the role of knowledge in the creation of value in India's still emerging economy.
Throughout the world, the proper place for high costume was once the royal court, which is why it should only make sense that Fashion in its modern avatar should come from Paris, where they first rid themselves of kings and courtiers. In the absence of titled nobility to serve, high performing houses of craft manufacture was released unto themselves, freed up to first seek out patronage, and then to promote it. In the later half of the nineteenth century, these houses organized themselves as the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, a self-governing association that could promote couture, guide growth, perpetuate scarcity, and limit competition from any new purveyors of Fashion, at least within France. In India, the FDCI was set up, just eleven years ago, as direct heir and counterpoint to the Parisian Syndicale.
One critical tool for the promotion of High Fashion houses was the Couture Parade, also invented in the late 19th century by Charles Frederick Worth, an English couturier working Paris, who had live models display an annual collection of his own designs, as distinct from the designs that might collaboratively emerge from the servicing of patrons. This shift in the pattern of creativity is central to modern fashion, for it is the taste of the designer, and not of the commissioning patron, that comes to be reflected in the suit. Now the customer may express taste by cultivating knowledge of designers and their work, leading directly to the necessity of fashion periodicals, image-making, mutual acknowledgment, in short the entire series of ricochets and reverberations, which constitute the discourse of Fashion.
 According to Fashion-maven Aparna Jain (no relation), the big three of Indian Fashion are Tarun Tahiliani, Manish Arora, and Rajesh Pratap Singh. Tahiliani has long been a major force, with modern society patrons that swear by him and see him as a living artiste who brings wonder into their life. He has shown collections for two decades now, and led the transition of Indian fashion from its sputtering starts to the steady confidence it now increasingly enjoys. The sheer volume of his annual production -- he owns a state of the art high quality production unit in Gurgaon -- means that he must cater to every segment of the market and all kinds of tastes, ranging from traditional updates to bridal finery to occasional experiments in global sophistication. Manish Arora, on the other hand, is the reigning enfant terrible of the fashion world, giddily remixing traditional motifs in acid colors, more intense than any Rajasthani or tribal costume, but ensuring enough of a field of white to Manish arora 2 appeal to global consumers seeking a taste of the new India. The acid remix of traditional India, whether in terms of street art and culture, or folk traditions, or courtly motifs is a strong trend in contemporary Indian fashion, for there is just so much stuff there, in the legacy of India's visual culture, and there is a still unsatisfied yearning to make all of it meaningful for contemporary lives and lifestyles. Rajesh Pratap Singh is a new entrant to the upper echelons of Indian fashion, and his work seems a more refined synthesis of so many different currents and themes in Indian visual culture. His stores are famous for being art installations in themselves, with screens made of tailoring scissors, or entire an entire long narrow store designed in the idiom of an Indian Railways carriage. He can do Indian alright, but he's cool about it, and tones it down a thousand while he's at it.
 Walking about the stalls of the trade show, your correspondent noted several different challenges to which designers are setting themselves. First, there is the legacy of the past. Courtly traditions from Mughal and post-Mughal states, repeated with minor variations throughout petty principalities through on up to the present are a major drag on Delhi's culture and still neo-feudal society. How to pep this stodginess up, without completely giving up on one's fabric, textile and sewing history? No definitive revolution can be reported yet, but the days of Indian designers serving as high-achieving Ladies Tailors are surely over. One must still do it, to keep operations alive, just as one must serve the bridal market, but that's surely not the road ahead.
Second, what do we do with the received sets of color palettes and motifs that make up India's fabric, tapestry and visual imaginaire? Here, regrettably, the answer is not new -- one must remix them, more violently and maniacally than Manish Arora, and then use them to create costumes that are familiar but dystopic. It is a stage we are still going through, but the light of beauty still promises to shine through the cacophony of it all.
Third, what to do with the churidar-kurta and the sari? It's all very well for retro films set in the sixties, but really now, what will we be wearing in the future? I saw one woman walking around wearing a salwar held up to her shoulders with fabric tape, like a pair of dungarees, or maybe an inverted parachute. I saw churidars whose crotch slung way low, around the knees, like maybe a Dr. Seuss character might wear. Payal herself showed a memorable sari-dress, which wound around itself and clasped tight on the shoulder, to offer a modern and flowing vision that evoked the classic female silhouettes of Raja Ravi Varma.
