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	The Parable of Metatechnology The Layman In Visible Cities On the Need for User-Centered Governance Innovation What India’s New Symbol for the Rupee Means The Techno-Future and Pre-History of Toes Towards a Post-Human Manifesto On the Creative Powers of Our Mind At the Intersections of Design, Ethnography and Global Governance When Twenty Minds Work as One The Question of Scale Design and the Redressal of Social Challenges What Makes Designers Different? The Design of Experience In India Fashion Week, The Future of Indian Culture Fashion as a Metaphor The Design of Invisible Things Do You Believe in Innovation? The Drawing of Architecture When the Shoe is on the Other's Foot The Truth in Wine Labels Design Diary / Lisbon   The Parable of Metatechnology by Aditya Dev Sood Last night I had a dream so vivid it can only be called a vision. Its specificity and purpose seem also to demand a name, and so I shall call it The Parable of Metatechnology. I dreamt of a Hungarian technocrat and polymath from the late 1800s, whose name is too complicated to remember. He had helped design many of the bridges that crisscross the Danube, interconnecting Buda and Pest, and so creating the twin-city of Budapest. He had consulted on the design of the city's underground railway, only the second in the world after London, and the only one on the Continent. In addition to his Engineering practice, He had a scholarly career in the field of Descriptive Geometry, so he was a kind of mathematician. He was an amateur linguist, and toyed with representing sentences in a simplified code -- he was a kind of programmer, long before there was something called software. Right around the end of the ninteenth century, his milieu, the city as a whole, was trying to figure out how to advance the pace of its technological development, how to ensure that Budapest would become the center of the twentieth century. He had a vague notion, a hunch, that there might be something beyond technology, which if it could be discovered, unlocked, unleashed, could predict the now uncertain pattern of the unfolding of technology. Just as two dimensional spaces can be projected into three, and as three can be projected into four and more, perhaps a modeling of metatechnology would allow him to resolve the technology layer through which his city was passing.   He asked for funds, of course. He set up his laboratory on one of the empty hilltops across the Danube, on the Buda side. From his window, he could see the last of his bridges being completed over the glistening Danube. His bright young assistants projected each of the known sciences and applied disciplines onto the other, struggling mightily to generate a unifying theory, trying to map this new field of metatechnology. The years passed quickly, but by the time the Archduke was assassinated there had been a few conferences and some papers circulated, but still no breakthrough. Metatechnology was proving to be a big failure. Perhaps as a result, the twentieth century was not kind to Budapest: wracked by two world wars and then shackled by the cold war, the city is now still struggling to find its feet within the EU. Why did the Hungarian polymath fail? Why can't there be something like metatechnology? A moment's introspection will suggest to you that perhaps technology is a hybrid and complex thing, made up of culture and materiality, science and commerce, design and commodity. And so there may never be something higher or lower than technology, but only two surfaces folding over and over and over each other, again and again. To aspire to go somewhere above and beyond technology is to go beyond the conceptual and cognitive powers of human societies. Still, the dream of metatechnology is a common collective fantasy, and it has migrated like a virus to different cities around the world: Shanghai 1990, Bangalore 1999, Sao Paolo 2014. In the grip of a particular wave of technology, the city forgets itself and remakes itself in the image of a particular, fleeting configuration of people and their systems, often acquired from someplace else. The form of that logic is stamped all over the city, but its underlying cultural, creative, and entrepreneurial energies are never really understood. In these contemporary times we do not talk of metatechnology, but rather use the word ‘innovation’ to refer to the process of creating new technologies, new ways for matter and meaning to be configured. Innovation is that holy grail which is common to the discourses of business, management, policy and governance, though it remains as mysterious to its seekers today as it was for the Hungarian polymath from the last century. This is because it resides not beyond the different realms of human activity, but as a resonance and harmonization of them, a flow state in which a society can experience being and becoming at the same time. Top The Layman by Aditya Dev Sood Brownian motion at a macro-scale. That's what my working week feels like these days. On Monday I flew from Delhi to Ahmedabad, the next day to Bangalore, a couple of days later to Patna via Calcutta. And now, after a tense hour's delay in Patna, while this decrepit Air-India plane was late arriving into that one-room box of an airport, we're finally off and away. We'll land in Delhi with just the right sliver of time for me to catch the only direct flight to Goa today. We'll be going for a friend's 40th birthday bash on the beach this holiday weekend. There's hardly anyone on the flight, but they've bunched us up in some artificial pattern near the middle of the fuselage. The whole thing is like a too-vivid dream from my childhood, from the yucky yellow-orange of the seats to the squat, curvy stewardesses in saris that remind me of my teachers in elementary school. They're coming around now with a meal cart. Sir, veg or non-veg for your breakfast? shakahari, the guy next to me says, and then leans over me to receive his tray with shaking, uncertain hands. I'm thinking I'll have the parantha-s as well. How does one open this, he asks me, holding up the micro-package of jam. I demonstrate by separating the aluminum layer from the plastic layer of my own packet and slowly pulling them apart. He's still going at it several times before I offer him my own packet. Now he's got the same problem with the butter serving, but instead of struggling with it he just offers it to me to open for him. I go back to my parantha-s, when a few minutes later he offers me his ketchup packet. I put my parantha down, wipe my greasy fingers and try to find the entry tear in the packet. The slit I'm making curves away from the pulpy body of the packet towards its edge, making no wound in the sac of ketchup. I hand it back to him wearily, knowing I won't be able to do any better. nahin hua bhai, kya karen? He puts it back down on his tray despondently. Now he turns to me holding up the fruit cup, and I'm wondering if he's for real. I mean it's just a plastic airplane service cup, aged and flecked and speaking of that misplaced parsimony that only Air-India still excels in, but elegantly taped up all round with saran-wrap. iska kya hai, bus phad dijiye, I tell him. He looks at the object like its form, meaning and logic are only now becoming clear to him, his mind is reading it, and his whole body nods, yes yes, I can just tear the plastic and get to the fruit inside! I've never been on a plane before, the man is saying, perhaps to explain his befuddledness, perhaps for sympathy. You know, I am just like a layman, an innocent one. This morning, early morning my son called from Delhi, he said Bapuji please you must come to Delhi. He had forgotten his passport and my wife's passport as well. From Delhi itself he had organized the ticket and sent me the number on my mobile phone. So I went to the airport and there they just gave me a ticket. Is he leaving today itself? Does he need it to get a visa? Now, I don't know why he needs it, but it must be urgent, that's why he called me. Today I just go to Delhi and then come back again in the evening. So much expense, but it must be urgent, that's why he called me. He is a doctor in New York. And my daughter is married into a family in New Delhi. But I have a simple life. As I went through the security checking the guard said to me, why old-timer, you've got a knife on you? I said no, really, I have no knife, but I showed him this -- now he pulls out a janeyu, his sacred thread, from under his shirt which to which he's tied a key. If you call this a knife how can I take it? This is my house key. I had to lock everything up this morning after my son called. In any case I was all alone, he's convinced his mother to with him to New York. My gold and silver, the jewelry, they're in a bank locker, so that's safe. We have three hundred and fifty bigha-s of land, and mostly our servants are trustworthy, reliable. But there are bandits, dacoits, you can't be too safe. I've been going on quite a bit -- what is it that you do? Well, I say, I am an architect, of things like mobile phones Oh, so you must be a very high officer! Things have deteriorated in Bihar, you know, despite all the propaganda. Nitish Kumar says he's brought about development, but I say it's only maintenance. He is only maintaining the things in the state they are. Bihar had gone backwards under Laloo, but now the corruption is all out of proportion. And now it is becoming legal. What is that English word? Con-con-consulting? Ten percent of all projects go towards consultants. Our annual property tax comes to one point two lakhs. But the officer will not give us a receipt for it. He wants two lakhs or else he says he will report it. Now what can we do? We will pay it, there is no one to look out for us, with my son in New York. My son tells me he wants to give me every happiness in life. I told him there are only two joys for a man -- to have a son, and to have him with him in his life. Now my son tells me to go to New York with him. But I won't go. I have seen New Delhi, everywhere life is jammed up, on the roads, in the houses. How can there be joy there. One day, when I was in Delhi, I said I'll go and get some milk. They said to me, Baba, how will you get milk without money in your pocket. And then I saw, yes, you need money even for milk in the city. We don't need money at home. We have our own cows and buffalos and as much milk as we want. He bangs the seat in front of him. These cities feel like jails to us! Back home it is open, in fields, in the orchards. My son earns good money in New York. He earns twelve lakhs and spends seven lakhs. One day I calculated that he spends more on his son every month than I had spent in all the time I brought him up, from his cradle to his medical college. He said to me that one's standard, one's status in life depends not on what one earns, but on what one spends, consumes. Now how can one respond to that? I don't know if you can understand our way of speaking, but in our village we say you cannot live with a son who wants to keep you as a servant. Whatever we do in this life will determine how we are born in the next. If your hands are dirty with karma you will come back as a dog or a pig. In our family when you die your body is taken to Ganga-maiyya in Varanasi. Abroad there is no Ganga, then what will you do? I worry for my son and for his son. What is your good-name, I ask him. Nand Kishore, he says, but I have a village call-out name, Baccha-Babu. I ask if I can take a photograph of him and he says yes. Is the flight going to stop in Lucknow? No, I tell him, it is going straight to Delhi. We'll probably land at about 11.30. How come you've brought your bag on board? Well, a small bag is allowed, I tell him. Oh, what a shame! I should have just brought it with me. There was no one to tell me what to do at the airport! And it has the passports in it! How much time before we can get our luggage? Will my son be able to come into the baggage hall? What's going on with the ears, he ask me. We're probably descending, I say, you should put your seat-belt on. Just pop that in there, and then pull the loose strap. The ears… he trails off in complaint. Shake them with your thumb, try opening and closing your mouth, I say. It'll be fine. As he begins shaking out his ears I see a fineness to his his hands and fingers that I hadn't noticed before, they are somehow loose and untrained, the way he himself comes off as a person, as a whole personality. A petty landowner of his generation might never even have attended school. The plane rumbles into the tarmac, and we look out onto the crazy zoo of airplanes parked at Delhi airport. Have we reached? We've gotten off the skies, I tell him. His cell phone immediately starts ringing, for he'd never turned it off. He explains to his son that although he's not yet on the ground, he's no longer in the air either -- the plane is moving on a