Do You Believe in Innovation?
by Aditya Dev Sood
The Drawing of Architecture
by Aditya Dev Sood
When the Shoe is on the Other's Foot
by Aditya Dev Sood
The Truth in Wine Labels
by Aditya Dev Sood
Design Diary / Lisbon
by Aditya Dev Sood |
Do You Believe in Innovation? by Aditya Dev Sood
Hm, you wonder, what could this mean? Do I believe in air? Do I believe that innovation happens? Do I believe that more innovation should happen? Or are you asking whether I am progressive and forward-looking? Well, of course, no one wants to be left behind, so who isn't for innovation?
Let's settle, first of all, what we can possibly mean by the word 'innovation.' The word is Latin in origin, and has at its root the particle 'nova,' which simply means 'new.' As you would have already guessed, 'nova' is cognate with the Sanskrit 'nava.' Innovation, therefore, literally means to bring about newness in the world. I can't help but think, from time to time, that newness comes into the world all the time, without anyone having to work very hard for it. I think of flowering trees, of newborn babies, of the seasons, each one new in its time.
Now, there is a particular context in which we are used to hearing the word innovation these days, and it has to do with technology, with new products and services, with Research and Development activities of all kinds and the on-going integration of India's economy with the wider world. In the volatile corridors of Indian Industry, innovation is quickly becoming a strategic resource through which to advance an organization's future competitiveness. Innovation can mean a new way to the market, a new way to make things happen, a new way to create value where none was seen before. Whether on the side of consumers or business practices or the technological foundations of the economy, it looks as though everyone believes that innovation is possible and necessary, and that innovation is not only good, but actually an indispensable resource for the future.
But let's stop and think a bit about the opposite of innovation -- What would that look like? Stasis, sameness, same old same old routine. We should think not of the past, for that would be a distraction, but of the present. Imagine an unchanging present, where the ways in which we do things today are the only ways they could ever be done. Clothes that never go out of fashion. A cell phone that never becomes obsolete. A decade-old laptop that you might repair once again in Lajpat Nagar, because, you know, why pay for a new one? Somehow, that's not the world we live in anymore. Something has changed in our world, and change and innovation have become constant, dynamic features of our lives.
So who's actually in charge of generating and distributing this invaluable new resource? Who 'innovates' so you can sit back, relax, and continue to have faith in a future that will actually come around, right on time, just as promised? In the business world, it turns out, there are lots of candidates for this mantle. From market research companies to human resources consultants, from advertising companies to management consultants, there is no dearth of players out there who are earnestly and profitably selling innovation to their clients.
Within this crowd, there is one group that really has the goods on innovation, and that is designers and design firms. To truly innovate is to see the world differently than it is, and this is at the heart of what it means to design.
This is not yet conventional wisdom in the corridors of Indian Industry, but if we want to become an Innovation economy, it will be necessary, along the way, to learn how to design.
Aditya Dev Sood runs the innovation consulting firm
: Center for Knowledge Societies (www.cks.in).
He can be reached at adityadevsood@gmail.com.
|
| |
Top |
| |
The Drawing of Architecture by Aditya Dev Sood
Consider the computer rendering above. It shows the roofline and courtyard of a building in some detail, including the qualities of tiling, vegetation, and varied wall finishes, as well as solar panels and other elements of building services. Its complex shadows speak of a summer's day, no later than three in the afternoon. Technically speaking, it is a masterful act of drawing architecture.
And yet, do you agree that there is something plasticky and antiseptic about the drawing? The drawing seduces you with the promise of fidelity, but fails to give you a strong sense of being there? Perhaps it doesn't help that to really be there, you'd have to be gliding thirty feet over and off the building.
Over the last year, I have become involved in the development of a small green building in New Delhi, and this has brought me back to some of the fundamental problems of Architecture: How to represent spaces in ways that the mind can understand, though the eye never sees? How to anticipate the experience of a building, and then draw out what you are thinking, so that others can understand?