Outside, the lobby feels as large as an airport, but perhaps one from the future. Men and women of all nationalities, races and ages, are dressed like a good acid trip, all happy and smiley but bizarre. Bow-ties on denim shirts and thick black frames with psuedo-mohawks and other irregular accessories abound, a wide spectrum of ways to be normal. So far as the firang contingent goes, it looks to me that the Euros are being edged out by the Koreans these days, whose boutiques must be looking for this next cutting-edge corner of the fashion world. I'm slowly beginning to understand that there is a particular way to be Indian these days, that is as cool as Sinatra must have been in his Rat Pack days, cool the way American culture must have been in the pre-dawn of its globalization, and this ineffable vibe, indefinable attitude is what Indian Fashion is for. That's what it's trying to get out, express.
And maybe that's all clothes ever can ever tell us -- how you're trying to be, how I feel about that, what we can do together given what I happen to be wearing. That's what becomes possible, back in the runway of life, even if not actually in the Fashion Show.
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The Design of Invisible Things
by Aditya Dev Sood
It is that time again, when we celebrate the complex ways in which bodies and things adorn one another. I'm speaking, of course, of India Fashion Week, which began with a sputter a couple of decades ago, but has grown in complexity and seriousness to become one of the large organizing principles of Indian public life, along with Bollywood and Cricket, with whom it is often in bed. Oh, I mean that in a good way, the best way possible! I'll come back with more on Fashion Week in a fortnight, once it's actually over and done with.
For the moment, I want to ask why design is always associated with things that we can see? Let's think about industries for whom design is most important. What comes to mind? Apparel, of course, because again, this is India Fashion Week, but also Accessories, Jewelry, Watches, Handbags, Shoes... There is a lot of fashion and styling on this list! What's that you say? Mobile phones, yes, very true. The design of mobile devices has become very important. And also laptops. But also Home Media devices of all kinds, Televisions and iPod docks. And what about Washing-Machines, Refrigerators, Microwaves? The entire so-called White-Goods sector.
So let's look over this list a bit, and try to find a common thread: First of all, these are all things one could buy in a mall -- well, perhaps a high-end mall in case of the fashion items. Perhaps on account of that fact, one might say that consumers exercise some degree of control over which product they buy, from among a range of competing options. And that moment of consumer decision-making is determined by an evaluation of the maker's name and reputation, the visual appeal of the product, and its price-point. One approach to thinking about design is to say that designers are responsible for that 'visual appeal' part of selling something to a consumer.
So, a great many things on our list above are what they are -- a pair of pants that looks cool to you when you try it on, will still be cool when you wear them out. But think of something like a mobile phone, or a washing machine, anything that you have to interact with in complex ways. Here it's not just about the visual appeal of the product, but what it does or doesn't do for you. How willingly it understands and responds to your intentions. How much frustration it causes you and those around you because it doesn't understand you and you don't understand it, and instead of pleasure and ease, it is pain all around, and you swear that you will never, ever, buy Brand X again!
That design must encompass the question of how things work in relation to you is a relatively new idea, anywhere in the world. It emerged, to be sure, with the advent of complex devices like computers, whose value could only be fully realized when they could be made to interact easily with a large number of users. This newer strand of design thinking goes by many names, Usability Design, Human Factors Design, Interaction design. I prefer the long-handed User Experience Design, although I'm not rigid about it.
So next time at the mall, remember it's not all about the wow or the show, but the sweetly invisible flow, between you and the world of things in your life.
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Do You Believe in Innovation?
by Aditya Dev Sood
Hm, you wonder, what could this mean? Do I believe in air? Do I believe that innovation happens? Do I believe that more innovation should happen? Or are you asking whether I am progressive and forward-looking? Well, of course, no one wants to be left behind, so who isn't for innovation?
Let's settle, first of all, what we can possibly mean by the word 'innovation.' The word is Latin in origin, and has at its root the particle 'nova,' which simply means 'new.' As you would have already guessed, 'nova' is cognate with the Sanskrit 'nava.' Innovation, therefore, literally means to bring about newness in the world. I can't help but think, from time to time, that newness comes into the world all the time, without anyone having to work very hard for it. I think of flowering trees, of newborn babies, of the seasons, each one new in its time.
