Fourth Annual PUKAR Lecture

Design Education in a Globalizing World

PUKAR’s Fourth Annual Lecture was held on June 21st, 2007. The theme of the lecture was “Design Education in a Globalizing World”. The keynote address was delivered by Tim Marshall, Dean, Parsons The New School for Design. The proceedings were moderated by Arjun Appadurai, President of PUKAR’s Board of Trustees.

The evening lecture was held at the NCPA and was attended by academicians, students, design professionals and planners from Mumbai.Tim Marshall began by sharing how he sees the construction ‘design’ – as the ‘object’, which is a result of designing; as the ‘process’, which includes the means of designing as well as the process of production; and as ‘agency’ – how designers interact with the world around them.

He opined that designing is increasingly understood as an expertise in process rather than just the product or act of designing. He urged that design education should embrace other faculties and be transdisciplinary, primarily to include social research and management principles - it would help a designer to know about a variety of topics ranging from how paper and ink are made to sociology and politics, in order to arrive at new designs, to help people imagine their lives differently.

He also expressed a need to integrate design process into general education as a basic competence.Bringing attention to the globally emerging urban and environmental challenges, Mr. Marshall said that the need of the hour was to break down the ‘Engineering’ or infrastructural approach to design and acquire and understanding to connect to how life is and feels. In this connection, he said that designers would have to collaborate with experts from other fields to sharpen the process of designing. He gave the example of a team that was designing an airport – they took the help of dancers to understand how bodies move in space – to create a viable people-friendly design.

In his response to the keynote address, Arjun Appadurai shared his understanding of design: Design includes elements of art, engineering and merchandising. He also said that design could not make sense without the market, to the extent that design creates things to be consumed by the market.

In the context of a city like Mumbai, Prof. Appadurai said it was necessary to see how design & planning go together. Social life is always the object of design in some way, but there are political questions – who makes the design? Who executes it? Who pays for it? He observed that it was time to make design people-friendly and people-driven.

The audience participated enthusiastically in the open dialogue that followed, sharing their comments and posing questions about design education approaches in Mumbai’s institutes and the role designers could play in making the city more liveable.

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