Back when I was in Architecture school, computers had only just entered the classroom, and the internet was several years in the future. In that by-gone era, drawing was done by hand, with pencil and ink-pen, on mylar or butter paper, and it took up most of an Architecture student's day, coffee, and night.
It was exquisite zen torture. The blank virgin beauty of cartridge paper, capable of the most nuanced layers of pencil shading, could be forever marred in a careless moment, by your leaking 0.1 mm rotring pen. Over the course of a half-an-hour's worth of drafting, your parallel bar might nudge ever so slightly clockwise, leaving your drawing with minuscule flaws, invisible at first sight, but then irritatingly recurring, here, there, everywhere, your lack of craft so publicly on display. We were taught, gradually, to anticipate the ways in which our body's repetitive actions might smudge, pull and pucker the paper and deform the drawing. We learned to accept, limit and account for imperfection, in the pursuit of drawing excellence.
The word design derives from the French verb dessiner, to draw or sketch schematically, to design in the very act of drawing. The advent of computer-aided tools, in those early nineteen-nineties, caused many in our faculty to worry about the future of Architecture: if students did not learn to draw and compose architecture into their body, with their body, how would they bring beauty into the world?
At the time, I thought that such a view was hopelessly antiquated. No one made presentation drawings in ink and watercolor anymore. Color Xerox machines, scanners, digital cameras, plotters were all beginning to be available, and the visual freedoms they afforded -- not to mention the ability to mix both media and professional identities -- could not be resisted. Architecture was no longer the Queen of the Arts, the Discipline of the Age. That mantle was being passed on to something new, yet to be named, that dealt with Information. Like so many others, I too was tossed into ever more fluid, abstract and transient disciplines: Human-Computer Interaction, Information Design, Usability Design, User Experience Design.
But we digress, into themes and topics for other columns, on future Sundays. Suffice it to say that we are not designing the green building in the way this image was drawn. Rather, we're using whiteboards, napkins, and the marginalia of printed plans to draw, express, and understand how it will be used and how it will actually work for its future inhabitants.
Aditya Dev Sood runs the innovation consulting firm
: Center for Knowledge Societies (www.cks.in).
He can be reached at adityadevsood@gmail.com.
|
| |
|
Top |
| |
When the Shoe is on the Other's Foot by Aditya Dev Sood
Some years ago, I was walking around the lifestyle and fashion district of Milan, when I came upon a pair of sandals. Outrageously priced, they looked to me like something straight out of a Charlton Heston movie, updated only by the deep lamp black in which they had been rendered. I was overcome by a longing that seemed to be deepened by knowing things about the provenance and meaning of this design -- these were Roman sandals, produced and worn in Italy since the times of Cicero, Asterix and Jesus. To pop them on and to walk about airports and cafes around the world seemed to me an unimaginable delight, connecting me back to Rome's historic past in a quiet but real way.
In my mind's eye I was a legionnaire, an early Christian, a movie extra. To those around me, perhaps, I was a technology consultant from Bangalore who enjoyed wearing sandals to work. Both views have their merits. You can decide for yourself, for the sandal is pictured above, on my left foot.
On my right foot, you will no doubt recognize our own proud example of sandal design, the Peshawari Chappal, which is constructed of two parallel leather straps, rising from either side of the foot and crossing over, to be clasped at the back of the ankle. It is, apparently, as ancient and elegant a design as the Roman sandal, and in many ways it is, in fact quite superior.
During these cold days of winter you can wear socks with your Peshawaris, but come summer there are enough reveals around the toe and arch to allow your foot to breathe, and lower your overall body temperature. While other kinds of sandals may be barred at Gymkhana Clubs and other post-colonial institutions, the strap at the back of the Peshawari will see you through past the rules against native sandals and other irregular garb. They look fetching with a safari suit, and complement sunglasses and men's wrist-pouch, but their main utility is to anchor a man's salwar kameez or sherwani.