Now, there is a particular context in which we are used to hearing the word innovation these days, and it has to do with technology, with new products and services, with Research and Development activities of all kinds and the on-going integration of India's economy with the wider world. In the volatile corridors of Indian Industry, innovation is quickly becoming a strategic resource through which to advance an organization's future competitiveness. Innovation can mean a new way to the market, a new way to make things happen, a new way to create value where none was seen before. Whether on the side of consumers or business practices or the technological foundations of the economy, it looks as though everyone believes that innovation is possible and necessary, and that innovation is not only good, but actually an indispensable resource for the future.
But let's stop and think a bit about the opposite of innovation -- What would that look like? Stasis, sameness, same old same old routine. We should think not of the past, for that would be a distraction, but of the present. Imagine an unchanging present, where the ways in which we do things today are the only ways they could ever be done. Clothes that never go out of fashion. A cell phone that never becomes obsolete. A decade-old laptop that you might repair once again in Lajpat Nagar, because, you know, why pay for a new one? Somehow, that's not the world we live in anymore. Something has changed in our world, and change and innovation have become constant, dynamic features of our lives.
So who's actually in charge of generating and distributing this invaluable new resource? Who 'innovates' so you can sit back, relax, and continue to have faith in a future that will actually come around, right on time, just as promised? In the business world, it turns out, there are lots of candidates for this mantle. From market research companies to human resources consultants, from advertising companies to management consultants, there is no dearth of players out there who are earnestly and profitably selling innovation to their clients.
Within this crowd, there is one group that really has the goods on innovation, and that is designers and design firms. To truly innovate is to see the world differently than it is, and this is at the heart of what it means to design.
This is not yet conventional wisdom in the corridors of Indian Industry, but if we want to become an Innovation economy, it will be necessary, along the way, to learn how to design.
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The Drawing of Architecture
by Aditya Dev Sood
Consider the computer rendering above. It shows the roofline and courtyard of a building in some detail, including the qualities of tiling, vegetation, and varied wall finishes, as well as solar panels and other elements of building services. Its complex shadows speak of a summer's day, no later than three in the afternoon. Technically speaking, it is a masterful act of drawing architecture.
And yet, do you agree that there is something plasticky and antiseptic about the drawing? The drawing seduces you with the promise of fidelity, but fails to give you a strong sense of being there? Perhaps it doesn't help that to really be there, you'd have to be gliding thirty feet over and off the building.
Over the last year, I have become involved in the development of a small green building in New Delhi, and this has brought me back to some of the fundamental problems of Architecture: How to represent spaces in ways that the mind can understand, though the eye never sees? How to anticipate the experience of a building, and then draw out what you are thinking, so that others can understand?
Back when I was in Architecture school, computers had only just entered the classroom, and the internet was several years in the future. In that by-gone era, drawing was done by hand, with pencil and ink-pen, on mylar or butter paper, and it took up most of an Architecture student's day, coffee, and night.
It was exquisite zen torture. The blank virgin beauty of cartridge paper, capable of the most nuanced layers of pencil shading, could be forever marred in a careless moment, by your leaking 0.1 mm rotring pen. Over the course of a half-an-hour's worth of drafting, your parallel bar might nudge ever so slightly clockwise, leaving your drawing with minuscule flaws, invisible at first sight, but then irritatingly recurring, here, there, everywhere, your lack of craft so publicly on display. We were taught, gradually, to anticipate the ways in which our body's repetitive actions might smudge, pull and pucker the paper and deform the drawing. We learned to accept, limit and account for imperfection, in the pursuit of drawing excellence.
The word design derives from the French verb dessiner, to draw or sketch schematically, to design in the very act of drawing. The advent of computer-aided tools, in those early nineteen-nineties, caused many in our faculty to worry about the future of Architecture: if students did not learn to draw and compose architecture into their body, with their body, how would they bring beauty into the world?
At the time, I thought that such a view was hopelessly antiquated. No one made presentation drawings in ink and watercolor anymore. Color Xerox machines, scanners, digital cameras, plotters were all beginning to be available, and the visual freedoms they afforded -- not to mention the ability to mix both media and professional identities -- could not be resisted. Architecture was no longer the Queen of the Arts, the Discipline of the Age. That mantle was being passed on to something new, yet to be named, that dealt with Information. Like so many others, I too was tossed into ever more fluid, abstract and transient disciplines: Human-Computer Interaction, Information Design, Usability Design, User Experience Design.
