by Fabian Nicolay
| A gigantic campus sprouts up in the outskirts of Pune, where the MIT Institute of Design trains young designers. The students are sent to rural regions so that they recognize that “Design” is not just about boosting sales or promotion, but also a social responsibility. |
Maeer’s MIT Institute of Design is located in Loni-Kalbhor which is about an hour’s drive from downtown Pune. Appearing partly as an adventuresome framework, the unfinished constructions stand on a site spread over 25 hectares of land. This forms an enormous campus with many other institutes and faculties. Part of the construction has been already completed (and as is common in India constructions are sometimes already in need of renovation or just carelessly constructed in the first place).
The architecture comes across as retro-style – a mix of Asian and Byzantine elements. The bay, the pointed arches and the beautiful cladding make the construction look like a part of “Arabian Nights”. The “Boat House” reminds you of a maharaja’s palace that stands on a block on the waters around which columned pavilions are mounted making it appear like a blooming lotus on water. The rowing boats are kept in a mighty hall which gives off a whiff of Cambridge and Oxford.
A lot of improvisation that is contradictory to the concept of “design” dominates despite the stylistic finesse of the architecture. The conference room for example, looks like a doorkeeper’s cottage from the seventies, even though it tries to appear like an English courtroom. However, no one here perceives that these are immediate creative priorities because the surrounding society is replete with disorders that are more pertinent to address through design.
Most of the students here dream of an international career. For them design in India means to be competitive, because products that don’t look good and don’t function well, don’t sell. The MITID’s alumni has effectively already accomplished a lot with many major companies such as Mercedes, where the talent scouts have already started sighting Indian talent.
But there is also an Indian design that concentrates on social circumstances. Director Arvind Merchant and three other professors -- Deepankar Bhattacharyya (Communications Design), Sham Patil (Animations Design) and Gaurang Shah (Transportation Design), speak a little bit regretfully about the students’ attitude to want to be close to the status symbols of global design, exactly like the rest of the world. But the teachers’ duty in their opinion is to draw attention to the problems in the country and the possibilities to find a remedy through options of design. “We are always striving to uphold this idea in the institute,” says Deepankar Bhattacharyya, “but it isn’t as easy as it seems.”
| 27 recognized national languages, around 100 sub-languages and a large number of regional dialects plus the low standard of education prevent a coordinated approach across the country. Design in India is mostly a regionally functioning solution for communication. What works in Rajasthan is not understood for long in Tamil For instance, abstract symbols on shields and pictograms. They only work when they have a huge similarity to native role models. |
Therefore the students are sent for fieldwork to rural areas. They are catapulted for one week in a surrounding where they are supposed to improve the existing circumstances with the help of product ideas and optimizing. The students are made to live with the local families, eat the same food and get first hand exposure to how difficult it is to even procure the bare necessities in life. Hence the students are prohibited from taking along or using any kind of technology there. No mobiles, no laptops, no MP3 players. They are only allowed to draw.
“The students must firstly learn how the larger population in this country actually lives,” says Arvind Merchant. “They don’t know that in many cases they have arrogance towards the ordinary people in rural regions.”
He further shows a range of examples that concentrate on two major problems in India: hard manual work and hygiene conditions.
While addressing the former problem, thorough relevant fieldwork a team of MITID faculty has been able to design a traditional chipper, a shovel or hollow barrow, as ergonomically different from being optimal. This “easy on the body” device was achieved with simple creative measures. “Our shovel and chipper will be tested by people at a range of locations across Maharashtra,” says Merchant, “and the manufacturing will be taken over by the local blacksmith.”
| Devices that hundreds of millions of people - comprising mainly of women - toil with every day are ergonomically catastrophic. Whoever improves them would endlessly do a lot for the people’s health. |
The designer knows that the women are not used to complaining or questioning anything and hence adds, “We need to pose the questions.” And, the result has often been surprising. For example, after a question- answer session with one of the end users, one of the small funnels, which are meant for light digging, was also converted into a carrier for equipment.
| Ordinary employees are not used to questioning anything. The use of tools and instruments is often not inspected or monitored because for the people the tools are part of the daily routines. We need to pose questions to first even identify the problems, and then resolve them creatively. |
Another vivid example was shown to us by Gaurang Shah: The disastrous hygienic conditions of toilets in trains. “The excrement falls on the tracks and automatically even at the train station.” So the concept of a biological toilet was devised, which transforms the sewage into gas and water with the help of bacteria. As a result, nothing other than plastic bottles disposed by passengers fall onto the tracks. “That was an additional request made by the engineers, because by the first test, the rebuilt toilets had been clogged up by the used up plastic water bottles,” adds Shah.
In due course of time, four of such devices will be tested. “They don’t have to be bullet-proofed,” laughs Shah, “but ‘people approved’ and that is the harder test.”
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This article has been extracted from Neugier.de. The first volume of the cultural magazine Neugier.de was launched at Frankfurt Book Fair 2010 by renowned SPIEGEL author Henryk Broder and Dirk Maxeiner, who along with a team of journalists and photographers had stayed in Pune for two months in 2009.
For more see http://www.neugier.de/
The article was originally written in German. The English translation has been done by Kirti Kale courtesy of the Goethe-Institut, Max Mueller Bhavan, Pune. Edited for MITID blog by Jitendra Arora.