kind of track. He gets out of his seat and makes as if to cross me towards the aisle. I tell him it is not allowed. But I just want to stand near the doorway until we stop. No, I tell him, it is not allowed. He'd better put his seatbelt back on. Once we finally stop, he glides past me and swiftly positions himself against the doorway, the better to be the first to rush out of the plane and complete his mission. I’m not really sure what, if anything, I learned from my meeting Baccha-Babu, which is why I thought of sharing the experience with you. Top In Visible Cities by Aditya Dev Sood Bangalore: I am writing from the backseat of a call-taxi, which is stuck in a traffic jam on J.C. Road, en route from the airport. But I could be anywhere else, and the situation would be the same. We are all on the road to somewhere, together in this city, joined in our frustration at one another, for we ourselves are the traffic, the noise, the pollution that we despise, and the stuff of cities that we love. It was not always this way, say the old Bangaloreans. This was once a beautiful garden city, almost a hill station, before you, we, the whole madness began. That IT boom, intensified by the whole Y2K scare. The dotcom boom and bust. The IT-Enabled Services craze. The BPO industry. The KPOs that came right after. The rearticulation of the Bangalore phenomenon as an R&D cluster. No point even mentioning Biotech. Whatever the acronym or jargony excuse for young men and women to arrive in the city, it has never abated in this decade, nor will it in the next one. Young men and women from Wazirabad, Aligarh, Muzzafarpur and small towns across the north of India, and from every state in the south, have been pouring into take their place in the new jobs that the Bangalore phenomenon made possible, always a couple of years ahead of every other Indian city. And for them, there are new flats under construction, new workstations at new technology parks and SEZs around the city, and new car loans -- but not necessarily any more roadspace, nor schools, nor museums, nor swimming pools, nor parks -- urban physical and social infrastructure that helps one get around and make life worth living in the urban compression of a major Indian metropolis. Most of us who have arrived in the great churning of Bangalore's participation in the global informational marketplace have long since been brutalised by the annual intensification of traffic, the delays and the ever increasing distance that makes the city once again a place of long waits and long separations. There is, however, new hope in the form of an informal working group of Indian and German architects and urbanists working together with a simple set of propositions: We cannot change what we do not understand. And we cannot understand what we cannot map, capture, see, measure, visualise, envision. Indian metropolises, meanwhile, generate infinitudes of data, much of which is never organised, so as to promote human understanding or civic dialogue. The group is called 'MOD,' and you can find the outcomes of their initial workshops and mapping efforts at www.workshop.mod.org.in. All the content is open source, and open for online comment and further public dialogue with you. Are these MOD people utopian? Will they succeed? Will our cities ever get any better in our lifetimes? It is really hard to know hope in metropolitan India today. All the 'solutions' to the problem of traffic serve only to rend the city up into so many bits and parts. The planning process can seem draconian and disconnected from community aspirations. Our metro-rails are still not entirely functional, and even where they operate, they have not alleviated the pressure on the roads. And yet, we know that it is possible for cities to be things of beauty and meaning, repositories of collective consciousness, spaces that mark the shared passage of our time on this earth. As the MOD people say, if we cannot see the city in a new way, as a complex sum and in all its component parts, we have no prayer of being able to rebuild it in our own image, as something purposive and beautiful. Top On the Need for User-Centered Governance Innovation by Aditya Dev Sood In the winter of 2000, almost a decade ago, I got off a train at Ratlam junction in Madhya Pradesh, and went looking for my ride. A white Gypsy with red flashing lights was parked near the entrance to the station, and its driver came out to greet me and grab my bags. aap ko circuit house le jane go kaha hai. aap fresh ho jaiye toh collector sahib milenge aap se. As we drove the hour or so from Ratlam to the circuit house in Dhar district, my driver was eager to tell me how impressed he was by the charismatic personality of his boss, for which my visit to Dhar was obviously only further evidence. Rajesh Rajoura, the district collector of Dhar, and his colleague Anil Aggarwal, the District Magistrate, had noticed a circular from Madhya Pradesh inviting districts to begin implementations of information technology for their routine activities. Rajoura and Aggarwal received permission for an innovative plan they called the Gyandoot project. The pair held a series of meetings with diverse local organizations, including panchayats and quasi-governmental agencies to establish their needs and their receptivity to using computers as a platform for their transactions and interactions. Using a consultative process, they then set up a network of information kiosks at different locations around Dhar district, through which they provided an array of innovative services and transactions, including requests and complaints to the district administration, land record inquiries, applications for various government subsidies and welfare schemes, local classified advertisements, typing and computer training. The information kiosks of Dhar district were now being visited by state and national-level teams. Soon after my visit, the Worldbank came calling, and made the district into a global case study for e-governance. Rajoura and Aggarwal, the joint progenitors of the project, went to Stockholm to receive an international award. Several features of the project were incorporated into national policies on networked villages and e-governance. It was looking like Dhar district could serve as the template for a new and networked form of rural administration across India. A decade on, while e-governance has become a normal mode for governments and agencies in India to transact, and practically represents a sub-sector within the IT industry, the provision of services at the district and village level has not appreciably changed. The promise of Gyandoot remains largely unrealized, and the reason for this lies not in the medium but the method that Rajoura and Aggarwal used. While most studies of their work focused on their use of computers, what seems now to have been critical was that they sought out local opinion and held consultations with groups that do not normally find a voice in governmental decision-making. Computers and information technology merely served as an opportunity or an excuse to imagine new ways in which governmental services could be delivered. The interactive dialogue and inclusive decison-making that was employed in the Gyandoot project was in fact its most radical and innovative element! Where do our regulations, the processes of our government, the systems and architecture of the state machinery all come from? Do we ever get to invent them, or must we always inherit them from the past, like so many vestigial organs that no longer suit these contemporary times? The very concept of a District Collector and a District Magistrate is an innovation dating from the colonial period, designed to allow English officers of the Indian Administrative Services to collect agricultural rents and other surpluses in the countryside. So many other elements of the machinery of the Indian state similarly date either from the colonial period or else go back further, to Mughal mansabdari, jajmani, zamindari, and other petty Maharaja and feudal architectures of power. Whenever we think of changing the way governmental systems work, we tend to speak of ‘reform,’ as if this part or component of the state has become corrupt or dissolute or lost its way. Others have no patience even for reform, but seek to bring private sector ‘standards’ and ‘best practices’ into the state bureaucracies. We should recognize that state apparatuses are always legacy systems lumbering into a present where they may or may not belong, and that they require continuous innovation and renovation in order to ensure that they are, in fact, in alignment with contemporary society. The way to make governmental processes responsive to the needs of its citizens and users is through the continuous application of user-centered governance innovation, of the kind that Rajoura and Aggarwal demonstrated more than a decade ago. Top What India’s New Symbol for the Rupee Means by Aditya Dev Sood In the early pre-dawn of India’s liberalization, I was once returning from college in the US for the summer, when I missed my connection and had an unplanned stop-over in Singapore. I had very little money on me, perhaps a hundred dollars and about a thousand rupees. As I roamed about the city in those early morning hours, I came upon a small, seedy change-money shop, whose proprietor had put examples of all the currencies of the world under his glass table. I was surprised to see a conversion rate for the Indian rupee also listed, among so many European and ASEAN-nation currencies. So, I asked him, can I get Singapore dollars for my rupees? He laughed at me, saying that that rate was only for selling rupees, which he sometimes did for returning Indian workers. From me he could buy only hard currencies – the $, the £, the ¥. What a long road we have traveled since then, with incremental changes to our financial institutions, the opening of our markets, foreign investment in every part of our economy, and the emergence of a global consumer class in our metropolitan cities. The long night of India’s isolation from the world, which stretched, roughly, across the decades of the seventies and eighties, is not just over, but it has given way to a period of prosperity and growth that shows no signs of abating in our lifetimes. Few societies have known such ascendance after such neglect, when the scale of their poverty seemed unfathomable. And few nations in the world – one can only think of China – have walked their own path out of underdevelopment towards investment and growth the way India has. The strength of India’s entire economy, not just its currency, is captured by the new symbol for the Indian rupee,. What makes a currency hard is not merely stability and growth, though these are important – it is rather faith in its ability to reflect value transparently and reliably over time – or at least more transparently than other available instruments for encoding such value. Whether it rise or falls in the short term, although ideally it should not fall too much, a currency must accurately reflect value over the longer term. This is the central conundrum of all attempts to artificially shore up currencies – the more intervention, the greater the softening of the instrument. The symbol would be meaningless without the past two decades of economic and financial sector reforms, which cumulatively stand behind the promise of this symbol to strive to reflect value truly, both within India as well as in the outside world. This is no small thing. The word ‘rupee’ is said to derive from the Sanskrit rupyakam, that which can be given another form. The sense of this word rupyakam is often taken to refer to the silver in which rupee coins were first stamped, often with the likeness or sign of the king. A deeper set of associations is also already at play, for with his likeness or seal, the king makes promises as to the purity of the coin, its capability to reflect true value. Moreover, the Rupee is capable of giving such value to one who possesses it on account of its malleability, its capability of being translated into another form through exchange. The mutability and translatability of the Rupee is itself now signified by its new international symbol. Most specialized glyphs, diacritics, punctuation marks, acronyms and abbreviations emerge through repetition, popular usage and the perception of a shared need for a shorter, simpler means of signification. The establishment of the Rupee sign by the Government of India could allow this logic to work in reverse: the availability of the sign will promote the increased use of the rupee, both in India and abroad. After all, the money form emerged out of a need to signify and communicate the value of goods and services more easily and effectively, a goal that this new symbol will also facilitate. By giving visual form to the concept of the rupee, the symbol introduces a new category of currency into