But we digress, into themes and topics for other columns, on future Sundays. Suffice it to say that we are not designing the green building in the way this image was drawn. Rather, we're using whiteboards, napkins, and the marginalia of printed plans to draw, express, and understand how it will be used and how it will actually work for its future inhabitants.
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When the Shoe is on the Other's Foot
by Aditya Dev Sood
Some years ago, I was walking around the lifestyle and fashion district of Milan, when I came upon a pair of sandals. Outrageously priced, they looked to me like something straight out of a Charlton Heston movie, updated only by the deep lamp black in which they had been rendered. I was overcome by a longing that seemed to be deepened by knowing things about the provenance and meaning of this design -- these were Roman sandals, produced and worn in Italy since the times of Cicero, Asterix and Jesus. To pop them on and to walk about airports and cafes around the world seemed to me an unimaginable delight, connecting me back to Rome's historic past in a quiet but real way.
In my mind's eye I was a legionnaire, an early Christian, a movie extra. To those around me, perhaps, I was a technology consultant from Bangalore who enjoyed wearing sandals to work. Both views have their merits. You can decide for yourself, for the sandal is pictured above, on my left foot.
On my right foot, you will no doubt recognize our own proud example of sandal design, the Peshawari Chappal, which is constructed of two parallel leather straps, rising from either side of the foot and crossing over, to be clasped at the back of the ankle. It is, apparently, as ancient and elegant a design as the Roman sandal, and in many ways it is, in fact quite superior.
During these cold days of winter you can wear socks with your Peshawaris, but come summer there are enough reveals around the toe and arch to allow your foot to breathe, and lower your overall body temperature. While other kinds of sandals may be barred at Gymkhana Clubs and other post-colonial institutions, the strap at the back of the Peshawari will see you through past the rules against native sandals and other irregular garb. They look fetching with a safari suit, and complement sunglasses and men's wrist-pouch, but their main utility is to anchor a man's salwar kameez or sherwani.
They also look sturdy and menacing enough to give you the edge in the street, where they look like they would make any brother-in-law think twice, should your feet need to do the talking. In Bhogal, Lajpat Nagar, and Khan Market, what Peshawari chappals really mean is that my family got off a bloody train from Pakistan, and we haven't forgotten who we are. Back in Greater Punjab, we were landlords, and these are the shoes in which we were used to treading confidently about the lands to which we were born.
What gives mere things the power to fire our imagination this way? We do not really know, and we disguise our ignorance of this mysterious power by giving it a name, which is the word 'design.' What these two examples make clear, though, is that whatever we mean by design is also shaped by cultural knowledge, by historical memory, by regional associations.
In a world awash with rootless objects and meaningless forms, whenever we recognize design, we are also experiencing things which have been touched by human minds, and by individual or collective narratives, which give name and meaning to otherwise silent objects.
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The Truth in Wine Labels
by Aditya Dev Sood
India's wine revolution is now fully underway, with over a dozen vineyards registered north of Bangalore and about 22 outside of Nasik, north-east of Mumbai. But a decade ago, there were only two serious contenders, the vineyards of Grover and Sula, themselves young upstarts, each of them pioneers of the two emerging wine regions. Regardless of how India's many future vintages taste, what should Indian wine look like? A quick comparison of these two established labels might suggest some answers.
Grover has allowed repeated face-lifts to its premium product, La Reserve, which nowadays sports a square off-white label with gilt edging. The Grover logo and logotypes are printed in gold, as is the name of Michel Rolland, the flying French vintner, who has nurtured the Grover experiment for years. At the bottom, near the center, it is quietly inscribed, 'Wine of India,' which appears to have been reverse-translated from the original French.
At first glance, the label's composition is suggestive of classic Bordeaux wine labels. Closer up, the label looks somehow inauthentic and pro-forma. It is smooth and unyielding to the touch, the gold is too mechanically applied and the paper glossy and impersonal. The design of the label may be saying all the right things, perhaps, but not with the right accent.
