Background Paper by Poonam Bir Kasturi
This conference has been called Design with India and not
Design in India.
This is not by accident, but intentional.
Design is a powerful process that needs to be understood as a way
of seeing, doing and bringing quality to action.
India is a complex country by any standards with a diversity of
culture, practices, people, language and everything else.
So this conference is a conversation between the two.
Between Design and India.
Though Design has been in India for more than 50 years, it remains
a nebulous concept with both Business and Government. When
asked “Do you use Design?” “Yes,” they say “We use it for
branding our tourism campaign”, or “For giving form to a new
vehicle” or “For creating a new retail outlet.”
And they are using Design – but they are only using Design halfway.
The reasons for this phenomenon run deep. It is not enough for us
designers to find fault with Business and Government, and complain
about their knowledge (or lack of it) about Design, or their attitudes
about Design and designers. We must acknowledge that it is only in
the recent past that Design is being seen as a process that is beyond
functional disciplines, that it can dramatically change the quality of
action, product, and experience. It is only now being seen as
'serious business'. And this process is agonisingly slow.
“Design is .....damn it....about the purchasing department.
The training department. The finance department.
Design. About services as much as lumps. About HR and IS
department as much as about new product development.
And about $0.79 items as much as $79,000 items. Those
are the terms-of-reference with which I approach this
Very Big Idea.”
Tom Peters - Re-imagine!
So perhaps India should have explicit focus on Design at the highest
levels of Government (the PMO? the Planning Commission?)? And
every company board should have a designer on it?
My contention is that if Design has to serve the concerns of the
economy, the environment, the society and individual citizens, then
it needs government, business and public involvement. It needs to
be acknowledged and used as a powerful process to address
everyday problems we face – be it “Which transportation solutions
to adopt for the country?” or “How to educate our children?
Accepting that Design is more than just designers, we need to
address the following important question:
India’s relationship with Design
What is its current relationship?
• Design is seen primarily as a product or branding function.
(and not a strategic function)
• Design is looked at as one more discipline (and not as a way
of integrating the many disciplines).
• It is seen as a last stage, dressing up function (and not as a
common thread that runs through needs research, solution
ideation and development, marketing, re-design and so on).
• Its understanding of the ‘stakeholder’ is limited to a narrow
set – typically of ‘users’ or customers (and not as a powerful
way of understanding the needs of the multiple stakeholders
including pre-production, lifecycle impact, indirect
implications for larger society etc).
• It is largely a “Western” import (and not seen as a process
to help us find creative solutions by engaging with our own
culture, our own histories).
An example will help illustrate these points.
According to the much-acclaimed Goldman Sachs BRICs report,
India is forecast to become the third largest economy in the world,
after China and the USA, by the year 2050, overtaking all other
developed economies.
It is nice to read such reports, with visions of a grand future for our
country. The hard reality on the ground today is that the present is
full of seemingly unresolvable problems.
Depending on who I talk to these days, India today seems to have
two stories. The first story is about our reality. This is the reality of
inequity and illiteracy, of poverty and unemployment, of scarcity
and depravation. The second story is about our potential. The
potential to create economic, social, cultural and ecological wealth
for all our citizens and for the world.
Time to Unlearn – if you want to transform our destiny, we will have to change
what we teach and how we teach.
Azim H Premji, India Today Nov 27 2006
Let me talk specifically about Bangalore. Thomas Friedman put this
city on the global radar; the city has delusions of being India’s
Silicon Valley.
The roads today in Bangalore are over-crowded with cars that are
too big for them. Very often there is only one person in the car. The
‘other Bangalore’ – my gardner for example – needs to use overcrowded and
often unreliable buses to get to work. Pollution is a visible high.
Other problems like waste disposal, water availability
and usage, housing and so on all exist visibly for everyone to see
and experience. But is there a co-ordinated approach to understand
the picture, engage with all stakeholders, find, test and implement
good solutions? The answer is “No”.
The ‘business’ imperative vs the ‘India’ imperative
Let us restrict our focus to the transportation issue. Never before in
the history of this country did we have this present set of
circumstances come together in this configuration – the size of the
roads, the conditions of the roads, the number of people, the
number of companies selling the cars, the size of cars, the car-
finance companies, the fuel crises, the aspirational values of nuclear
families, the security requirements of government (each official
entourage has a number of vehicles), the lack of public
transportation vision, lack of political will to implement a public
transportation system, and the dismal management of public
systems.
Sure, the issue is complex. Maybe Design alone cannot solve the
transport problems of Bangalore. But Design can facilitate a solution
that will be bold, holistic and contextual – and most of all
‘successful’.
Finding contextual solutions is important. We can learn a lot from
how economies in other parts of the world grew, but it is downright
dangerous to think that we can import that lock, stock and barrel for
India.
While our Indian automobile manufacturers are working hard to
design Indian cars for India, it is also a fact that too many cars on
Indian city roads are choking our streets. From the car
manufacturers’ point of view, with other players flooding the market,
they would have been foolish not to have built a vehicle that could
take on that competition. So as a business the “design solution” is to
build a great vehicle in India, sell it to Indians, and do India proud!