the consciousness of the world, for versions of the Rupee are now in use in several countries across South and South East Asia, and in the past, the Indian Rupee has been used as legal tender in the Gulf states and in parts of Africa. One should not be surprised if these other forms of the Rupee come to be symbolized by an adapted or qualified version of the new Rupee sign. The most striking feature of D. Udaya Kumar’s winning design is the way it combines Latin and Devanagari scripts with the ubiquitous double stroke of other global currency symbols. Unlike, for example, the awkward logo of the Ashok Hotel in New Delhi or Manish Arora’s manic brand, this fusion works because of its minimalism, because of what it leaves out. The vertical stoke of the Latin R is merely suggested, the mind has to work to complete the meaning of the symbol. There is, however, tremendous tension between the two horizontal strokes at the top of the form, which together represent another kind of visual pun. The double strokes seen in other currency symbols is overlaid upon the shiro rekha, that nearly ubiquitous top stroke of the Devanagari script. Kumar has explained this element of his design as a reference not only to the exchange value of the currency, but also as an abstraction of the Indian tricolor, which is perhaps one alibi too many. Finally, while the upper portion of the symbol is curvilinear, with the variable width suggestive of calligraphy, no such flair is seen in the diagonal lower stroke, which is again a source of some visual confusion to the discerning eye. Overall, however, Kumar’s presentation of his design is striking and unitary, and no element of his solution can be fundamentally altered without diminishing it. Abhishek Hazra, an expert in Fontography, points out that the Rupee sign might better have been presented not in this single rendition, but as a symbol expressed in multiple fonts. As seen in the illustration above, the symbols for other currencies can vary a great deal depending on the font in which they are rendered. As seen in this series, the cross strokes reduce from two to one in several cases, sometime drop out in the middle, and otherwise vary according to the stylistic convention of each font, and yet their significance and meaning remain unchanged. The design presented by Kumar, therefore, should be seen as one typical presentation of the Rupee sign, and not as its only allowed or allowable rendition symbol. As the Rupee sign comes more and more into usage, we should expect it to vary in each instance, and thus evolve into something that all its users can share in. Perhaps some users will write it without the top-bar, in the style of the Gurmukhi script. Perhaps others will bring flourish and elan to the way they arch the lower diagonal stroke of the symbol. The authorities should allow the Rupee sign to fluctuate slightly in these ways, for such liberalism has already shown itself to be sound policy. Top The Techno-Future and Pre-History of Toes by Aditya Dev Sood I was riding the 2/3 to Brooklyn the first couple of days I was back, when I saw this guy in a baggy pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and these kinda shoes I’d never seen before. They wrapped around each toe, exposing the toes basically, through the thin skin of the shoe. Years ago, I remember reading a children’s encyclopedia on Surrealist Art, where I saw a charcoal drawing of an empty pair of boots with laces whose burnished, buffeted folds drew further and further down to reveal toes. There was something spectral and scary about the catch in the mind, which confused shoe for feet, with the after-image of the even grosser idea that the skin of one’s feet might someday serve as the boots of another. These bizarre shoe-things with toes brought all that to mind and more. The mind understood sandals, it understood shoes, but these things were total genre busters – like the Sporks of footwear. They were somehow unseemly, uncanny, desirable. I had to have ‘em! I got online and found myself bang in the middle of a cultural revolution, where running is the leitmotif for a responsible and contemporary lifestyle. As many readers will already know, recent studies have suggested that human form emerges as a result of endurance running, whereby our distant ancestors ran and walk their prey to exhaustion and ultimate death. While we humans can easily be outclassed in a sprint and overwhelmed in a full frontal attack at close quarters, our intellect and genius for tracking was able to manifest a potentially overwhelming evolutionary advantage at long distances and over longer periods of time. Also relevant are recent pop-anthropological studies of Meso-American tribes who can still be observed running and hunting over long distances barefoot, perhaps evidence that we humans truly are born to run. While there’s a small and growing sub-culture of barefoot runners these days, there’s also the view that this is a sure track to contracting Hepatitis C. This is because enough people have it, and enough of them are urinating out and about the city, so it is only a matter of time and chance for the moment when you have a cut on the palm of your foot, which becomes infected. But even in rural and remote regions of the world, walking or running barefoot can be a high-risk activity, exposing the body to hookworm, podoconiosis, and other neglected tropical diseases. Seen from this perspective, the shoe is a prophylactic, protecting the body from the diseases that may be locked into the loam of the earth. The goal of further design and innovation in shoes, therefore, should be to afford the flexibility and sensation of going bareback, while still ensuring that users enjoy safe sports. The success of the global culture industry rests on its ability, every so often, to spin out a new kind of consumer product or service that can offer up rich desirable experiences that could not have even been imagined just a few years earlier. I’m thinking of Levi’s, Nikes, the Walkman, the Spielberg blockbuster, iStuff, Social Networking. These foot-gloves approach these heights of socio-technical and cultural innovation, for they embody a new way of living in the very form of their product offering. No other company offers what they offer at this time, their brand is coterminous with the category they have created: five-fingered footwear. The foot-gloves are made by an Italian rubber soles manufacturer called Vibram, which has enjoyed long-standing repute among the hiking and mountaineering community. With the development of their uniquely designed sock-shoe-sandals, however, they are now funding biomechanical and sports-medical research, which in turn fuels fevered popular reception, discussion and commentary on how best to walk and run as a contemporary human. Vibram S.P.A. is understandably reluctant to make specific claims about the advantages of its footwear over conventional sports shoes, but the popular receptions of the product have discussed the natural splay of human toes across the ground while running. Five-finger footwear is perceived as being able to better approximate the putative bio-mechanical and evolutionary values of that splay, as the foot slaps the ground and spring up again. Certainly, the products are made with a precision of design and manufacture that would have been unimaginable only decades ago, not only for the materials science involved, but also for the computer-aided design and precision joinery that the products require. Where other shoes from our own time may have heels made of wood and steel, and might even use nails to bang uppers and lowers together, these foot-condoms are almost seamless, just a series of cutting-edge materials circling in and around one another to wrap the foot with grace and precision. While this is not immediately intuitive, it seems to me that Vibram’s expertise with rubber soles may in fact be central to its success with the toe-pocket design. This is because there is enormous variety in human toe forms, with the second toe sometimes being longer or shorter than the big toe, varying degrees of splay across toes and variations in the decrease of toe size from big to pinkie. The Vibram foot-glove, however, provides for an optimal pocket for each toe, while also creating an exoskeleton of sorts in rubber, which curves up and around the toe, even if it is incompletely filled. This is the central design innovation that makes the Vibram foot-glove workable in both functional as well as visual-aesthetic terms, rather like an underwire and padded bra. The technology serves to reorganize and re-form the flesh and bone of the body like an orthotic, but also to make it visible and consumable in a new way. There is certainly something scandalous about a shoe that reveals the toes that it hides, like a male ballet dancer’s tights, revealing the form of his cod piece. Our mind’s eye should be forgiven the confusion, for as Freud noticed, the digits of our feet do poke out in rather the same odd way as male genitalia, and like the nose, may also serve as a substitute or transposition for the male penis. In Exodus, for instance, Sarah protects Moses from the wrath intended for the Egyptians by touching the foreskin removed from their son to his foot, or member, the text is obscure, thereby effecting a ritual circumcision. So also, diverse Shaiva rituals which are vestigeally preserved in caste Hindu households, require the bridegroom or the father-in-law’s toe to be ritually cleansed with water and milk, ritual symbols for fertility, potency, patrilinality. I’ve heard several people express both pleasure and unease at the visual form of the Vibrams, and I’m willing to propose that this does have something to do with the visual suggestiveness of these exposed-yet-cosseted human members which are also newly available to the eye because they have been cosseted. To begin to use your Vibrams is to learn new ways of managing and inhabiting your body. It’s not all that easy getting your toes into the tiny spaces allotted for each of them without practice. It is like being a child again, and learning to put on your shoes without a shoe-horn. Or perhaps wearing your first pair of gloves backwards, and having to link the kinesthetic and tactile data from your hands with the good sense of your eyes, so you can align all of your digits into the fingers of the glove. Already something interesting is going on here: ways of using my mind that are supposed to apply for the upper half of my body are being applied downwards to parts which are usually not so well cared for, hidden, forgotten, and even abused. The recovery of one’s toes -- nay, the recovery of one’s feet as such, a hitherto concealed and forgotten organ -- gives one to have a new sense of one’s own corporeal construction. Our two sets of limbs have become increasingly asymmetric in their role and purpose, but foot-gloves bring back the kinship between our divergently adapted upper and lower members. The navel now marks the point of a horizontal line of symmetry between the tops and bottoms of our body. Now that I have foot-gloves, I want a set of hand-shoes as well, so that I can swing from the train bars, parkour in and out of the subway, live a little, beyond the repressive cultures of foot-concealment. There are millions of nerve endings, I remember being told, in each of my finger-tips, which are partially responsible for my gentle tapping on this keyboard, even as my toes wriggle in sympathy from down below. I'm beginning to want an end to this apartheid -- I only want for my toes what I enjoy for my fingers. Do you not also worry about our toes’ uncertain evolutionary future? I’ve often thought that the pinkie is already so squashed and so nearly vestigial in its form that we won’t hardly miss it in a few generations. And really what good do our toes do us in the course of everyday bureaucratic life? They will surely be reabsorbed by the skin around them, giving us a kind of webfoot, perfectly evolutionarily adapted for wearing Gucci loafers, kick-powering office roller-chairs and balancing ourselves on Segways. There is a madness to this form of civilization that the barefoot runners’ contingent are right to reject, in favor of a closer, more direct relationship with the surface of the earth. For what’s still missing in these foot-condoms is the sweet kiss of grass, the dank cloddedness of soil, the grainy play of gravel, the full array of sensations of earth that our feet, those wonderful and underused sense organs, afford us. Thanks to toes, our feet are a fundamental way of knowing where we stand in the world. Top Towards a Post-Human Manifesto by Aditya Dev Sood The problem with Gregor Samsa was not that he had become a cockroach, but rather that his family members, and indeed, he himself, found this revolting, disgusting, gross. The protagonist of Franz Kafka's famous short story The Metamorphosis found that he no