The Sula bottle is emblazoned with a coy, smiling sun, whose rays dance outwards in all directions. This Bhaskara, this Surya, this Aditya has an unmistakeably Hindu mustache, twirling upward at the tav, involuting further, into a pair of question-marks. Reminiscent of royal sculpture from Gandhara through to Java, it represents masculine virtue. As if to confirm that this is indeed an Indian sun, he bears a Vaishnava sandalwood marking upon his forehead. Wine grapes are difficult to grow in India because of the higher temperatures, our scalding sun, but the Sula label seems to take this challenge head on, turning it to virtue -- for it is that last kiss of the sun that will give the Shiraz grapes their most subtle sugars, to eventually leave behind complex lingering flavors in the wine.
The label runs down the bottle, to form an elongated rectangle, which unfortunately crops some of the sun's rays. The logotype and other product details use a stylized and fun sans-serif font. The Sula label offers an informality and openness that seems positively Californian, even though the idiom and meanings are so obviously local. The label proposes a frank, modern, global way of being Indian, that remains current, even though it was likely designed a decade ago. In some sense, therefore, Sula has learned from the strategies adopted by other new wine countries -- California, Australia, Chile -- in exploring a way to create a distinctive visual identity for its wine.
Thousands of categories of products in India today face the same kind of challenge today -- how to be Indian, while creating and offering something that has never been seen in India before? How to communicate international standards of quality, while also preserving local distinction and creating distinctiveness? How to be authentic somehow, to our own emerging, changing selves? My own preferences are clear enough, yet there can be no easy answers, only honest attempts to serially, iteratively, engage the question.
What's in the bottle is suggested by what's on the label, and therein lies the promise -- or betrayal -- of the truth that is in wine. For that I've had to open these two bottles here, and give them a few minutes to breathe, before decanting them into these two identical glasses.
The Sula holds up pretty well against the La Reserve, but who really knows truth when holding wine in his glass? A toast to both vineyards, then, for this is a column not on wine, but on design.
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Design Diary / Lisbon
by Aditya Dev Sood
 I have been directed to a line that says C.P.L.P. for some reason. Most of the passengers around me are holding Brazilian passports, though a series of flags, mostly unrecognizable to me, are flashing on the LED display. The Comunidades dos Países de Língua Portuguesa, I later learn, is a radically alternative way of cutting up the planet, predicated on Portugal’s colonial heritage and historical experience of the wider world. Along with Portugal, it includes Brazil, Angola, East Timor among other member states, while also acknowledging India (because of Goa) and China (because of Macau) as associate members.
I’m here because my company, the Center for Knowledge Societies, is being showcased as one of seven design firms from around the world at a exhibit called The Pace of Design, curated by Tulga Beyerle. It is part of a design biennale festival called ExperimentaDesign, directed by Guta Moura Guedes. Without the long and pedigreed design traditions of, say, Rotterdam, Berlin or Milan, Lisbon seems a quaint location for a major European design event. But the enthusiasm of the festival’s founder and director, Guta and her dedicated team have made the festival a relaxed yet comprehensive review of what contemporary design is and what it means for the cultures of Europe and the world.
Conferencing starts at a leisurely 11.00 am in the morning, and then only when the event bus arrives or quorum is achieved, whichever is later. The most important talks are scheduled at three in the afternoon, and then they last a professorial hour, rather than the 6 minutes 40 seconds that have become de rigueur in the design world. Openings are scheduled, for ten, eleven, and later in the evening, after a series of other dinners and ceremonial events, and well past midnight we’re still early birds at the nightclub party. In India, we are so used to taking grief from foreign visitors about time and timings, that it is oddly disconcerting to find oneself in the faster lane, shuffling so as to slow down and find the rhythm of one’s hosts, which is languid, fluid, flexible, and calm as the afternoon sun.
The air in Lisbon is gentle, and the sun looks to be taking all afternoon and evening to set, showing the city’s yellow, blue, and pastel-shaded buildings in their best light. In the city center are the municipal buildings in a dirty, almost acid, yellow that could only look poetic in this peacable and becalming light.
 Perhaps following the logic of the C.P.L.P., I have been appointed agent provocateur for a panel showcasing South African design talent. Nkhensani Nkosi, one of the speakers, is wearing an elegant black body-wrap that closes with flourishing architectural collar at her neck, which frames her braided Mohawk. She speaks of her past in the theater and the role of the performing arts during the anti-apartheid struggle, but her approach to design is simple: We make people beautiful. Nkosi is a television personality in South Africa, and her label, Stoned Cherrie, channels the imagery of black politics, theater, dance and music from decades past to render a contemporary and hip sensibility to her young African customers.
