Arvind Lodaya
Ever since Harry Truman conceptualised the world as “developed” and “underdeveloped”, both “sides” uncritically accepted this formulation as valid and authentic. The economic definition of “development” was adopted and internalised by most newly-independent countries in the 20th century, and made “catching up” (with the west) a key state and institutional objective. The same happened in the case of design as well.
However, since the turn of the century, sustainability is fast capturing the world's imagination as a more appropriate developmental ideal, and social and environmental factors are being added on to and qualifying the previous economic benchmarks. Will the new paradigm of “development” and by implication design be once again driven by the north, based largely on their own reflexive norms and strategic self-interest? Or will it be challenged by alternative concepts from the south, in alliance with like-minded thinkers and practitioners in the north?
The author questions some of the supposedly universal truisms underlying design from an Indian perspective and argues for a critique, re-definition and reformulation of the linkages between design, development, culture and sustainability—a “letting go”. He concludes with the hope that such an exercise would be of tremendous value not just to the “developing world” but would contribute to the introspections of the “developed countries” as well.
This article emerged out of my wondering if we could conceptualise and if possible even catalyse a re-integration of culture, nature and spirit—by design. The title refers to the subtextual meaning of the term ‘development’, the big idea that informs our conceptions of value, meaning and identity. I will elaborate this at the end of this article.
Implicit in ‘development’ is the idea of difference, of a comparison, between two stages of existence on a linear continuum. And implicit in any comparison or difference is a shared perception of something absolute, the continuum, the truth. That is why Jan Nederveen Pieterse quotes Vaclav Havel: ‘The principle involved here is that the centre of power is identical with the centre of truth.’ (Havel 1985:25, quoted in Pieterse 2004:18)
My attempt here is to contest certain truths that we have assumed in design, and bring to your notice the important questions this raises.
Ever since Truman allegedly sliced the world into two halves, the top priority of most newly-independent countries of the 20th century, including India, was clear: under-development. The measure of development was universal, as was its appearance—the ultra-efficient, resource-abundant, high-tech lifestyles of the west.
The neo-state marshaled every possible resource to address this deficiency. Along with various forms of foreign developmental aid and assistance, design too was imported with the mandate—to help India ‘catch up’. Since design had neither the authority nor expertise to develop and execute a comprehensive strategy (it certainly lacked the perspective or courage to question the very assignment), it settled for the task of producing a set of symbolic artefacts that connoted ‘developed’. For this, it had to efface or manipulate any marker of the ‘backward’ local culture—which had to be somehow put away.
The process of development set out to right the many wrongs that prevailed in India but it also systematically and indiscriminately dismantled the self-sustaining, local and closed autonomy that pervaded India. Systemically disconnected from local ecology and economy, culture was modernized or exoticised—in either case, put into glass boxes, with price tags. The façade of development was put into place.
Despite the doubts, the generic development model prevailed, and the rapid
growth of the South East Asian ‘Tiger’ economies lent it a big shot of
confidence. Today, India and China are being cited as the exemplars of the
success of globalization—the ‘universal development’ model—but the cultural
price they are paying is not inconsiderable.
It is in response to the ‘cultural price’ of development that Bhutan redefined
its index of human, societal and national progress from Gross National Product
(GNP) to Gross National Happiness (GNH) in 2003. Bhutan’s ex-Prime Minister and
one of the chief architects of this innovation, Jigmi Y. Thinley, stated: “It
appeared that material advancement was being obtained at the cost of sprit
impoverishment” (Thinley 2005). Thailand too has commenced a re-alignment of its
policies towards enabling happiness rather than merely generating economic
growth.
It is time to question similar ‘universal truths’ underlying design such as ‘comfort/convenience’, ‘luxury’ and ‘profitability’, and counterpose alternative values like ‘continuity’, ‘non-violence’ or ‘duty’ instead, drawn from non-European cultures and non-economic perspectives. This movement can have far-reaching consequences. To modify a proposition emanating in the field of cultural studies (Dhareshwar 1998: 214), “Any attempt to describe or theorize ourselves is at the same time to construct a metatheory of western theories.” What would design be if its purpose and goals were local and contextual—and what would it tell us about so-called global design?
We’ve learnt that design is ‘problem solving’. What’s left unsaid is that the ‘problem solving’ implies someone with a problem in the first place—what we call a ‘client’. We apply our knowledge about human needs and artefacts to propose potential products to industry, and devise ways to create demand for industry’s products and services. We fail to realize that in most cases, our ‘problem solving’ often inadvertently results in ‘problem creation’, since feeding industry’s constant need for growth cannot be fulfilled in a non-wasteful and non-speculative way.
What is design, without industry? Unlike many professions, individual people wouldn’t approach a designer, because our expertise is geared towards serving corporations, even though it is based on knowing about people. The inescapable fact seems to be that design is all about proposing new products and creating demand for them.