longer inhabited a body familar to him, but something alien to him, and that in turn, this new arachnoid body alienated him from his family and from the wider world of humans. Is it natural for humans and creepy-crawlies to be on such poor terms with one another? Why do we not feel kinship with our brethren of smallish size, who have exoskeletons and multiple limbs? Perhaps the problem is that we are constructed so differently at different scales, and that we lack the right tools for interacting with one another. We are so big, they are so small. And if, by some miracle, we were to shrink down to their size, they would be so strong, their forelimbs, probosces, and jaws would immediately squish our soft -- and now shrunken -- mammalian bodies. Natalie Jeremijenko showed me a unique solution to the pressing problem of cross-species communication last week, in her live-in studios and labs in New York City. As shown in the image below, she has built a giant helmet to wear on one's head, which has a long elongated proboscis that curves down to the level of an arachnoid, in this case the Horned Dung Beetle, the the strongest animal for its size in the world. Robotic sensors translate the movements of your human head and jaw down to the movements of a little arm that is the right size and shape for interacting with the beetle. If you had ever wondered, with Franz Kafka, what it would be like to have six legs and a pair of pliers for a mouth, Natalie's contraption provides an ingenious way to experience this and to find out. The beetle in the wrestling ring below is eagerly awaiting your challenge, and immediately grasps your robotic claw in his jaws, pushing, clamping, biting, as if he has found another mate to play with. You too, can now see how much energy, style and intelligence goes into Horned Dung Beetle wrestling, an art that was hitherto prohibited to our species. To become an arachnoid is no longer a dismal fate, but perhaps a lifestyle choice. Our experiences in this world are necessarily constrained by these bodies which we inhabit, bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical, with a strong sense of the difference between up-down, front-back, and a slightly less sure grasp of left from right. In the early morning hours after my yoga routine, when I am lost in shavasana, the position of the corpse, these logics of the body evaporate, and my life energies seem capable of reconfigurating into any other corporeal form: hexapedal, octopedal, amoebal. This body has been assigned randomly to me, and for all its benefits, it is only one form of life, not necessarily the best or highest or ultimate form. This insight is the foundation of the Jaina teaching of non-violence, not only towards creepy-crawlies, but even to the microscopic organisms that surround us. The discipline of Anthropology teaches us that technology is something uniquely human, and the practice of Design assumes that we humans must be the measure of all things built and constructed in the world. Natalie's approach, however, shows us that technology can be a way of extending our experience beyond the human, out to the worlds of geese, fish and beetles and that we can interact with those life forms in interesting and pleasurable ways. Using her technologies, we can glimpse the truth of our being as just another form of prana, life, and begin re-engineering our planet for the collective benefit of all its prani-s, our fellow living beings, with whom are only beginning to communicate and interact. Top   On the Creative Powers of Our Mind by Aditya Dev Sood The other day, I was visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where I happened upon a public lecture by Dr. Kurt Behrendt. He was talking in a small room where Ramayana paintings from Mughal and post-Mughal schools of miniature painting were on display. Eventually, Behrendt led our small group to a medium-sized painting from the Kangra school, in Himachal Pradesh, which depicted the visit of Ram, Sita and Lakshman to the forest monastery of the rishi Bharadvaj. The rishi is describing the forest to his visitors, suggesting beautiful and hospitable places for them to visit in these hills. The rishi is seated before a sacrificial fire, draped in a tiger pelt, while a purple Ram dressed in leaves, and bashful, completely-covered Sita sit on the hide of a deer. A younger, respectful Lakshman sits beside them on his knees. Members of Bharadvaj’s retinue sit further away from the group, at the base of a bountiful mango tree, that rises up and around, to fill up the whole center of the canvas, its branches pointing up and left, and then right, to other smaller vignettes in the further distance, recessed among rolling hills and mountain peaks. Ram, Sita and Lakshman will have to cross a wide river by boat to get to this beautiful valley, where herons and other birds frolic among the lotus ponds, and hermits live quietly in simple straw huts. The reproduction below will not do justice to the fine-grained brush work of the original, where individual strokes delineate the current of the water, the ripeness of fruit, the swiftness of the wind through the shimmering leaves of the tree. As the hills draw further away, still more detail becomes apparent, smaller and smaller trees, hutments, little winding streams. In the perimeter of Bharadvaj’s settlement are dark, perfect trees, each botanically specific, each perfectly composed to give the group shelter. I think it can be no accident that this scene of Himalayan beauty comes from the Kangra school. Even as Bharadvaj speaks, his words are taken up by the unnamed and unknown master’s eye, hand, and brush, to the upper folds of his painting. This painting is itself an icon of manuscript illumination, whose task is to give words and narrative visual expression, to complement them, to make the eye dance along the parchment page, to trigger visual thoughts in mind of the one reading and reciting, and those listening and enjoying. It must have taken this painter such incredible focus and empathy to have generated so much vivid detail from just a few lines of Valmiki's text. Have you noticed how intimately the creative powers of our mind are interconnected with our ability to see? The very word ‘imagination,’ in English, holds within it a root metaphor of being able to make an image with one’s mind. So also, in the Sanskritic tradition, the early rishi-s, or seers, were so called because they had the power of direct perception into the hidden essences of things, from the root √rsh, to see, from which we also get the modern Hindi drishti, darshan and so forth. Each of us has the capacity for this kind of creative vision, which we can either develop, or else let fade away. One way in which we can preserve and further develop our creative powers, it seems to me, is to allow ourselves to confront works of such heartbreaking and insistent beauty, which challenge the mind’s eye to try find any joint or edge, between the imagination of the artist, and the vividness of his reality. Top   At the Intersections of Design, Ethnography and Global Governance by Aditya Dev Sood    At my table were two diplomats and a cultural researcher. My own role was designated as 'designer.' We were told that there was a post-conflict situation in an African nation where the U.N. had been called in. Local institutions and forms of self-governance had been eroded during the long and bloody conflict. Child soldiers had been involved in the civil war on both sides, and the competing ends of Justice and Rehabilitation had both to be balanced. Our job was to plan the series of activities that would result in a contextually-appropriate program of activities for the U.N. teams working in the region. We had two hours. We began by trying to itemize all the different internal and external stakeholders in the situation, from U.N. agencies to neighboring countries to international investors, and gave up once we got into double digits. Then we tried to bound the problem by trying to establish what kind of time-line and terms of reference we were working with. It seemed foolish to try to do anything in less than six weeks time, for meanwhile the country was burning, and the U.N. agencies would need a plan to start working with as soon as possible. But six weeks was also nowhere near enough time to collect meaningful cultural and socioeconomic data on twenty or thirty million people. We agreed that we would have to rely on secondary data from prior sociocultural research, while also involving regional and in-country experts. We also wanted U.N. agencies to pre-pone our terms of reference to a period well prior to the U.N. flag going up in the nation in question. So we revised our ideal scenario again, to ensure that we had social and cultural data as well as resource personnel at hand for the region that would tell us enough about it before the conflict started. We would then be able to do highly targeted data gathering activities from the time the U.N. became responsible for the country. Very rapidly, we imagined, we would acquire preliminary data on combatants, local cultures of masculinity and violence, what in local terms were the cultural valences of 'laying down one’s arms' ? What threats to security were likely to be perceived by different local stakeholders? What could we therefore do to minimize the likelihood of their appearance? Even with all these insights, the diplomats reminded us, although we had established the possibility of local knowledge, we still had no program for action. The cultural researcher among us proposed waiting for the data to come in, for in his experience, sanding the grains of culture could yield deep cultural insights, and these might then guide the on-ground actions of the state machinery. We conceded that such insights might arise, but worried that we could not leave the U.N. agencies hanging for weeks on end without a clear articulation about what steps we were going to take in translating that knowledge into a program for their action. This is where design entered the picture. I proposed a data review session where local experts and U.N. officials would both be in attendance. I suggested that based on sociocultural data, we might be able to identify representatives of key stakeholder communities, and make life-sized cut-outs of persona, articulating elements of their particular aspirations and concerns. Based on prior work we'd done in other areas, I suggested an innovation workshop, wherein the data collected could serve as stimulus for cross-functional teams to generate and propose different governance and program implementation solutions, no matter how outlandish or difficult to realize. I suggested listening sessions, wherein the same stimulus materials would be reviewed and then discussed by different local communities, and feedback rendered publicly as well as reported up to the U.N. command. We discussed ways in which proposed solutions could be visualized as storyboards, and means through which feedback and commentary might be solicited from local groups, even as the reconciliation and accountability concepts were prioritized and evaluated for impact and feasibility. We imagined a design team to be continuously involved, organizing the information collected, visualizing it, reconciling differences of understanding and perspective among different players, imagining new common grounds for understanding and creative action between the governing and the governed. We had worked through lunch, and as time was called, our group stood up to present to the other five tables, each with a similarly constituted team. Our diplomats were sufficiently excited by the prospect of having developed a community-centered design mechanism that they agreed to present it to the rest of the group. There was something very heartening about seeing U.N. diplomats talking about ‘innovation workshops’ and ‘storyboards,’ and ‘user-feedback.’ It very nearly gave one faith again in the international system and the prospect that it might actually empower and enable the beneficiaries of its global interventions. Once, in a very long while, there will be an occasion at which all that you have been doing is illuminated, organized in new terms, given new perspective. Something like this happened for me last week at the Glen Cove Conference on Strategic Design and Public Policy, hosted by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. The event proceeded from a critique of the modularity of U.N. discourses and practices around peace-keeping, disarmament and security, which often failed on the ground, because these international concepts had not been adequately translated into local social, cultural and political terms. The concept of security, it was repeatedly pointed out, was meaningful only in local social and cultural terms to different local actors. Without an understanding of the lay of this land, securing the peace could only operate through hit-and-trial. The second and more trenchant observation made by the Conference organizers was that such local socio-cultural knowledge and insight, acquired through ethnography and filtered through any array of disciplinary frameworks from the social science and humanities, while valuable and necessary, was also proving insufficient. This was because cultural knowledge in terms of observed behavior and practice was being presented as observed fact, rather than dynamic operational opportunity. To move from local knowledge to programmatic action was still a challenge, and this is where Design could play a critical role. Perhaps Design and Cultural Research and Public Policy really do fit together, as we had demonstrated to one another in our working group. But if so, why is there such a disconnection between these disciplines and practices? A brief review of their disparate origins and development will be necessary to understand this. The scientific study of human practices, belief systems, and social structures is itself a relatively recent phenomenon, albeit with a deep prehistory, in the form of traveler’s accounts of foreign lands and similar writings prior to the early nineteenth century. The acquisition of cultural knowledge since the Age of Discovery were motivated first by the desire to proselytize and to save newly Christian souls and then from the need to effectively administer European colonies in the Old and New Worlds. If one could not have effective knowledge of local customs, one could not create positive law for the colonized, one of the great gifts of European Civilization, it was often perceived, and a common justification for colonial intervention in the wider world. The purpose of colonial anthropology, therefore, was in fact to acquire just the sort of local knowledges that might aid exogenous authorities to proceed with their programs of on-ground action -- to secure the peace, to promote trade, and perhaps even to promote the welfare of the local populations. Much had changed by the late nineteenth century. The emerging standardization of International trade and governance practices in multiple colonized regions of the world, thanks in part to the establishment of Anglo-Saxon and international law meant that local practices, behaviors and customs were less of an impediment in colonial governmental processes. Anthropology was no longer necessarily an applied science, but could be freed up to become an academic discipline, searching for more and more fundamental truths about the nature of language, culture, kinship, hierarchy and other elements of being human. Training in Anthropology no longer led to a career, however peripatetic or erratic, in colonial administration, but became a disciplinary specialization to be pursued within the academy. The discourse of Design on the other hand had an entirely different origin. It was born in the Industrial Age, from the split between the act of making an artifact, and the process of visualizing, conceptualizing and continuously improving it, which were hitherto conjoined in the artisanal mode of production. Design was both a means of enabling industry, and a means for diverse regional cultures to adapt to its by now changed mode of production. From the beginning of the twentieth century, emerging conceptions of revolution, emancipation, and anticipation for the future found expression in the artistic, visual and material cultures of both Fascist and Communist avant-gardes, such as for example the Italian Futurists, the Russian Constructivists and the German Bauhaus schools. In that shared, technologically-inspired and factory-fabricated future, local cultures were no longer relevant, be they European or otherwise. Inspired by factories and industrial techniques of manufacture, the discourse and practice of design was a vector for refashioning culture in the image of industrial modes of production. In the famous words of Le Corbusier, for example, the house was a machine for living, a chair was a machine for sitting, and so forth. Designers were visionaries who had seen that techno-industrial future, and who could lead others, consumers as well as industrialist patrons, to achieving it. Modernity was therefore the desirable condition of having technologized one’s culture, of having made it compatible with patterns of industrial production and massified consumption that defined modern urban life. These broad cultural and ideological trends are what we called Modernism, and they achieved their apotheosis in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Lev Manovich has pointed out that in electronic, digital and media art and design activities that arrived at the demise of Modernism, the exact reverse trend is observed. If modernism was about the technologization of culture, innovations in the world of electronic and digital technology involved the acculturation of machines, the better to situate them within everyday life, for them to create value for their users. User-Centered Design, perhaps the dominant mode of design-thinking at present, was born as a specific response to the challenge of making intelligent and interactive products, complex systems, and distributed networks easy, intuitive and effective for everyday people. As objects of design became more ethereal, insubstantial and distributed, including the design of services, the means and mechanisms of design became more collaborative, interactive, and collective. More and more, to be a designer means to be able to engage in role-playing, brainstorming, dynamic visualization and to be able to see the world from the point of view of those quite different from oneself. Between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, further theoretical trends in Anthropology and Cultural Studies, moreover, excoriated these disciplines for having once served as hand-maidens to colonial governmental processes and for having been means and mechanisms for either exoticizing or else objectifying or otherwise subjugating various Others. In this context, of course, methodological and theoretical approaches which might actually subserve either State or corporate interests were marginalized, in favor of approaches promoting academic autonomy, the net consequence of which was the effective divorce between contemporary Anthropology and the pragmatic ends of any apparatus of power and organizational mechanism for change in the world. Even as contemporary thinking in Anthropology was busy evacuating the discipline of its original epistemological foundations, Anthropology students were finding work as corporate ethnographers, who observed and described the degree to which new products, technologies and systems could be adopted and adapted by their users. The first major challenge to the application of Anthropology to contemporary global challenges is the degree of unease that most trained Anthropologists have with the idea of using their knowledge for Cultural Engineering or, more exactly, Cultural Re-Engineering, which non-specialists take for granted as the normal practice of Governance, Development or, in fact, Business. The persistent gulf between Anthropology and applied sciences of all kinds that must be addressed through further conferencing, research and perhaps through curriculum redesign. At the Glen Cove Conference, we did address the challenges of effecting a conversation between Humanities and Social Science disciplines with the applied and professional disciplines of Law, Management, Policy, Medicine among others, and the further remove that the discipline of Design represented. Perhaps to a greater extent even than other disciplines of practice, Design relies on a live, transactional relationship within the world: To be a designer, one must have found a client with a problem that can be solved with a product, no matter how hard, soft or conceptual that product turns out to be. For designers, acquired social, technical or industrial knowledge must eventually be put into motion, for the resolution of actually existing challenges, that real people or groups of people have. Both Design and Ethnography require one to look at the world in a visionary way: to see with one’s mind’s eye the subtle and hidden relationships that are not always visible on the surfaces, but discerned in the interaction of people and things. To see the way things are, however, is not precisely the same as to be able to see how they could be. I often think of the ideal dynamic between ethnographers and designers as akin to the heat cycle of the internal combustion engine. For the process to work right, we have to be able to move from people to product and back again, but as of now, we mostly train people to become virtuosos of material-cultural production with an amateur or folk knowledge of culture and social behavior. Or conversely, we train specialists in observing culture, who are painstakingly shy of actually producing new cultural artifacts in the world. To extend the metaphor of the heat cycle, this means that the sum of Design and Anthropology can be plotted as a line that courses back and forth without creating an area, a polygon, corresponding to new value. In the professional sphere, of course, designers and ethnographers do work together to create such value, but they must first learn one another’s languages and ways of working.   The second major challenge, however, must be the nebulous self-understanding and incomplete thematic articulation of Design in its contemporary avatar. A leading design theorist among us at the conference presented a conception of four orders of design, beginning with the design of two and three-dimensional objects (‘posters and toasters’). The third order refers to the design of human interactions, perhaps including the artifacts, platforms and systems that enable them. The fourth order of design, therefore, addresses the enabling environments, organizational logics, social networks and institutions within which human interactions take place. These orders of Design have a familiar, perhaps Platonist ring to them, for they move from simple, hard objects-in-the-world to artifacts of increasing complexity to more and more abstract objects of human construction, each supervenient to the other. Such an organization of the diverse activities undertaken in the name of design is comforting because it brings a kind of abstract order to a life-universe that appears otherwise confused and promiscuous, employing every different kind of business model and encompassing the entire range of human material culture, while dynamically, moreover, evolving and updating its own self-understanding from decade to decade. Notwithstanding the merits of the orders of Design approach, this classification nevertheless disguises deep polarities among the different orders. Thanks to its origins in processes of industrialization and massification, including advertising, packaging, and product styling, Design is still often viewed as an optional appliqué upon more essential, more core elements of the business process. This tension divides the four orders of design into two halves, with the ‘posters and toasters’ on one side, and the design of human interactions and social institutions and networks on the other. To this extent, the word 'design' may be considered to operate as a pair of homonyms, the first referring to non-essential and practical presentations or representations of the essential object, and the second to high-order conceptual and cognitive achievements that make possible a new proposition in the world and which are integral and inextricable from it. In my own experience, when such a situation of novelty and cognitive transformation comes about, the mind immediately grasps that there has been an irrevocable fusion between process and product, that something new has been brought into the world: an in-nova-tion. Many things were accomplished at the Glen Cove Conference, not the least of which is the idea that what we should mean by Design henceforth are always its highest orders, the means and mechanisms of transforming systems, organizations, institutions and the enabling environments of people, under which lower orders are always implicitly included, in supporting roles, to tactical ends. The words 'Strategic Design,' therefore, may now be read as redundant, for if it is to have any value for the worlds of Policy and Governance, Design must always be strategic, and so far as possible, clearly named. At the end of the conference, a leading scholar and practitioner of participatory and inclusive programs in Public Health offered up a new conception of Design as a way for different stakeholders to articulate their distinct interests and aspirations and for these divergent interests to be synthesized, as well the means and mechanisms through which diverse extant knowledges could be organized and integrated in creating a solution. She had long been practicing Design, but she had just never called it that! Endnote The Glen Cove Conference on Strategic Design and Public Policy was organized through the collaboration of several different individuals and organizations. Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnik, associated with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDR) specialize in International Relations and Cultural Research, respectively. Lucy Kimball teaches Design Leadership at the Said Business School at Oxford. Gerry Philipsen teaches the Ethnography of Speaking at the University of Washington, where he is also the Chair of the Center for Local Strategies. More comprehensive documentation of the event will become available in due course of time from the Conference organizers. The Conference followed Chatham House Rules, which proscribe the attribution of particular points of view to named individuals. This convention, in part, is responsible for the absence of specific quotations in the above article, which is an account written from my own point of view. I take sole responsibility for the inevitable errors. Top   When Twenty Minds Work as One by Aditya Dev Sood Last week, I was privileged to participate in a high-level conclave hosted by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. The agenda was to explore how design processes might help the U.N. create programs for action in destabilized or post-conflict regions of the world. In attendance were senior U.N. functionaries, international development and policy experts, academics involved in social and cultural research, and designers from different regions of the world. The meeting was remarkable for the sophisticated understanding that was already in evidence regarding the meaning, purpose and nature of design. While most people in the business and policy world may still think of design as something to do with posters and toasters, this group was interested not only in the design of human interactions, but also of the organization of the enabling environment in which people interact with one another and with systems around them. The meeting proceeded from the assumption that design could assist in humanitarian and peace-keeping efforts to the extent that it enabled the translation of local insights or cultural knowledge into the specifics of programmatic action. This movement, from knowledge to action, which may at first seem to occur spontaneously, or in the flash of a cognitive leap, can actually be drawn out into a series of steps or stages, and can also be externalized, into a process in which many persons or groups can participate.    The ways in which design processes can accomplish this were not only discussed at the conclave, but also instantiated in the very sequencing and logic of the event. By ensuring shared focus on visual artifacts, by promoting structured forms of group interaction and participation, by requiring groups to present the outcomes from their collaborative interaction in a specific sequence, design teams can help organize diverse perspectives and kinds of knowledge and expertise into new and unanticipated outcomes that could not have been arrived at through mere dialogue and debate. There is often an inductive and intuitive dimension to design thinking, which the right kind of design processes can marshall and organize in a collective way, for more effective problem solving. When this happens, all participants will agree that the designed outcome is superior to anything that any one individual or group had had in mind prior to the process, yet there is no easy way to account for how the solution came into existence. Some kind of collective magic held sway, briefly, and the group was able to think as one, with the power of twenty minds working in concert. Contrast this, for a moment, with the way most businesses and organizations work in India, where twenty minds and bodies wait around for one to tell them what to do. The top-heavy, top-down structure and functioning of our organizations is perhaps the most important impediment to dynamic, effective, coordinated decision-making in India Incorporated. Where did we learn to be this way? What can we do to unlearn it? There are many good reasons why Indian organizations operate top-down, an account of which would begin from the mansabdari system to the logic of District Collectors through to the familial ownership patterns of listed Indian corporations. And it is, perhaps, a decade long challenge for Indian organizations to come to reorganize themselves in ways that more clearly identify the responsibilities of individuals within a team, allowing each to own their individual responsibilities rather than leaving their time and effort to the command and discretion of their boss. To allow each mind the freedom to dedicate itself to its own specific task area is a basic prerequisite for it to be able to work freely and collaboratively with others. Until this happens, it will be difficult to envision design-thinking and organizational innovation on a sufficiently large scale in India. Top   The Question of Scale by Aditya Dev Sood Back when I was in Architecture school, our professor brought in an old-style film projector to class one day. He had with him a short film made by the American designers Charles and Ray Eames, called 'Powers of Ten.' The stock was not yet grainy, though well it could have been, for the film was made in 1968. It opens with a family of four enjoying a picnic in a park, whereupon the film's optic zooms out tenfold, again and again, showing the park, the city, the state, the continent, the whole earth, and the dark beyond at tenfold increases of scale. And then the film zooms back down again, to the picnicking family, zooming back down into the man's hand, ending finally in a visualization of a part of a carbon atom at ten to the power of minus ten. The film remains a visual delight, and only grows more sublime with every year that passes. I've had occasion to think of it again these days, while thinking about the role of design in relationship to things that can and cannot scale up, tenfold in a single year for example, just like the camera did in the Eames' movie. Here is the thesis: Design has to be about particularity, specificity, presence. There is but one Rashtrapati Bhavan, and it took all of Lutyens' and Baker's training and experience to create it. There is but one Corbusier, and one Villa Savoy, that best and most gem-like of his buildings. Yes, there are many pieces of furniture, designed for industrial manufacture since the days of the Bauhaus, but all of them are copies of the same Platonic original. Every copy reinforces the ideal form of the chair, the one true design that cannot be improved through any modification. So also, Design must always be about discovering and resolving the minute challenges of materiality, form, posture, use, the critical questions that pertain to any designed object. Design cannot be about marketing or distribution and payments recovery, or any other modular and repetitive element of a scalable business model. This idea has consoled me on numerous occasions over the last decade, while new Indian start-ups in software consulting and IT-enabled services have grown exponentially year upon year. My friend Naresh in Bangalore, himself a major architect, has commiserated with me over many an Old Monk and Thumbs Up. Don't worry, he would say, we don't have that kind of IT brain -- we have design minds!    For antithesis, let us consider the example of Usman Haque. An architect, artist and designer of media who lives and works in London, Usman has been building interactive media installations for almost two decades. His work often required environmental and other electronic sensors to talk to one another for those innovative media effects to arise, so that the works could respond to their context and to their audience. After years of jerry-rigging balloons, doors, solar panels, and motion sensors together again and again, he discovered the need for a way to patch these diverse products together through a new and common software platform. His software product has solved this problem once, so many others can benefit from his efforts, and go on to create unimaginable varieties of art, architectural, design, and service innovations. Without really planning for it, he suddenly finds himself at a moment of being able to take his design solutions to impressive scale. Yet, he has also gone from building unique media art installations, to seeking venture capital, hiring a Chief Technology Officer, and creating a platform for social innovation, rather than an specific media artifact. What kind of synthesis can we draw from this brief discussion? Usman's movement from piece-meal art and design to platform-thinking seems to me an excellent parable for the relationship between design and innovation. Design can be an everyday, thankless task, which must also often be its own reward. And yet, there can come a time, when all that effort and the array of knowledges acquired through dealing with the particularities of a set of problems can lead to a new and unprecedented product, service, or business concept. Scalability is not on designer's minds all the time, the way it might be with venture capitalists, but design thinking can sometimes lead to innovations that grow tenfold and hundredfold, well beyond the limited scale of our everyday life. Top   Design and the Redressal of Social Challenges by Aditya Dev Sood Earlier this afternoon, I'd had my head on my table, and was drifting in and out of wakefulness, under the cool embrace of the air-conditioner hovering directly above my head. There was knocking on the door and I dimly registered it opening slowly. Foreigner log aaey hain, the guard said. Slowly, very slowly, I got up and out of my chair, shook my head awake, and went out into the conference room to greet these unknown visitors. Timo Backer and Johann Schorr turned out to have a long-standing appointment with me. They were design students at the University of Kassel in middle Germany, and were on a global quest to interview designers and design thinkers on their views on something they were calling 'Social Design.' By this term I think they meant the role of design in reconfiguring social and interactional relationships so as to ameliorate the human condition. They wanted to begin audio-taping our meeting, and so I let them, with the proviso that if they were going to write about me, I would also have the opportunity to write about them. Timo and Johann embodied the kind of earnestness, seriousness and clarity that one only ever finds among the youth. Over the course of their education and training in design, they had developed the hunch that the way mainstream design was being taught, and the way design is understood by most people, was off in some way, from a deeper, partially hidden truth. Where they encountered so many of their peers toying with colors and forms and shapes in the name of design, they felt that there was a deeper link between design and social responsibility and social meaning. But this intuited link had yet to be brought to theoretical expression, which is why they had begun their global series of interviews.    Over several cups of tea and nimbu-pani-s, I talked to Johann and Timo about my own training in Architecture and Anthropology, and in the many accidents of life that had lead to the establishment of the Center for Knowledge Societies almost a decade ago. I talked of Bangalore in the days of the dotcom boom and bust, of the difficulty of articulating an approach to technology, product and service design back then. Of the very recent past, when the idea that we could use information technology to improve our own infrastructure, governance, social and welfare services and overall quality of life seemed a distant dream. I described our work in areas as diverse as Color and Healthcare and Mobile Financial Services. I explained our processes and methodologies, how we moved from a documentation of social phenomena to a description of possible solutions. How we made those possible solutions better by involving experts in innovation workshops and then validating protoype solutions with end users, those who will eventually use the product. Do people in government see the value of design in solving social problems? I looked back at Timo and tried to find a way to answer him. Ten years ago this was not even on the agenda, I began. Today, it is clear to many people that just taking a half-baked, off-the-shelf technology solution, and throwing it out into the landscape is not going to work. You need to move gradually, step-by-step, from a crude, ready to hand solution, to a more sophisticated, contextually-appropriate solution. Most people I talk to recognize that. What they don't know, or are not sure of, is that the name for that very process is the word design. Johann and Timo represent a whole new generation out there, in Asia and Europe and in the Americas, who understand design in no other way, and who are actually going to reshape the social contours of our urban, economic, virtual, mobile, and interactive experiences with the tools and techniques of design. Top   What Makes Designers Different? by Aditya Dev Sood So long as I can remember, I was always aware that there are some special people, who are responsible for the form and character of all these things in the world, these buildings, the layout of these neighborhoods, the width of these roads. As a student, I thought it was important to become like those people, so as to be able to have a say in the way things are. In my youth, I imagined that architects and designers served as expert authorities to whose judgment others would defer. I thought of design as the accomplishment of grand agonistic and ecstatic challenges: the making of the Taj Mahal, the creation of an Eames chair, an Aldo Rossi coffee pot, Tom Ford's new collection. Some years ago, when I was still establishing my practice, I was struggling to find a credible vocabulary for color, material, texture and form for our work. I sent out teams of designers all around Bangalore to look for objects and artifacts that appeared to embody that kind of distinctiveness, which would serve as inspiration for us. The results of that effort forever changed our approach to design.    