'Design' and Indian traditional village manufacturing
Project team leader: Chris Rose, University of Brighton
This project aims to enable design students to understand differential issues of globalisation and its challenges in a development context enlivened by; (a) specific field research and (b) parallel project structure with students of contemporary design working in India. It will develop greater understanding of the challenges and begin to explore practical alternatives to the ‘cultural displacement’ model of development. Information from the project will be used to facilitate collaborative work to produce and evaluate designed objects/processes based on the student’s perceptions developed from the peer group. The findings of the project, in combination with other pedagogic research, will be drawn upon to produce a model for interdisciplinary learning in a cross-cultural development setting. Preconceptions of vernacular artifacts will be challenged and a broader view of materials and design will be created with a socially constructed theme. A pilot will be produced for a larger scale funded research scheme to be proposed to the AHRC.
The Context
India is much in the news for its rapidly developing economy, which at present benefits a small minority centred on the major cities and in the associated satellite business parks on the western model. Paradoxically, it is ostensibly a secular democracy yet the majority of the population employs a visual and social culture deeply rooted in complex pre-scientific philosophies and religions that reach vivid expression in the arts. More controversial is the imperilled future of the rural majority and its long history of co-operative trade and manufacture, farming and barter. Translated geographically into the UK, the picture would be that of a 21st century technological economy in, say, Oxford Circus, whereas Watford would be a thriving Elizabethan environment. In the village environment in India, technical sophistication (generally unrecorded), compelling use of recycled and sustainable materials through necessity, and skillful manipulation of local materials are among the features of much traditionally manufactured artifacts. Paradoxically at a time when such features need to be re-envisaged and re-valued as an integral part of a future-orientated culture in contemporary design, manufacture and ownership, the localised village manufacturing culture that embodies many of these principles is most under threat from the ‘cultural displacement’ model we see at present, in which an alien business model is transplanted onto the complexities of a vernacular culture, often with disastrous effects.
The strength of the Indian diaspora in terms of mathematics, medicine and science is well known and its historical significance acknowledged by notable Western scientists (as evidenced for example in the Hunterian Collection in Glasgow.) This strength in mathematics, together with early expressions of what is now known as complexity theory, is the same thread to be found in the vernacular designs and creative expression throughout the fine and applied arts in the Karnatic region in which the project is situated, embracing music and dance as well as in the construction of material goods which is the focus of this project.
The Project
The project is intended to research, with the assistance of staff from the SRISHTI college of design, the contemporary issues of ‘development’ as perceived from inside the vernacular tradition in two local examples of manufacturing in tribal communities in the Karnatic region. The area concerned is within 30 miles of Bangalore, the “Indian Silicon Valley”. Design students attending the Indian college, and Design students here at the University of Brighton will work both separately and ‘together’ by means of video conference and information exchange facilitated by one of the “inQbate” labs and by the organisers, Chris Rose and Arvind Lodaya, ‘swapping’ student group seminars; i.e, Lodaya in Brighton and Rose in Bangalore with ‘each others’ students for a developmental segment of the project. In this way a similar project will run in parallel in each School and the process and results critically compared. An innovative feature of the proposed plan from the students perspective, is that the project structure is designed to encourage emergent perceptions from within the peer group and then develop designs informed by these. This approach contrasts with the more conventional one in which difficult challenges are delivered in a top-down manner to student group in a conventional briefing activity. Students from Srishti and Brighton have both encountered this emergent model within the creative seminar-workshops carried out by Rose in both institutions in ’06 – 07.
Reports
