Design With India Session

As I mentioned the other day, a couple of weeks ago, I was speaking with my friend Niti Bhan and she told me she was going to be in New York on February 5th to be part of a panel entitled Design With India. Niti asked if I'd like to come and blog about the meeting.

Let me start by asking a question: when's the last time you were at any kind of presentation, seminar or group discussion and wished it had lasted LONGER than it had?

Yeah, me too.

But that was definitely the case Monday evening. Here was a session crammed full with interesting people talking about great ideas on important subjects.

Like I said, pretty rare.

Perhaps this happened because the meeting was framed as a "strategy session." Three people made up the speakers panel:  Dr. Vishakah Desai, of the Asia Society; Bruce Nussbaum, Newsweek's Assistant Managing Editor and resident innovation  guru; and, Bunker Roy, founder of the Barefoot College, one of India's most notable social/educational institutions. Then, a distinguished group of about 20 designers, business people and others (including Niti) interested in India made up a "Resource Panel" to address the three questions that set the theme for the evening.

Those questions were:

1. What are the opportunities and challenges for collaborating in India?
2. What does India seek for itself and what roles can design play?
3. Who are the key stakeholders?

Neelam Deo, the Consul General of India, kicked off the proceedings with remarks about India's growing role in the national economy. Deo stressed India's opportunity to affect the post-industrial urban world, citing the creativity of the country's citizenry. Deo believes that TIME magazine naming "You" the Person of the Year for 2006 signals an opportunity for India's 1 billion people to blend their heritage and traditions with the web-enabled opportunities of the still emerging post-industrial world.

Bruce Nussbaum, fresh from the World Economic Forum in Davos, focused on innovating in a networked society. What's needed, Nussbaum believes, is the rare individual who can (in the words of WIPRO founder Azim Premji) "see around corners," a skill Nussbaum believes many in India possess. Citing examples from healthcare (dramatic cost reductions in cardiology and cataract surgery), telecommunication (one-cent/minute mobile calls), and rural development  (bottom of the pyramid economic growth), Nussbaum was enthusiastically optimistic about India's opportunity to bring its rich culture(s) to the rest of the world.

Members of the resource panel pointed out that India today exhibits both the best and the worst of the world concurrently. India's overwhelming poverty and underdeveloped infrastructure are challenges of massive proportions. At the same time, the opportunity to use its position as a "special place" makes India globally unique. A key question: what does India tell us about what design can be? Another: how can design thinking be applied to the legal and civil aspects of Indian life? It's clear that "constraint-driven innovation" will be put to its most stringent test on the subcontinent.

One resource panel member cited a mindboggling figure: India has more than 650,000 rural villages that appear on Google Earth. As Bunker Roy showed, those villages are repositories of untold know-how and wisdom, in everything from pottery to weaving to fabric dying.

Many residents of those villages are being forced to leave to pursue educational and economic opportunities. In India (as in places like rural Pennsylvania), leaving the village for schooling means never returning. This social migration drains the countryside of vast storehouses of human capital and condemns traditional practices to extinction as mass-produced merchandise becomes available.

Paradoxically, at the same time as respect (and markets) for hand-crafted items grows in the developed world, support and expertise for their production erodes in the developing world. The problem this present is clear: how can India "modernize" AND retain its specificity, rather than homogenizing into another consumer culture like all others?

The key, Bill Moggridge said, will be design's ability to listen; to listen to the people rather than succumb to the arrogance that plagues all too many designers who believe they know what's best for everyone; designing with rather than designing for.

In effect, India's circumstances demand a redefinition of the word, "progress." Historically, progress has entailed a moving-beyond the past, abandoning "primitive" processes in favor of more modern ones. In effect, progress has meant leaving behind the work of the hand for the work of the machine.

But India's vast rural population must be able to remain in its villages AND earn a living by using the ingenuity that has always characterized the work of survivors in difficult circumstances. Bunker Roy showed many examples of that ingenuity in the work of villagers building geodesic domes (presumed to be too "technologically advanced" to be built by "backwards" people), harvesting rainwater and producing handicrafts. These are the skills that are at risk if a traditional notion of progress guides India's future.

And, at the same time, as a resource panel member pointed out, India's 600 million middle-class citizens are working in high tech companies all over the country, poised to take their place with their social and economic counterparts in countries all around the world. This remark was a perfect example of the danger inherent in speaking of India in generalities.

There's more to say about this exciting evening, but not today. I'll return to it again soon.

Many thanks to Niti and Deborah Johnson of New York's IDSA Chapter for inviting me to this terrific event.

Comments

[Michael Wagner]

Tom - I am always so happy I get to listen in on your brain putting things together.

This post had me thinking IOWA every time I read India.

Statements like this are common among concerned leaders here - "leaving the village for schooling means never returning".

Now my mind is racing with applications for my little slice of the world.

Thanks...and keep creating great posts,
Mike

[sudhir]

Dear Tom,

Yes i wish the session was longer, I was there too as a panelist and i came from India just for this. The discussions were great. I would like to put your views on the "Designindia" egroup, this is the group where "Design with India" germinated.
Let me know if i can?

regards
Sudhir Sharma
Elephant Strategy + Design
Designindia