They also look sturdy and menacing enough to give you the edge in the street, where they look like they would make any brother-in-law think twice, should your feet need to do the talking. In Bhogal, Lajpat Nagar, and Khan Market, what Peshawari chappals really mean is that my family got off a bloody train from Pakistan, and we haven't forgotten who we are. Back in Greater Punjab, we were landlords, and these are the shoes in which we were used to treading confidently about the lands to which we were born.
What gives mere things the power to fire our imagination this way? We do not really know, and we disguise our ignorance of this mysterious power by giving it a name, which is the word 'design.' What these two examples make clear, though, is that whatever we mean by design is also shaped by cultural knowledge, by historical memory, by regional associations.
In a world awash with rootless objects and meaningless forms, whenever we recognize design, we are also experiencing things which have been touched by human minds, and by individual or collective narratives, which give name and meaning to otherwise silent objects.
Aditya Dev Sood runs the innovation consulting firm
: Center for Knowledge Societies (www.cks.in).
He can be reached at adityadevsood@gmail.com.
|
| |
|
Top |
| |
The Truth in Wine Labels
by Aditya Dev Sood
India's wine revolution is now fully underway, with over a dozen vineyards registered north of Bangalore and about 22 outside of Nasik, north-east of Mumbai. But a decade ago, there were only two serious contenders, the vineyards of Grover and Sula, themselves young upstarts, each of them pioneers of the two emerging wine regions. Regardless of how India's many future vintages taste, what should Indian wine look like? A quick comparison of these two established labels might suggest some answers.
Grover has allowed repeated face-lifts to its premium product, La Reserve, which nowadays sports a square off-white label with gilt edging. The Grover logo and logotypes are printed in gold, as is the name of Michel Rolland, the flying French vintner, who has nurtured the Grover experiment for years. At the bottom, near the center, it is quietly inscribed, 'Wine of India,' which appears to have been reverse-translated from the original French.
At first glance, the label's composition is suggestive of classic Bordeaux wine labels. Closer up, the label looks somehow inauthentic and pro-forma. It is smooth and unyielding to the touch, the gold is too mechanically applied and the paper glossy and impersonal. The design of the label may be saying all the right things, perhaps, but not with the right accent.
The Sula bottle is emblazoned with a coy, smiling sun, whose rays dance outwards in all directions. This Bhaskara, this Surya, this Aditya has an unmistakeably Hindu mustache, twirling upward at the tav, involuting further, into a pair of question-marks. Reminiscent of royal sculpture from Gandhara through to Java, it represents masculine virtue. As if to confirm that this is indeed an Indian sun, he bears a Vaishnava sandalwood marking upon his forehead. Wine grapes are difficult to grow in India because of the higher temperatures, our scalding sun, but the Sula label seems to take this challenge head on, turning it to virtue -- for it is that last kiss of the sun that will give the Shiraz grapes their most subtle sugars, to eventually leave behind complex lingering flavors in the wine.
The label runs down the bottle, to form an elongated rectangle, which unfortunately crops some of the sun's rays. The logotype and other product details use a stylized and fun sans-serif font. The Sula label offers an informality and openness that seems positively Californian, even though the idiom and meanings are so obviously local. The label proposes a frank, modern, global way of being Indian, that remains current, even though it was likely designed a decade ago. In some sense, therefore, Sula has learned from the strategies adopted by other new wine countries -- California, Australia, Chile -- in exploring a way to create a distinctive visual identity for its wine.
Thousands of categories of products in India today face the same kind of challenge today -- how to be Indian, while creating and offering something that has never been seen in India before? How to communicate international standards of quality, while also preserving local distinction and creating distinctiveness? How to be authentic somehow, to our own emerging, changing selves? My own preferences are clear enough, yet there can be no easy answers, only honest attempts to serially, iteratively, engage the question.
What's in the bottle is suggested by what's on the label, and therein lies the promise -- or betrayal -- of the truth that is in wine. For that I've had to open these two bottles here, and give them a few minutes to breathe, before decanting them into these two identical glasses.