 Next up, Gaby de Abreu is of Portuguese origin, and is overcome with emotion at being back in the mother country. He is the creative director of Switch Design Group, a South African creative agency that won the FIFA World Cup account for 2010. In just a few slides he shows how he came up with the intuitive and powerful imagery that will command attention around the world next year. He starts with the iconic black-and-white photograph of Pele delivering his trademark up-side-down scissor-kick goal. The African continent as a whole is energized by vertical lines of force rising up from that upside-down kick. The imagery makes a permanent association between South Africa, at the foot of Africa as a whole, with the kicking power of football, and it beautifully renders the inclusive message of the games – this is the first World Cup to be played in Africa – to encompass the whole of the continent.
I later talked with Ravi Naidoo, South African design curator of the Design Indaba Festival in Cape Town, about the state of design in his country. While it was clear that design was changing how people around the world perceived South Africa, was design doing anything to change how people actually lived in Africa? What stories could he share with me of designers showing people a better way of living? Naidoo tells me that design is about enthusiasm, and that that is the reigning zeitgeist of South Africa today. From that enthusiasm will come change. Abreu’s pan-African imagery, Nkosi’s contemporary African chic, these had never been possible before, and together with Nathan Reddy’s on-going rebranding of the country design was going to transform the country as an inclusive, multicultural creative society. Images and surfaces are important, because they can transform perceptions and lead to a better way of living.
Naidoo described how the South African economy had grown once the political poison of apartheid was removed in the mid-nineties. He compared that with India’s own growth since liberalization in 1991, and suggested that growth in the design industries was directly linked with the growth in the market as a whole. I found his theory pretty sound, and offered him one better: South Africa and India both represented countries experiencing informationalization under conditions of limited or partial industrialization. And for that reason, the disciplines of design that have flourished in both countries up until now have had more to do with the shaping of images, ideas and perhaps retail experiences than with the design and manufacture of things, they way they might do in places like Italy and China.
 China, that great industrial factory to the world, was represented at the conference through the experiences of Michael Young, who has now spent five years working as a designer in Hong Kong. Young is back this autumn to tell young Europeans how to do great work, get rich and become famous by heading East. Young is a loveable rogue of a designer who is effusive in his appreciation for the dynamism, industry and technical craftsmanship of the factories in Shekou that he has worked with. His work is a grab-bag of watches, bicycles, stools and restaurants, all of which do, indeed, showcase the abilities of Chinese factories to create an apparently endless variety of things with which to fill up the living-rooms of our mind. Design is only part of it, Young tells us – to be successful in China you have to seek out the patronage of the rich and well-connected, market effectively, provide brand-consulting advice and even help with distribution so as to better reach European markets. The designer must himself become an entrepreneur, and use his personal brand in order to accelerate the movement of product into the market.
As if in intentional counterpoint to this product-centered and brand-oriented vision of design, the afternoon panel also featured a presentation by IDEO. Leif Huff and Dario Buzzini, senior members of IDEO’s Europe offices, offered a quick history of the company’s iconic achievements before turning to the European work their office has recently handled. IDEO, of course, is famous for being the design firm that Apple commissioned to develop and test the world’s first computer mouse back in 1980, a pedigree that few existing firms can match. The company has since grown to a global strength of 580 people in offices around the world, and has broadened its focus from mainline industrial and engineering design to interaction design, organizational design, experience design. Among the many stories they shared was one about repositioning and redesigning a racing bike as a home and lifestyle accessory for everyday use. This involved not only rethinking the product form and functionalities, but also the retail and online experience of bike purchase and adoption. Designers, in this telling, become invisible to the consumer, though design now permeates the organizational intelligence of a company, defining its positioning, identity and competitive edge.
I cannot but be sympathetic to this vision, for my own company, CKS, operates in much the same way, spending time with users, understanding their needs, articulating those needs as product and service design opportunities, making prototype and concept designs, all of which ultimately serves the business interests of the client. CKS is a small and young Indian David to IDEO’s global Goliath, and we tend to focus more on lower-income and rural users of technology. Nevertheless, we are on the same end of the design industry, and open to seeing interfaces, systems, services, and other intangible relationships and experiences as appropriate objects of design. While most consumers may never know that IDEO or CKS researchers and designers had worked on the objects and systems they use, they may yet passively enjoy the relative simplicity or even pleasure in interaction that the experience might offer. None of this reticence or self-abasement is expected in the world of marquee-name designer furniture. If you have ever seen a Philippe Starck or Konstantin Grcic chair, you will know the thrill of desire and acquisitiveness, mixed with fetishistic wonder at the aura of the thing. The designed object and the personality of the designer will reinforce one another in ways that resemble high concept art..