Mahesh, junior-most in the team, brought back photographs of a mechanical typewriter from the 1950s, which was still being used in a law clerks' office. It had three parallel lines of Sandalwood paste markings on its front and sides, together with a red vermillion dot at each place. Sitting right above the highest row of keys was a postcard from the Tirupathi temple. As the stenographer drummed at his keys, he was also always worshiping, at a mystical altar of alphabetic and literary meaning. Sayalee, a senior designer, visited a family that prided themselves on their ability to create inventive solutions to everyday life problems. They had taken their old rotary dial television set and installed a new infra-red receiver into it, which meant that they too could experience the joys of remote channel switching. Over the round hole left by the obsolete rotary dial, they placed a sticker of a soccer ball, testimony to the family's passion for the game. But the TV still needed to be turned off at night, when the family was already tired and lazing in bed. For this they set up a long cable wire, stretching from the mains of the TV set to a point right above their bedside table. This was a television set the entire family could take pride in, one which they would never trade in, no matter how flat and thin and slick the category would get in years to come. In another field visit, we discovered a gentle middle aged man, who had recently had his old wedding photos remastered into a digital album in the contemporary style. He showed us images of his own youthful self, along with his wife in 1985, superposed onto images from the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai. He hadn't been able to make that pilgrimage then, but with a few instructions to his desktop-wallah, he had been able to make that vision real. These illuminating yet humbling case studies taught us that designers are in no way special, but that innovation, visual expressiveness and inventiveness are in fact human fundamentals. All of us take pride and pleasure in smarter, more elegant ways of doing things, and it doesn't take a credentialed designer, per se, to arrive at a better solution. Nevertheless, designers may still have years of training and some experience tackling particular kinds of challenges. If they're very lucky, they may even have some innate abilities, visual or analytic, though of course this is never guaranteed! So what should designers be doing with their professionally-acquired or inherited abilities? My still-emerging answer is that designers should allow decisions to emerge through collective consensus, by being part of the conversation, contributing to the final judgment, without trying to be the one who actually renders it. It is by unleashing the creativity of others that designers can best redeem the special opportunities and insights that they have been given. Top   The Design of Experience by Aditya Dev Sood     After about a whole day's driving, we finally arrived at Rainforest House. The resort sits on the banks of the Ganga, north of Rishikesh, just a few kilometers north of Lakshman Jhula. The photographs of the place online were provocative, and the place had received good reviews. Steve, an Englishman who runs the place with his Marathi wife, showed us to our rooms and promised to be around in the evening, in case we wanted anything. We showered and changed, and then climbed down the rocks along a stream at the edge of the resort to the river. In the late afternoon light we could see a pale human form doing an advanced surya-namaskar, across the river, on the sand of the opposite river bank. Around us there were so many yelling and chattering river rafters in helmets and life-jackets, many of them climbing up to a rock out-crop to jump back into the river, several meters down. We looked back up to the resort to see the facade's rich colors reflected in the nether light. Steve's wife Trupti is an architect, and the building is her creation. A kind of Khus Green, an Ochre yellow, and a flat, Sandstone Red, combine in ways I've never seen before, to form a modern facade rising a couple of stories out and up from the rising mountain, just next to a rustling brook. Despite all the bustle around us, the place made you feel silent from the inside, sensible of this time, the flowing river, the setting sun. A simple vegetarian dinner was served in a courtyard with low seating, partially enclosed and partially open to the night's sky. Steve's wide collection of Indian classical music gave the evening rhythm and mood. We chatted with a financier and his family, an anthropologist, and a yoga instructor who was also interested in political theory. Steve and Trupti floated in and out of the social space they had created. I remember thinking of how the soul of a resort, or any hospitality venture, rested in the personality of its entrepreneur. Steve's serenity anchored and organized the feeling of this place, and allowed its patrons to feel comfortable with themselves and with each other. How does one design experience? It seems a fundamental problem, for our mind's processes and therefore the business of the world seems so much focused on objects, products, things. But things only give us value, meaning and pleasure through their experience, and this is where life seems always to break down. For which architect can guarantee that your house will always be full of music and pleasant conversation? Our lives are filled up with increasingly intelligent objects, each of which promises more and more complex experiences, each designed by a consortium of technical, marketing, and branding gurus, to capture our distracted, wandering, attention, to fill up the stillness and composure of our being. Their products are all very well designed, but what of the design of our experience? In this intensely mediatized life-universe, I think each of us has a new responsibility to ourselves, to monitor and manage our own experience. We must think and act as designers of our own life-experience, seeking out the right balance between signal and silence. Top   In India Fashion Week, The Future of Indian Culture by Aditya Dev Sood     The history of Delhi can be told as a series of tents. The encampments of the Turks, of Babur, of Sher Shah Suri. Our architecture is the story of shamiana-s and kanath-s turning to stone, each bamboo becoming a flute, tapestries being inlaid into walls, canopies being frozen permanently into rising, undulating domes. So also the future of Delhi can be read from the tentage of our own times. Tents are necessary when no permanent place exists in the city for a new kind of activity, which cannot be housed in any existing architecture. This is the situation of Delhi's version of India Fashion Week, which was set up in enormous white air-conditioned tents, right on the corner of Okhla's Industrial Area. Getting in and out was the usual jhamela of uncertain car parking and security frisking, but once inside, something new, something now, about to be real, came into view. The tent felt as large as an airport, but perhaps one from the future. Stalls are selling cappuccinos and canapes, demoing Segways, and desperately repositioning varieties of technology as fashion. Men and women of all nationalities, races and ages, are dressed like a good acid trip, all happy and smiley but bizarre, a wide spectrum of ways to be normal. The Europeans are being edged out by the Koreans these days, who seem to on to this hot new Indian thing. Walking about the stalls of the trade show, I made notes on some of the challenges that our designers seem to be grappling with: First, there is the legacy of the past. The courtly traditions we have inherited from Mughal and Raj durbars are a major drag on Delhi's still neo-feudal social scene. How to pep this stodginess up, without completely giving up on one's fabric, textile and sewing history? No definitive revolution can be reported yet, but the days of Indian designers serving as high-achieving Ladies Tailors are surely over. One must still do it, to keep operations alive, just as one must serve the bridal market, but that's surely not the road ahead. Second, what do we do with the received sets of color palettes and motifs that make up India's fabric, tapestry and visual imaginaire? Here, regrettably, the answer is not new -- one must remix them, more violently and maniacally than Manish Arora, and then use them to create costumes that are familiar but dystopic. Third, what to do with the churidar-kurta and the sari? It's all very well for retro films set in the sixties, but really now, is that what we'll be wearing in the future? I saw one woman, perhaps a buyer, walking around in a salwar held up to her shoulders with fabric tape, like a pair of dungarees or maybe an inverted parachute. Abraham and Thakore showed churidars whose crotch slung way low, around the knees, like maybe a Dr. Seuss character might wear. Payal Jain showed a memorable sari-dress, which wound around itself and clasped tight on the shoulder, to offer a modern and flowing vision that still evoked the classic female silhouettes of Raja Ravi Verma. I'm beginning to see that there is a particular way to be Indian these days, that is cool the way American culture must have been in the early pre-dawn of its globalization, cool like Sinatra in his Rat Pack days. Achieving this kind of ineffable vibe, indefinable attitude is what Fashion is for. That's what it's trying to get out, express. Can you hear it calling? Top   Fashion as a Metaphor by Aditya Dev Sood Your correspondent has wrangled a place in the first elevated row, just behind the backless futons reserved for buyers. The Three Quarks Daily seat is adjacent to the New Indian Express (Calcutta) and The Man (monthly). Black bleachers cascade all along on either side of the runway. There are bells suspended above one end, just above the backboard with Payal Jain's name on it. On the other end, the jostling mosh-pit of camera men in five, no six layers, like the green toy soldiers that you may remember from childhood: sniper flat on the ground, aiming and firing on one knee, mortar loader, aiming while standing, platoon leader yelling. The lights go brighter for a moment before dimming, the music starts thumping, a thrill ripples through us all, and four models appear on the far end of the catwalk. Your correspondent has never been so aware of the dramatic tension between camera, focal length, object and field. The contemporary, globalizing fashion show, of course, is a media practice, which requires the collaboration and participation of so many players to create this sense of the new, the now, the it, which one can either be with, or else clueless about. Payal's models are wearing hoodies and head-scarves of many designs, and occasionally smocks that look also like Iranian chadors. Her literature says that the collection is inspired by the monastaries of Laos, which God love her, is surely exotic territory for all of us. The music is vaguely Enigma, perhaps remixed by Laotian monks.   