We’ve even geared our method towards working for industry, narrowing our knowledge into a technical specialism and applying it where instructs us, leaving the rest to other specialists. We have internalized our cog-in-the-wheel role within the industrial process so deeply, that we mistake it as the inherent property of our discipline.
Traditional craft products did far more than ‘solve problems’, they rarely created new ones. Their aesthetics and economics were based on continuity and incremental change rather than high growth or disruptive innovation. Most such products were invariably sustainable. Often, they were custom-designed for the individual.
Thanks to the sustained efforts of environmentalists, industry is being forced to acknowledge the serious impact it is having on the planet. However, its response has been to co-opt eco-friendliness as the new consumerism, and it is distressing to see design following obediently. This raises the concern about the emergent paradigm of development and following it, that of design as well, once again becoming the hegemony of the wealthy nations, acting out of their own self-reflexivity and serving their own strategic interests. At the same time, entire tracts of cultural knowledge are being lost in the tradition-rich poor countries thanks to the developmental process described above, and all design has done is to help convert culture into a commodity.
Can we even conceive of design serving humanity directly, without a ‘client’ intermediary—or without turning into one? As a discipline, design is built on an extensive pragmatic understanding of touching the human spirit in harmony with nature; have we lost this body of knowledge forever?
Contemporary Indian design traces its origins to a single document, the “India Report” authored by Charles and Ray Eames at the behest of the government of India in 1958, as a series of recommendations for a training programme “to prevent the rapid deterioration of consumer goods within the country today.” In their report, the Eameses called for a transformation from traditional, unconscious, automatic decision-making to a conscious, considered and comprehensive approach. In effect, this meant a paradigm shift from the traditional to the modern-scientific.
The design that we imported, inherited and eventually inhabited originated in the modern movement. Its key tenets were a rejection of the spiritual, decorative and traditional, embracing the rational, technical and industrial. It was conceptualised in a war-torn economy, in an ideologic of war-enabled mass production. We in India embraced this and made it our own, assuming that our problems were also the same: a repressive tradition, a tattered economy, and the urgent need to feed, clothe, house and provide jobs to our masses.
However, by the time we imported modernist design, it had already turned into a style connoting luxury and good taste. And so, many of the important achievements of Indian design ended up being symbolic creations that helped the state construct an image of a modern nation—in denial of its past. This political economy has not been systematically studied, but it can empirically be traced forward to the continued service of design in helping construct an ‘India Shining’, ‘India Poised’ and other images of a modern nation that has merely appropriated its past, not come to terms with it.
One of the ways design was asked to participate in nation-building was to help modernize craft. Its track record in this regard has been reasonably successful if one looks at the numbers. But if one analyses the reality on the ground, it has successfully reduced artisans with lengthy craft ancestries to crude replicas of designers’ own industrial function: decontextualised and disempowered units of labour, applying their specific expertise mechanically and repetitively to one fragment of the industrial process. Mahatma Gandhi’s nightmare (said to have inspired Chaplin’s classic, “Modern Times”) is coming true, and design is playing a key role in this.
We’ve learnt that design involves managing the dynamic between form and function, and great design is where both seamlessly merge into a unity.
An unspoken fact whilst teaching form and function is that most modern design is undertaken in complete limbo, with very little reference to the specificity of context: our choice of materials, form, structure, colour, textures, language, symbols, mode of production, distribution and retail, mode of consumption, usage, maintenance and discarding—all these crucial and definitive decisions are taken without much thought or concern, because we assume there is a techno-economic entity between us and the end user: the infrastructure of business. In many cases, the designer does not belong to the context of what s/he is designing, nor does s/he even visit it—that is taken care of by expert intermediaries.
Most importantly, we assume that the end user is no more than a consumer, and that s/he cannot conceivably participate in the production-consumption process in any other way besides being the consumer.
In doing so, we let down our discipline severely. Each artefact we produce is in actuality a cultural object rather than a commodity, which cumulatively defines and shapes our material culture. Producing objects of culture certainly does not deserve to be undertaken with unconcern or shortsightedness.
Citing Baudrillard, Csikszentmihalyi and others, Suzan Boztepe (Boztepe 2007) says, “People often value objects not for what they do or what they are made of, but for what they signify.” This points to a less-understood and under-rated role of design – helping people make meaning of their external and internal environment. Traditional craft, due to its essentially localized context, connected people to their immediate natural environment through its materiality. The material was the sign, which was anchored in the locality.
The scientific-industrial-economic process, with design as its extension, has led to the de-linking of signs from their origins. Signs have lost their local anchorage and have become freely mobile to travel around the world. This causes the sense of loss, ennui and disconnection so many of us experience in our world, and why we enjoy the opportunity to travel into ‘unspoilt’ nature or to a ‘culture’ that is semiotically anchored to its context.