The Sula holds up pretty well against the La Reserve, but who really knows truth when holding wine in his glass? A toast to both vineyards, then, for this is a column not on wine, but on design.
Aditya Dev Sood runs the innovation consulting firm
: Center for Knowledge Societies (www.cks.in).
He can be reached at adityadevsood@gmail.com.
|
| |
|
Top |
Design Diary / Lisbon
by Aditya Dev Sood
 I have been directed to a line that says C.P.L.P. for some reason. Most of the passengers around me are holding Brazilian passports, though a series of flags, mostly unrecognizable to me, are flashing on the LED display. The Comunidades dos Países de Língua Portuguesa, I later learn, is a radically alternative way of cutting up the planet, predicated on Portugal’s colonial heritage and historical experience of the wider world. Along with Portugal, it includes Brazil, Angola, East Timor among other member states, while also acknowledging India (because of Goa) and China (because of Macau) as associate members.
I’m here because my company, the Center for Knowledge Societies, is being showcased as one of seven design firms from around the world at a exhibit called The Pace of Design, curated by Tulga Beyerle. It is part of a design biennale festival called ExperimentaDesign, directed by Guta Moura Guedes. Without the long and pedigreed design traditions of, say, Rotterdam, Berlin or Milan, Lisbon seems a quaint location for a major European design event. But the enthusiasm of the festival’s founder and director, Guta and her dedicated team have made the festival a relaxed yet comprehensive review of what contemporary design is and what it means for the cultures of Europe and the world.
Conferencing starts at a leisurely 11.00 am in the morning, and then only when the event bus arrives or quorum is achieved, whichever is later. The most important talks are scheduled at three in the afternoon, and then they last a professorial hour, rather than the 6 minutes 40 seconds that have become de rigueur in the design world. Openings are scheduled, for ten, eleven, and later in the evening, after a series of other dinners and ceremonial events, and well past midnight we’re still early birds at the nightclub party. In India, we are so used to taking grief from foreign visitors about time and timings, that it is oddly disconcerting to find oneself in the faster lane, shuffling so as to slow down and find the rhythm of one’s hosts, which is languid, fluid, flexible, and calm as the afternoon sun.
The air in Lisbon is gentle, and the sun looks to be taking all afternoon and evening to set, showing the city’s yellow, blue, and pastel-shaded buildings in their best light. In the city center are the municipal buildings in a dirty, almost acid, yellow that could only look poetic in this peacable and becalming light.
 Perhaps following the logic of the C.P.L.P., I have been appointed agent provocateur for a panel showcasing South African design talent. Nkhensani Nkosi, one of the speakers, is wearing an elegant black body-wrap that closes with flourishing architectural collar at her neck, which frames her braided Mohawk. She speaks of her past in the theater and the role of the performing arts during the anti-apartheid struggle, but her approach to design is simple: We make people beautiful. Nkosi is a television personality in South Africa, and her label, Stoned Cherrie, channels the imagery of black politics, theater, dance and music from decades past to render a contemporary and hip sensibility to her young African customers.
Next up, Gaby de Abreu is of Portuguese origin, and is overcome with emotion at being back in the mother country. He is the creative director of Switch Design Group, a South African creative agency that won the FIFA World Cup account for 2010. In just a few slides he shows how he came up with the intuitive and powerful imagery that will command attention around the world next year. He starts with the iconic black-and-white photograph of Pele delivering his trademark up-side-down scissor-kick goal. The African continent as a whole is energized by vertical lines of force rising up from that upside-down kick. The imagery makes a permanent association between South Africa, at the foot of Africa as a whole, with the kicking power of football, and it beautifully renders the inclusive message of the games – this is the first World Cup to be played in Africa – to encompass the whole of the continent.