All is expectation while the model is still walking towards you, but nothing prepares you for the odd way in which she walks right on past, going on vogue the cameras, which crackle like crickets in the darkness. Notwithstanding a couple of thousand years since the natyashastra defined abhinaya, the art of communicating emotion through facial expressions, the model is a blank slate and cipher. Perhaps it all makes sense, for the point is the clothes she is wearing, not the character she is playing. If her expression means anything at all it means I have something very important to tell you, but it's slung from my hips. As readers of this newspaper will no doubt be aware, the social life of clothing is estimated to have begun some 90,000 years ago, based on a reconstruction of the time taken for the strains of human head and body lice to have diverged from one another. This is also the point at which the first pigments, line drawings, visual representations are believed to have occurred. That was when we realized that bodies and things could adorn one another with meaning, creating socially individuated selves. And this is the eternally deferred, which is to say betrayed promise of the runway, that there is someone inhabiting that A-line smock, as opposed to a human mannequin, a professional zombie, someone who has trained herself so carefully to constrain her natural aura, to give off no scent of personhood. The lights come on, and just like that, we're done. The models are well choreographed, the clothes were structured into several layers and variations upon one another, and the show seems a success. Payal comes out at the end to take a bow with a small smile and folds her hands, namaskar, which might be the only tell, giveaway, that this is an Indian fashion show. It is an oddly formatted dramatic experience, about as long as a sit-com, with the musicality and vividness of a music video and without breaks for advertising. There is a mood and a set of associations conveyed, with neither character nor plot. It sits like empty calories in the gut, leaving you hungry, but for something more substantial. Payal comes from a family that has long been involved in garment exports. In the early nineties a series of billboards came up around South Delhi that announced her spring-summer collection. The idea was strange then, that some one in Delhi should proclaim themselves to be a fashion designer. For that you would have to go to New York or Paris, her classmates and cohort would have thought. Over time, though, Payal's collections have proved routinely innovative, continuously evolving, and responsive to the cultural trends and flows that have constitute India's present. Garment, Apparel and Trade Shows have meanwhile given over to Fashion Weeks and runway extravaganzas, more professionally organized by the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI), and more avidly consumed by the public through an Indian media industry that is still exploding, fragmenting and pixelating. And so, like so many of her fellows at the FDCI, Payal has moved from commodity manufacturing to intellectual property creation in a single generation. Fashion can serve us as a metaphor for the role of knowledge in the creation of value in India's still emerging economy. Throughout the world, the proper place for high costume was once the royal court, which is why it should only make sense that Fashion in its modern avatar should come from Paris, where they first rid themselves of kings and courtiers. In the absence of titled nobility to serve, high performing houses of craft manufacture was released unto themselves, freed up to first seek out patronage, and then to promote it. In the later half of the nineteenth century, these houses organized themselves as the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, a self-governing association that could promote couture, guide growth, perpetuate scarcity, and limit competition from any new purveyors of Fashion, at least within France. In India, the FDCI was set up, just eleven years ago, as direct heir and counterpoint to the Parisian Syndicale. One critical tool for the promotion of High Fashion houses was the Couture Parade, also invented in the late 19th century by Charles Frederick Worth, an English couturier working Paris, who had live models display an annual collection of his own designs, as distinct from the designs that might collaboratively emerge from the servicing of patrons. This shift in the pattern of creativity is central to modern fashion, for it is the taste of the designer, and not of the commissioning patron, that comes to be reflected in the suit. Now the customer may express taste by cultivating knowledge of designers and their work, leading directly to the necessity of fashion periodicals, image-making, mutual acknowledgment, in short the entire series of ricochets and reverberations, which constitute the discourse of Fashion. According to Fashion-maven Aparna Jain (no relation), the big three of Indian Fashion are Tarun Tahiliani, Manish Arora, and Rajesh Pratap Singh. Tahiliani has long been a major force, with modern society patrons that swear by him and see him as a living artiste who brings wonder into their life. He has shown collections for two decades now, and led the transition of Indian fashion from its sputtering starts to the steady confidence it now increasingly enjoys. The sheer volume of his annual production -- he owns a state of the art high quality production unit in Gurgaon -- means that he must cater to every segment of the market and all kinds of tastes, ranging from traditional updates to bridal finery to occasional experiments in global sophistication. Manish Arora, on the other hand, is the reigning enfant terrible of the fashion world, giddily remixing traditional motifs in acid colors, more intense than any Rajasthani or tribal costume, but ensuring enough of a field of white to Manish arora 2 appeal to global consumers seeking a taste of the new India. The acid remix of traditional India, whether in terms of street art and culture, or folk traditions, or courtly motifs is a strong trend in contemporary Indian fashion, for there is just so much stuff there, in the legacy of India's visual culture, and there is a still unsatisfied yearning to make all of it meaningful for contemporary lives and lifestyles. Rajesh Pratap Singh is a new entrant to the upper echelons of Indian fashion, and his work seems a more refined synthesis of so many different currents and themes in Indian visual culture. His stores are famous for being art installations in themselves, with screens made of tailoring scissors, or entire an entire long narrow store designed in the idiom of an Indian Railways carriage. He can do Indian alright, but he's cool about it, and tones it down a thousand while he's at it. Walking about the stalls of the trade show, your correspondent noted several different challenges to which designers are setting themselves. First, there is the legacy of the past. Courtly traditions from Mughal and post-Mughal states, repeated with minor variations throughout petty principalities through on up to the present are a major drag on Delhi's culture and still neo-feudal society. How to pep this stodginess up, without completely giving up on one's fabric, textile and sewing history? No definitive revolution can be reported yet, but the days of Indian designers serving as high-achieving Ladies Tailors are surely over. One must still do it, to keep operations alive, just as one must serve the bridal market, but that's surely not the road ahead. Second, what do we do with the received sets of color palettes and motifs that make up India's fabric, tapestry and visual imaginaire? Here, regrettably, the answer is not new -- one must remix them, more violently and maniacally than Manish Arora, and then use them to create costumes that are familiar but dystopic. It is a stage we are still going through, but the light of beauty still promises to shine through the cacophony of it all. Third, what to do with the churidar-kurta and the sari? It's all very well for retro films set in the sixties, but really now, what will we be wearing in the future? I saw one woman walking around wearing a salwar held up to her shoulders with fabric tape, like a pair of dungarees, or maybe an inverted parachute. I saw churidars whose crotch slung way low, around the knees, like maybe a Dr. Seuss character might wear. Payal herself showed a memorable sari-dress, which wound around itself and clasped tight on the shoulder, to offer a modern and flowing vision that evoked the classic female silhouettes of Raja Ravi Varma. Outside, the lobby feels as large as an airport, but perhaps one from the future. Men and women of all nationalities, races and ages, are dressed like a good acid trip, all happy and smiley but bizarre. Bow-ties on denim shirts and thick black frames with psuedo-mohawks and other irregular accessories abound, a wide spectrum of ways to be normal. So far as the firang contingent goes, it looks to me that the Euros are being edged out by the Koreans these days, whose boutiques must be looking for this next cutting-edge corner of the fashion world. I'm slowly beginning to understand that there is a particular way to be Indian these days, that is as cool as Sinatra must have been in his Rat Pack days, cool the way American culture must have been in the pre-dawn of its globalization, and this ineffable vibe, indefinable attitude is what Indian Fashion is for. That's what it's trying to get out, express. And maybe that's all clothes ever can ever tell us -- how you're trying to be, how I feel about that, what we can do together given what I happen to be wearing. That's what becomes possible, back in the runway of life, even if not actually in the Fashion Show.   Top   The Design of Invisible Things by Aditya Dev Sood It is that time again, when we celebrate the complex ways in which bodies and things adorn one another. I'm speaking, of course, of India Fashion Week, which began with a sputter a couple of decades ago, but has grown in complexity and seriousness to become one of the large organizing principles of Indian public life, along with Bollywood and Cricket, with whom it is often in bed. Oh, I mean that in a good way, the best way possible! I'll come back with more on Fashion Week in a fortnight, once it's actually over and done with. For the moment, I want to ask why design is always associated with things that we can see? Let's think about industries for whom design is most important. What comes to mind? Apparel, of course, because again, this is India Fashion Week, but also Accessories, Jewelry, Watches, Handbags, Shoes... There is a lot of fashion and styling on this list! What's that you say? Mobile phones, yes, very true. The design of mobile devices has become very important. And also laptops. But also Home Media devices of all kinds, Televisions and iPod docks. And what about Washing-Machines, Refrigerators, Microwaves? The entire so-called White-Goods sector. So let's look over this list a bit, and try to find a common thread: First of all, these are all things one could buy in a mall -- well, perhaps a high-end mall in case of the fashion items. Perhaps on account of that fact, one might say that consumers exercise some degree of control over which product they buy, from among a range of competing options. And that moment of consumer decision-making is determined by an evaluation of the maker's name and reputation, the visual appeal of the product, and its price-point. One approach to thinking about design is to say that designers are responsible for that 'visual appeal' part of selling something to a consumer. So, a great many things on our list above are what they are -- a pair of pants that looks cool to you when you try it on, will still be cool when you wear them out. But think of something like a mobile phone, or a washing machine, anything that you have to interact with in complex ways. Here it's not just about the visual appeal of the product, but what it does or doesn't do for you. How willingly it understands and responds to your intentions. How much frustration it causes you and those around you because it doesn't understand you and you don't understand it, and instead of pleasure and ease, it is pain all around, and you swear that you will never, ever, buy Brand X again! That design must encompass the question of how things work in relation to you is a relatively new idea, anywhere in the world. It emerged, to be sure, with the advent of complex devices like computers, whose value could only be fully realized when they could be made to interact easily with a large number of users. This newer strand of design thinking goes by many names, Usability Design, Human Factors Design, Interaction design. I prefer the long-handed User Experience Design, although I'm not rigid about it. So next time at the mall, remember it's not all about the wow or the show, but the sweetly invisible flow, between you and the world of things in your life. Top   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. 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.   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.   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. 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. Top
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