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First anniversary special 60 processes, protocols, and the practice of design in India.

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Innowin April-June 201480

first anniversary special desIgn educAtIon

Teaching innovation in design schools today is about embracing a compelling shift in worldview and practices to be more human-centred, exploratory and sustainable. Soumitra Bhat tells us that to appreciate why the shift is necessary, we need to understand what design and innovation have come to mean historically, and the challenges today that design-innovation needs to respond to.

design is an ubiquitous activity as old as humanity itself—perhaps older if we discover instances of intentional tool use in species that preceded humans. Like any other activity that has continuously survived through as many millennia—such as eating, sleeping and

foraging—the activity of design has undergone transformation in response to the conditions afforded by the larger socio-economic context. Here, I define design activity in general terms as an act of synthesising forms, shapes, materials, meanings, spaces, words, rules and norms into four-dimensional (3-d space and time) artefacts—the interaction with which leads humans to move from a problematic situation to a situation where the problem is resolved. or, in other words, a car, a logo, a suit, a temple, Facebook, the constitution of India, a court of law, democracy, and the companies Act, 2013 are all four-dimensional artefacts of design meant to resolve human problems.

What is innovation?Whether something is innovative is a relative judgement on the ‘goodness’ of a design artefact. Innovation compares the human’s interaction with the design artefact, historically and categorically, to say whether the design artefact provides a positive difference in value (‘value-add’) to the human when compared to the value afforded by all the historical precedents of the artefact, and/or all the artefacts sharing its category. For instance, the mobile phone today provides more value for personal telecommunication to consumers in rural India than

Soumitra Bhat, Innovation Manager, Indian School of Design and Innovation-Parsons Mumbai.

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any other type of phone that preceded it, and any other type of personal telecommunication solution that exists today. thus, the mobile phone is an artefact of innovation from the perspective of consumers in rural India, and it definitely is also a design artefact. However, the reverse is naturally not true. one may have several designs of chairs, but they might not qualify as innovations as they might not provide any positive difference in value from the experience with chairs that have been.

Design in the industrial ageIn the pre-industrial age, millions of people did not have cheap, standard utensils; but when such utensils became available suddenly due to industrial development, they were happy. there was a dramatic increase in individual and overall well-being. Product after product became affordable, accessible and aesthetically pleasing. the ideas of capitalism (separating producers from consumers) and the division of labour that fuelled the Industrial Revolution were working fantastically well to improve the lives of people. It was easy to experience the value-add, and therefore see design and innovation as aligned forces. However, with production lines becoming more product- and even design-specific, these same ideas put designers in inaccessible silos along the assembly line, and made it inefficient and expensive for them to access information on a continuous basis about the changing needs of consumers and what would improve their lives further. Production technology was still expensive and time-consuming for small batch runs. the emphasis driving design was on getting it right the first time and at minimum cost. those few who could do that became famous as illustrious masters of design.

The post-industrial splitthe other majority of designers, in the absence of meaningful access to end users, did the only thing that they could: they referenced the models of human functioning of those times—from cognitive psychology, ergonomics, etc.—to codify principles that would guide good design. these principles became the backbone of design education

Innowin April-June 201482

first anniversary special desIgn educAtIon

when the first formal schools of industrial design were established, right till the end of the 20th century. designers adopted these principles as a means to achieve the implied ‘perfect’ design consistently and efficiently. In reality, this approach worked only till society reached the post-industrial point where to improve well-being further with just first principles was very difficult. As the needs of people evolved beyond those for survival, comfort and convenience, people began wanting uniqueness, and subtle value-add. However, without access to consumers, designers responded by creating a great magnitude of choice, but no real value-add. that’s how we got great walls of detergent in super markets with no real differentiation. that’s how we also killed the environment.

Design challenge Aristotle, in his treatise on ethics, theorised that the search for ‘good life’ is the ultimate motivation behind human action. today, due to the evolution of empirical theories of human behaviour, we know more about what makes people live well. We know that humans are hard-wired to seek well-being in the choices that we make. However, we do not have an absolute measure of personal well-being.

Instead, we perceive—much like innovation—the positive difference in well-being when compared historically and categorically. As we become happier, we become harder to please! to add to the complexity, we are not very good at evaluating pay-offs from our choices, especially if those choices involve processing complex or incomplete information, with their impact being perceptible only in the not-so-near future. We often do something that gives us immediate gratification, only to regret that decision (years) later.

today, there is a need for designers to design artefacts that provide value in this final mile of well-being: when it is increasingly difficult to know what makes people happy, and people themselves don’t know what is good for them. there is also a great sense of responsibility towards the environment that needs to reflect in the way we design and the choices we promote for people. the challenge today is for designers to transform themselves and to train new designers to be able to function in this new context.

Design-innovationthe response to this challenge is the integrated design-innovation worldview. this worldview seeks human well-being by making innovation the product of design activity. It aims for the

The challenge today is for designers to transform themselves and to train new designers to be able to function in this new context.

A foundation in design being built by exploring the fundamentals and principles of form, colour, and composition.

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intentional design of artefacts that demonstrate historical and categorical value-add. often such products get termed as disruptive because they help create new markets, and value networks, eventually disrupting existing markets and value networks.

the design-innovation worldview is associated with three key behaviours:

Bringing users into the design process: Leg guards for the safety of batsmen in cricket have been the same for years: bulky, awkward, but safe. so when Moonwalkr decided to disrupt the leg guard, they worked with professional batsmen to identify opportunities for innovation. they realised that leg guards had always been designed for safety at the cost of mobility, but for batsmen, mobility was more important for running between the wickets. With this insight, they developed ways to enhance mobility first, and tackle safety later. This resulted in the first-ever composite leg guard that is strong, slim and ultra-light.

Bringing the future into the present: elon Musk, ceo of tesla Motors, believes that for the future to be sustainable, the world needs to switch from fossil fuels to electricity as the primary source of energy for transportation. However, technology behind electric vehicles was very expensive and the infrastructure for electric cars was poor. this stopped electric cars from being adopted by the masses. Musk knew that to drive adoption, he would have to bring down the cost of the car drastically, and create enabling systems around electric transportation. He also knew that for being chosen by consumers, the car had to be competitive in its category and provide real differentiated value to consumers. these and

other ideas culminated in tesla Motors releasing Model s—the world’s first premium electric sedan—selling more than 25,000 units globally in 2013.

Systematic exploration and experimentation: Before releasing the disruptive and highly successful bagless dyson vacuum cleaner, James Dyson made 5,126 prototypes that failed over 15 years before finding the 5,127th that worked. Dyson believes that it is essential to fail constructively several times especially if one wants to discover something that other people haven’t. His latest innovation, a hand dryer that uses neither heat nor evaporation took only three years, but dyson says his grinding, error-filled approach hasn't changed.

Integration in design educationteaching innovation in design schools must involve the cultivation of this design-innovation worldview and the promotion of the three key behaviours associated with it within design students. these behaviours, which were challenging to perform till very recently, are now facilitated by developments unique to the present context—plunging costs and increase in accessibility of production technology making it easy to experiment and explore; product development teams who are increasingly decentralised and have greater, direct access to consumers; development of better ways to capture and analyse experimental data; and a deeper understanding of complexity and systems thinking. However, despite the opportunities presented by these developments, the biggest challenge for design education will lie in overcoming ideological inertia to embrace this design-innovation worldview. Feedback: innowin@spentamultimedia.com

Reimagining the future of primary education for a project. Students working with consumers to get early feedback on their ideas for a novel self-service kiosk.

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