So, ‘nature’ in the product- or commodity-sense could well mean the Rocky Mountain ecosystem to a privileged Indian school child, just as it might mean the Hawaiian ecosystem to an American child. Our notion of nature is no longer connected with our own locality and existence; it is a set of competing ‘experiences’ from around the world who are trying to capture our imagination —and a chunk of our wallets!
We have allowed our deep expertise of meaning-making to get reduced to a play of signs and signification, unencumbered by context—which is much more attractive to and lucrative for industry.
The wonderful news is that despite this delinking of signs from context, source or origin, our senses, aesthetics and subjectivity still respond to natural cues. This is what Donald Norman has called our ‘visceral’ level of processing (Norman 2004:63). Even though our ‘reflective’ level supposedly controls our aesthetic judgement and decision-making, it still needs to refer to the visceral. After all, the bitterness of coffee might not be as meaningful were it not very distant from our instinctive love of sweet-tasting foods.
One common spiritual teaching in most traditions is to rediscover the instinct, and rely on it. Most alternative health traditions also emphasize the need to listen to one’s body. Agony aunts and career counselors alike urge confused people to ‘follow their heart’. ‘Instinct’ and ‘conscience’ become almost interchangeable in this regard.
There still exist, in fairly remote areas around the world, substantial pools of traditional wisdom and knowledge on living lightly, but at a high plane of subjective well-being. These are potential knowledge banks that can teach us a superior way of living. Their forms of knowledge are close to what has been called ‘Action-Knowledge’: “Action-knowledge is not knowledge about actions, but the ability to act in order to know.” (Dhareshwar 1998:218)
Dogan and Walker (2003) mention the extensive writing linking sustainability and localization. They quote Van der Ryn and Cowan, which is pertinent: “we have allowed engineering, architecture and other design disciplines to be split from the very local knowledge systems that inform them.”
Most researchers of ‘happiness’ agree (Schwarz and Strack 1999:61) that the most reliable way to measure it is by tapping the subjectivity of the subjects. In spite of the attempts to articulate design as a form of science, it remains without doubt a subjective discipline – from the points of view of both designer and the user/consumer of the designed object.
Sustainability requires a reconfiguration of our relationship with nature—certainly at the material plane, but even more at the semiotic plane. That is because as a species, we have lost our ability to read and make sense of nature in substantial measure. As stated above, the sign is no longer attached to its origin, it merely points towards it. How can the sign be re-attached to its origin?
From the “form versus function” debate, design has evolved to the understanding and creation of “experiences”. It now needs to evolve yet again, to the understanding and creation of something akin to happiness or spirituality, in ways that are intrinsically sustainable and culturally responsible. Since the output of design is culture, it needs to deeply understand it and respond to it in a careful, critical and nuanced manner. Since the materials of design are derived from and impact upon the environment, it needs to deploy these as carefully as it intervenes into culture. Since the subject of design is the human being, it needs to understand not just the physical but the emotional and spiritual aspects of the human experience and respond to it with care and respect. Bridging these three foci is the challenge before design today.
This means that design has to revisit enhancing human comfort and convenience as its primary raison d’être, and shift its focus not only to our emotional and spiritual well-being but also include earth-friendliness and cultural responsibility as its core objectives. Design must therefore expand its theory base beyond engineering, art and business, and build ties with the wellness disciplines, environmental and systems disciplines and cultural disciplines.
Wissner and Walker (2003) propose the possible new values for design as authenticity and sustainability, and quote a Ford Motor vice president suggesting that the future success of major corporations will be based on producing regional products and selling them locally.
If we conceptualise a return to locality as the new organizing principle for society, economy and culture, it automatically gets underwritten by the ecology. Seen this way, culture, ecology and spirituality can converge once again, and design can play an instrumental role in bringing them together. Interestingly, this echoes a recent call (Margolin 2007:15) for an ethics of designing, citing nature, religion and philosophy as its possible value-sources.
To conclude, both the developed and developing countries need to evolve from their own contexts their own definition and model for development. Design can play a key role in enabling this debate. Next, they need to discover proven ways of living lightly but well that exist in their own culture, and use these as springboards to conceptualise their future. Finally, they need to share their findings and ideas with other countries and co-evolve a global code of living that is plural and diverse, yet in harmony and synergy with each other, and with the environment. Design is the discipline that by definition can orchestrate such an effort and assure definite results.
The heartening news is that there is a small but significant number of design thinkers & visionaries in the north, who are leading the critique of the legacy paradigm and are excited about excavating and building upon alternative cultural knowledges. The distressing news is that there aren’t very many such initiatives and initiators in the south—their efforts, like that of their nations, appear simply unable to “let go” their single-minded agenda of “catching up”. One can only hope that this will soon change, and that an equal and inspirational alliance across national boundaries emerges, recovers the discarded wisdoms from traditional & spiritual societies, and applies it to devise shared and sustainable futures for our planet.
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