But India as a whole also suffers as a consequence! This conflict
between the business imperative and what I call the “India
imperative” is something that we are facing in many contexts.
New problems need new approaches
India has many problems. Education, Transportation, Housing,
Water, Agriculture, Infrastructure, Technology, R & D, Economic
inequality, and so on.
Our “traditional mindsets”, market research, private-public
partnerships, induction of technology and other similar approaches
used in the past are unlikely to help solve these massive current
problems. We need to go beyond all this.
In fact it is our current predominant belief that since our growth is
going great, we can fix everything without changing the way we look
at things. This attitude can be shortsighted. To solve these problems
with sustainable solutions, we need to “unlearn.”
Design thinking is a great way to facilitate this unlearning. Design
allows the space to appreciate the contradictions and pulls in a given
premise and provides the courage to tread in areas that are risky
and uncharted. Design thinking actively encourages looking at
multiple points of view, involving conflicting stakeholders, and
generating solutions that are win-win. It uses but goes beyond the
‘specialist’ bias that other disciplines bring to the table.
The inherent momentum of the business world often ignores or
underplays the need to gain cross-disciplinary insights. Competition
and bottom line growth is a mind-set that can be positive but can
also be very limiting. And in this present time in our country, its
important to generate wealth through new means, and more
importantly wealth that will flow down to diverse components of
Indian society.
Going back to our transportation problem. Design may bring
together the following stakeholders to analyse, discuss and
brainstorm the problem – children of different ages and economic
backgrounds, a bus conductor and driver, a transport policeman, an
old lady who uses buses, the vehicle manufacturers, officials from
the municipal department, the transport ministry, truck drivers, road
cleaners, a doctor, a pavement dweller, and a roadside vendor.
Such a group, which may be ‘unusual’ or even ‘impossible’ for a
business organisation to work with (and accommodate their points of
view), will be able to explore the problem in a more comprehensive
and realistic way – and thus provide rich insights for finding
solutions that are contextual, effective and implementable. And such
a group will be very easy for Design to work with.
You may think this is unrealistic, it can’t happen, it will never
happen. Not true. It is already happening – in other countries, as
well as to a small extent in India. But we need to accelerate the
adoption of such approaches.
To do this, here are some questions that I hope this conference will
engage with:
1. How do we equip Indian decision makers with design
thinking?
Design thinking is a combination of systems thinking, ethics, ways of
seeing, doing, testing, observation, research and empathy. To
become such a thinker one needs to experience cognitive shifts and critical
inquiry. It is a result of active processes and requires
reflection, experimentation and reinterpretation. It develops the
courage to live with risk and ambiguity.
Such thinking is essential if leaders have to cope with the rapid pace
of change that we are witnessing in India today. We have reached a
state in our development as a country, where, if we become smart,
we can avoid the mistakes made by the developed world when they
were negotiating their economic growth path.
No easy task. But design pedagogy can help make this happen.
Educators and experts all over the world are now acknowledging the
efficacy of design pedagogy to help bring about transformation in
organizations and individuals – especially people in leadership
positions. How do we make this happen in India?
2. Apart from ‘practice’ what roles should Indian designers
take on?
First, designers need to evangelize Design, and may need to work a
certain % of ther time away from their practice – in areas such as
Design education, Design advocacy and so on.
Secondly, designers will need to work collaboratively on projects
that deal with larger ‘social’ issues – issues that are beyond the
‘business’ imperative but rather address the ‘India’ imperative.
For example three different business magazines recently reported on
the emerging agricultural retail sector. Their perspective, however,
was limited to the ‘business’ imperative. Designers, if they had got
involved, could have researched, suggested, ideated and clarified to
make possible the presentation of “brutal facts” in a creative
manner that allows for more effective, long term decisions to be
taken.
So perhaps some designers do need to consider including advocacy
into their practice, and to make it pay, they will need to find new
networks of collaboration.
3. How can Government and Business help bring in Design
thinking?
There are many ways. Some thoughts:
• The Government can create a new category called Design on
its already existing portal BAIF. I hope that after this
conference you will see Design listed in that left hand column
when you enter the page –Industry.
• The Government can ask design schools (and we have a lot of
them being set up today) to work on a collaborative For example three
different business magazines recently reported on
the emerging agricultural retail sector. Their perspective, however,
was limited to the ‘business’ imperative. Designers, if they had got
involved, could have researched, suggested, ideated and clarified to
make possible the presentation of “brutal facts” in a creative
manner that allows for more effective, long term decisions to be
taken.
So perhaps some designers do need to consider including advocacy
into their practice, and to make it pay, they will need to find new
networks of collaboration.
3. How can Government and Business help bring in Design
thinking?
There are many ways. Some thoughts:
• The Government can create a new category called Design on
its already existing portal BAIF. I hope that after this
conference you will see Design listed in that left hand column
when you enter the page –Industry.
• The Government can ask design schools (and we have a lot of
them being set up today) to work on a collaborative
design/innovation audit to draw out insights from the change
happening in its priority areas.