I later talked with Ravi Naidoo, South African design curator of the Design Indaba Festival in Cape Town, about the state of design in his country. While it was clear that design was changing how people around the world perceived South Africa, was design doing anything to change how people actually lived in Africa? What stories could he share with me of designers showing people a better way of living? Naidoo tells me that design is about enthusiasm, and that that is the reigning zeitgeist of South Africa today. From that enthusiasm will come change. Abreu’s pan-African imagery, Nkosi’s contemporary African chic, these had never been possible before, and together with Nathan Reddy’s on-going rebranding of the country design was going to transform the country as an inclusive, multicultural creative society. Images and surfaces are important, because they can transform perceptions and lead to a better way of living.
Naidoo described how the South African economy had grown once the political poison of apartheid was removed in the mid-nineties. He compared that with India’s own growth since liberalization in 1991, and suggested that growth in the design industries was directly linked with the growth in the market as a whole. I found his theory pretty sound, and offered him one better: South Africa and India both represented countries experiencing informationalization under conditions of limited or partial industrialization. And for that reason, the disciplines of design that have flourished in both countries up until now have had more to do with the shaping of images, ideas and perhaps retail experiences than with the design and manufacture of things, they way they might do in places like Italy and China.
 China, that great industrial factory to the world, was represented at the conference through the experiences of Michael Young, who has now spent five years working as a designer in Hong Kong. Young is back this autumn to tell young Europeans how to do great work, get rich and become famous by heading East. Young is a loveable rogue of a designer who is effusive in his appreciation for the dynamism, industry and technical craftsmanship of the factories in Shekou that he has worked with. His work is a grab-bag of watches, bicycles, stools and restaurants, all of which do, indeed, showcase the abilities of Chinese factories to create an apparently endless variety of things with which to fill up the living-rooms of our mind. Design is only part of it, Young tells us – to be successful in China you have to seek out the patronage of the rich and well-connected, market effectively, provide brand-consulting advice and even help with distribution so as to better reach European markets. The designer must himself become an entrepreneur, and use his personal brand in order to accelerate the movement of product into the market.
As if in intentional counterpoint to this product-centered and brand-oriented vision of design, the afternoon panel also featured a presentation by IDEO. Leif Huff and Dario Buzzini, senior members of IDEO’s Europe offices, offered a quick history of the company’s iconic achievements before turning to the European work their office has recently handled. IDEO, of course, is famous for being the design firm that Apple commissioned to develop and test the world’s first computer mouse back in 1980, a pedigree that few existing firms can match. The company has since grown to a global strength of 580 people in offices around the world, and has broadened its focus from mainline industrial and engineering design to interaction design, organizational design, experience design. Among the many stories they shared was one about repositioning and redesigning a racing bike as a home and lifestyle accessory for everyday use. This involved not only rethinking the product form and functionalities, but also the retail and online experience of bike purchase and adoption. Designers, in this telling, become invisible to the consumer, though design now permeates the organizational intelligence of a company, defining its positioning, identity and competitive edge.
I cannot but be sympathetic to this vision, for my own company, CKS, operates in much the same way, spending time with users, understanding their needs, articulating those needs as product and service design opportunities, making prototype and concept designs, all of which ultimately serves the business interests of the client. CKS is a small and young Indian David to IDEO’s global Goliath, and we tend to focus more on lower-income and rural users of technology. Nevertheless, we are on the same end of the design industry, and open to seeing interfaces, systems, services, and other intangible relationships and experiences as appropriate objects of design. While most consumers may never know that IDEO or CKS researchers and designers had worked on the objects and systems they use, they may yet passively enjoy the relative simplicity or even pleasure in interaction that the experience might offer. None of this reticence or self-abasement is expected in the world of marquee-name designer furniture. If you have ever seen a Philippe Starck or Konstantin Grcic chair, you will know the thrill of desire and acquisitiveness, mixed with fetishistic wonder at the aura of the thing. The designed object and the personality of the designer will reinforce one another in ways that resemble high concept art..