Konstantin Grcic’s address was the highlight of the lecture series. He was not shy in comparing himself with the masters that had gone before him, Charles and Ray Eames and Marcel Brauer in particular, and yet he came off as humble and self-possessed. In precise and articulate terms, he explained how his studio worked in close coordination with production companies in northern Italy and Switzerland. He described the detailed and iterative design process his firm follows in the design of each new chair, stretching from concept to engineering, to materials to color, to finish, to tooling, to prototyping yet again. His life and work appeared as an ongoing Platonic meditation on the very form of the chair, revisiting the problem from the point of view of different materials, uses, and social contexts. Grcic lives a charmed and successful life, having gained the respect of the design community, while also enjoying substantial commercial success. But Grcic´s practice also depends on an entire ecology of participating players, from the specialized manufacturers of industrial furniture in Europe, to design critics and journalists, and design fairs and festivals like this one, as well as organized retail distribution, as can be found in Europe and the United States. His model of industrial design, conducted in formal and in formal partnership with all these players is not even available to those working in non-industrialized regions of the world.
Alice Rawsthorn, Design Editor of the International Herald Tribune, hosted an Open Talk on the Future of Design, the subject of her own forthcoming book. She identified two characteristic trends that would define the near-future of design, the first being Dematerialization. She identified the iPhone as the harbinger of our future ability to get rid of so much obsolete gadgetery, that could now be housed within the Apple device. Her second trend was design for "the other 90%," for which she provided case studies from the world of rural development with innovative field solutions that lead, for example, to more frequently washed and cleaner hands. Not discussed in Rawsthorn's panel, was the slippage between 'design' and 'designer,' between anonymous innovation and branded, signed goods, which essentially characterize design for that top 10% that lives in the formal market and in the grip of consumer capitalist messaging. To reorient the focus of design, from elite signals of social status achievement, to means and mechanisms of achieving the larger social good will require a substantial re-architecting of the entire ecology of the design world, which we should not expect to occur either spontaneously or quickly.
Our own work and process is on display at the exhibit, The Pace of Design, which finally opens at midnight. CKS is featured along with Michael Young, Konstantin Grcic, and design firms from other regions of the world, including Brazil, South Africa and the United States. Where other firms have shown as their interim or final artifact a toothbrush, a lamp, a stool, a cycle, we show a large poster of notes and post-its culled from an ideation session we held while the curator Tulga Beyerle visited our New Delhi studio. It is mildly disconcerting to hear my voice amplified and my image occasionally projected into the installation space, along with images from our studio. We had been working on service design concepts for a rural kiosk operation proposed by a large multinational technology firm, but little of that confidential imagery or content could be shown here. Still, our studio looks good in the photographs, and certainly, as I look around at other installations in the room, this is pretty good company to find oneself in.
Guta, the EXD Festival Director, is leading the Mayor of the city of Lisbon and the Minister of Culture over towards us. She introduces me to them as the designer from India whose studio is being showcased in the corner. I’ve been waiting all night, I tell them, to share the story of how my father fought in the Indian Army for the ‘liberation’ of Goa in 1960. Both gentlemen are tickled by this, and the Mayor tells me that his father is from Goa. The Minister of Culture says that it’s been fifty years, and we must move on and build new and deeper relations with India. He describes how China has made strategic use of its membership within the C.P.L.P., through Macau, to make investments into Angola and secure access to the country’s raw materials. And, of course, Brazil benefits from the C.P.L.P. in many ways as well. We all nod, and raise a toast to the coming of the new world order of design: India, China, South Africa, Brazil and Portugal: "The Other 90%!"
Conducted in whatever region of the world, under whatever regime and mode of production, to whatever degree of materiality or ethereality, design now strikes me as an intrinsically human activity, no less so than speech, sociality and art, of which it is only another complementary dimension and aspect. The discourse of design can appear abstruse and self-involved, but the celebration of design, through this festival, is ultimately an homage to our own life's energies, the crafting, crafty hand of our collective species-being, homo faber.
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