• The Government can experiment with introduction of design
thinking at different levels in its structure - clerks, lower rung
staff, middle and top management. This can be followed up by
programmes that will enable them to innovate to become more
transparent, authentic service providers to the public.
• Business can engage design services to come up with better,
more equitable, more sustainable soluions. They can definitely
stop the “silo” culture within their organizations. They can
also put pressure on Management schools to include design
thinking as part of the curriculum. For this some support needs
to be provided to faculty and the system to understand how to
teach for the fluid, fuzzy parts of design and the nitty gritty,
hard tasks of implementation of innovation.
4. How can Design help people honestly say “Proud to be
Indian”?
Many Indians today are faced with the challenge of handling the
pulls of tradition and yet belonging to the globalised world. Even the
rural household watching MTV faces this challenge.
I cherish the rich culture that I have grown in. It is painful to see
fellow Indians looking to other lands to find themselves, their skills,
their values. It is essential to nurture the ability to be able to learn
from everywhere without losing the spirit of self. Rather than be like
Singapore or China, we need to remain solidly Indian. And yet be a
part of the Global community – whose borders are getting more and
more irrelevant.
Again social scientists, businessmen, politians, artists, NGOs, and
Government need to sit across the table to find new ways of
approaching this. Design can help facilitate this.
In summary, the time is ripe to evolve and define a new relationship
between India and Design.
I hope that this Conference will be a starting point for the kind of
changes we need (and are capable of achieving) to make “Hamara
Bharat Mahaan”.
Poonam Bir Kasturi
Bangalore Dec 2006
Events:
We are endorsing:
Innovation is not just about inventing new
products and services; today it is to a greater
degree also connected with other ways of doing
business or changes in organizational structure.
Index 2007 Magazine
When New product development is discussed in
most management schools in India the IDEO
shopping cart film and the Apple i-Pod are the
favourite examples. Students are not exposed to
the great water works of Tamil Nadu and the
administration systems of Tipu Sultan. So it’s not their fault that they think this thing called
“innovation” like everything else came from
Harvard or Wharton.
This initiative is inspired by the discussions on the online forum
Leading from good to great does not mean
coming up with answers and then motivating
everyone to follow your messianic vision. It
means having the humility to grasp the fact that
you do not yet understand enough to have the
answers and then to ask the questions that will
lead to the best possible insights.
Good to Geat - Jim Collins r
Tata, M&M auto finance arms eye foreign mart. Market analysts have estimated Tata Motors to sell 300,000 units of the Rs one lakh-car during the the initial year of the launch. By 2010, one million one lakh cars are estimated to be sold in the domestic and international markets. Business Standard: June 27, 2006
Global car designers eyeing India
“With almost every global carmaker showing up on Indian roads, international car designers are coming to India to set up shop “
The Hindu Business Line: November 10, 2006
“Technology is transformed overnight; mentality takes generations to alter. Who can blame us for thinking technology will cure all that ails the workplace. It’s so much easier to acquire.” Maverick - Ricardo Semler
“What now matters is the design and delivery of value. That needs design thinking. That needs creative thinking. Judgment thinking alone is not going to be enough. Most people, in business and elsewhere, have done very well on judgment thinking. Such people are rarely aware of the need for 'design thinking'. They find it difficult to conceive that there is a whole other aspect of thinking that is different from judgment thinking. It is not that such people are complacent. It is simply that they do not know that there is another aspect to thinking.”
—Edward de Bono, Why So Stupid? How the
Human Race has Never Really Learned to Think,
2003
“Just as industrial manufacturing can create
ecological havoc, industry’s more innovative
engineers are able to dream up socially
responsible ways to solve these problems
before they occur. Like eco-friendly chemist
Michael Braungart, whose creations include
snack wrappers that dissolve into soil-
enhancing fertilizer and popsicle sticks that
harbor native plant seeds and the nutrients to
make them grow.”
“You can’t transform a group structure
without having the leadership go through some
sort of transformation” asserts Richard Barrett, author of Liberating the Corpoate Soul and creator of one of the most widely used means of assessing the level of consciousness (or ways of thinking) of an individual or culture. The way out is literally unthinkable with the iron reasoning of the corporate machine. The first step is a new way of thinking – a new consciousness or worldview that enables us to recognize how everything is interdependent and how connection to a larger purpose is critical for personal and professional success.”
Leadership does not begin just with vision. It begins with getting people to confront the brutal facts and to act on the implications”
Good to Geat- Jim Collins
“We should not underestimate the crucial
importance of leadership and design joining
forces. Our global future depends on it. We will
either design our way through the deadly
challenges of this century, or we won't make it.
For our institutions - in truth, for our civilization to survive and prosper, we must solve extremely complex problems and cope with many bewildering dilemmas. We cannot assume that, following our present path, we will simply evolve toward a better world. But we can design that better world. That is why designers need to become leaders, and why leaders need to become designers.”
—Richard Farson, Management by Design,
2000
No, those who turn good into great are
motivated by a deep creative urge and an inner
compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence
for its own sake. Those who build and
perpetuate mediocrity, in contrast, are motivated
more by the fear of being left behind.
Good to Geat - Jim Collins r