Konstantin Grcic’s address was the highlight of the lecture series. He was not shy in comparing himself with the masters that had gone before him, Charles and Ray Eames and Marcel Brauer in particular, and yet he came off as humble and self-possessed. In precise and articulate terms, he explained how his studio worked in close coordination with production companies in northern Italy and Switzerland. He described the detailed and iterative design process his firm follows in the design of each new chair, stretching from concept to engineering, to materials to color, to finish, to tooling, to prototyping yet again. His life and work appeared as an ongoing Platonic meditation on the very form of the chair, revisiting the problem from the point of view of different materials, uses, and social contexts. Grcic lives a charmed and successful life, having gained the respect of the design community, while also enjoying substantial commercial success. But Grcic´s practice also depends on an entire ecology of participating players, from the specialized manufacturers of industrial furniture in Europe, to design critics and journalists, and design fairs and festivals like this one, as well as organized retail distribution, as can be found in Europe and the United States. His model of industrial design, conducted in formal and in formal partnership with all these players is not even available to those working in non-industrialized regions of the world.
Alice Rawsthorn, Design Editor of the International Herald Tribune, hosted an Open Talk on the Future of Design, the subject of her own forthcoming book. She identified two characteristic trends that would define the near-future of design, the first being Dematerialization. She identified the iPhone as the harbinger of our future ability to get rid of so much obsolete gadgetery, that could now be housed within the Apple device. Her second trend was design for "the other 90%," for which she provided case studies from the world of rural development with innovative field solutions that lead, for example, to more frequently washed and cleaner hands. Not discussed in Rawsthorn's panel, was the slippage between 'design' and 'designer,' between anonymous innovation and branded, signed goods, which essentially characterize design for that top 10% that lives in the formal market and in the grip of consumer capitalist messaging. To reorient the focus of design, from elite signals of social status achievement, to means and mechanisms of achieving the larger social good will require a substantial re-architecting of the entire ecology of the design world, which we should not expect to occur either spontaneously or quickly.
Our own work and process is on display at the exhibit, The Pace of Design, which finally opens at midnight. CKS is featured along with Michael Young, Konstantin Grcic, and design firms from other regions of the world, including Brazil, South Africa and the United States. Where other firms have shown as their interim or final artifact a toothbrush, a lamp, a stool, a cycle, we show a large poster of notes and post-its culled from an ideation session we held while the curator Tulga Beyerle visited our New Delhi studio. It is mildly disconcerting to hear my voice amplified and my image occasionally projected into the installation space, along with images from our studio. We had been working on service design concepts for a rural kiosk operation proposed by a large multinational technology firm, but little of that confidential imagery or content could be shown here. Still, our studio looks good in the photographs, and certainly, as I look around at other installations in the room, this is pretty good company to find oneself in.
Guta, the EXD Festival Director, is leading the Mayor of the city of Lisbon and the Minister of Culture over towards us. She introduces me to them as the designer from India whose studio is being showcased in the corner. I’ve been waiting all night, I tell them, to share the story of how my father fought in the Indian Army for the ‘liberation’ of Goa in 1960. Both gentlemen are tickled by this, and the Mayor tells me that his father is from Goa. The Minister of Culture says that it’s been fifty years, and we must move on and build new and deeper relations with India. He describes how China has made strategic use of its membership within the C.P.L.P., through Macau, to make investments into Angola and secure access to the country’s raw materials. And, of course, Brazil benefits from the C.P.L.P. in many ways as well. We all nod, and raise a toast to the coming of the new world order of design: India, China, South Africa, Brazil and Portugal: "The Other 90%!"
Conducted in whatever region of the world, under whatever regime and mode of production, to whatever degree of materiality or ethereality, design now strikes me as an intrinsically human activity, no less so than speech, sociality and art, of which it is only another complementary dimension and aspect. The discourse of design can appear abstruse and self-involved, but the celebration of design, through this festival, is ultimately an homage to our own life's energies, the crafting, crafty hand of our collective species-being, homo faber.
Aditya Dev Sood runs the innovation consulting firm
: Center for Knowledge Societies (www.cks.in).
He can be reached at adityadevsood@gmail.com.
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
Top |
 |
|
