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At this event, we would love to hear you share some of your design experiences and philosophies with us, sir. We request you to speak during the morning slot on the first day (June 28th) for a duration of 20 minutes (+ 10 minutes for addressing any questions) on any topic.....

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It is requested to kindly make a presentation of half an hour on vision for our undergraduate programme during the faculty meeting scheduled on 5th March, 2014 at 11 a.m. in the Conference Room.

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Project Progress Presentation:Each student should present in 10 minutes.

Summer Internship Presentation:Present in not more than 10 minutes.

Research Project presentation:Don’t take more than 15 minutes to present your research.

Final Project presentationHow much time you will take? Try to finish in 20 minutes.

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20 MinutesThe constraint of available time in Design Education

Everybody is always busy.

There is never enough time for anything.

A recent phenomenon.

Every activity is to be finished in a fixed and limited time,

to be submitted by the due date.

Same day.In one week.In one month.In one term.

as dictated by the time-table.

Time Table decides

how much time to spend on something,

not the task.

There is never time to keep doing something

till it is well done.

MFA Programme at MS University of Baroda

When the students enter the programme, they are not masters.

However, after two years, exactly on the same dateevery one becomes a Master.

Master of Fine Arts in Painting

Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture.

IDC

Master of Design

in two years

What does it mean?

To Master something ?

To become a Master ?

To become a Master is

an open-ended pursuit.

Acquiring skills is not enough

to make one a Master.

Not all become Masters.

Students pass when they get 33% marks.

You either know how to make chapati, or don’t. What does it mean to know 33% chapati-making?

- Acharya Vinoba Bhave

The agreed recipe for making

Masters in Two Years

Spending 12 days each per semester as decided

by the curriculum, on certain subjects,

makes one a Master of Design.

The time has come to revisit this approach.

The shift from Material Economy

to Knowledge and Creative Economy.

Excellence in creativity and innovation

creates the true wealth of a nation

The Centre of World Creativity has shifted to Asia.

The Time of Asia has come.Japan. China. Korea. Hong Kong. Taiwan.

India held in great regard by Asians, for its great intellectual and visual creativity.

Many of the great ideas of Asian countries owe their origin and inspiration to India – the Jagadguru.

The Time of India has also come.To dazzle the world with its creativity.

How is India responding?How is India’s Design Education System responding?

The situation is as dismal as our performance in the Olympics.

A School of Design, like IDC, should primarily

be a place which nurtures excellence.

How does one nurture excellence in

creativity and innovation?

One can neither rush excellence,

nor issue an order.

‘In two years Soviet Design will be the best in

the world, because I have issued an order to

all my designers in the Soviet Union to

become the best in the world.’

-Yuri Soloviev, Head, Industrial Design, USSR

during a visit to IDC in the ‘70s

How to nurture excellence?

1

One has to learn to recognize excellence.

Directly, by personal experience.

By repeatedly making something better and

better, till the object tells you it can’t get any

better.

In the present system one never comes

face-to-face with excellence of one’s own

creation, because the project is considered

complete, when the time is over.

Usually the project gets over when even the first version

is incomplete and unsatisfactory.

One never ever reaches the stage of refining it.

One never encounters excellence

in one’s own creation.

“God has prescribed perfection

for all things”

Ihsan (Perfection)

A Sense of Beauty and Virtue

Beauty is a Divine quality always relating back

to

the One

God has made the world

beautiful and perfect.

Everything we make should be

worthy of being in this world.

Who has created the Seven Heavens? You see no fault in the creation of the Most Gracious. Look at the

heavens, can you see any cracks?

Al-Qur’an 67.4

To Create like God

one needs to integrally understand the order

in nature which effortlessly creates beauty

and perfection. To understand the structures,

processes and algorithms which ensure

perfection.

Understanding the way of God’s Creation

These are iterative processes, which

progressively refine and define a solution.

Not one-stop ideas.

2

By living and working with greats (Gurus)

Guru = Big, Great

Guru = Teacher

Gurutvakarshana

The attraction of Bigness

My teachers at

The Royal College of Art,

London, 1972-1974

Sir Misha Black, Frank Height,

David Herman-Powell, Dr Bruce Archer,

Michael Starling, Lou Klein, John Hedgecoe

Kohei Sugiura

my Guru who teaches without teaching

In our present system,

teachers have no time to become Gurus.

They are completely busy conducting courses, attending

presentations, setting and checking assignments, attending

meetings, managing facilities, writing proposals, conducting

exams, and getting angry at students

because they don’t excel.

They have no time

to become great themselves.

From Instructors, they become managers,

fund-getters, and delegate work to research

staff, TAs and students.

Many stop being designers.

In Design,

great insights come from

being engaged in the act of design.

Students have no time

to pursue their own passions. They are

completely busy attending courses, making

presentations, submitting assignments,

meeting deadlines, attending meetings,

working as TAs, doing as told, writing reports,

writing exams, and getting depressed because

they don’t like what they are doing.

The Students are very busy.

The Instructors are very busy.

Everybody is always busy,

nothing significant ever gets done.

3

Living in an environment of excellence.

Surrounded by excellence, to be a part of a

culture of excellence.

Sensitivity to excellence

develops only in such an environment.

Signage at the entrance of IDC

Light fitting and security cabin at entrance foyer

Granite joinery at Lift entrance

Newly painted window frame

Wiring and light at the Design Circle

Lift interior

Water-cooler space

Door of main office

Construction quality at IIT Convention Centre

Signage in IIT

It is too easy to get accustomed to living in

shabbiness and shallowness,

to consider it good enough,

and never be aware of the depths of

excellence

Two day’s exposure to Typography should be

enough for all Interaction Design students

- a suggestion by a senior faculty member in

course review discussion

In a typographically illiterate country like India,

the suggestion just demonstrates the

shallowness of one’s knowledge about

Typography –

intellectually the most demanding of all design

disciplines.

One must make the transition from

the shallow superficiality of the surface,

before one encounters excellence.

One must learn to live in depth.

Can you feel the blood circulation of

letterforms ?

The question by Prof Kohei Sugiura years ago, led to a

quest, where one can now feel the blood circulation of

letterforms.

4

The urge to excel requires being deeply

passionate about something, and pursuing it

relentlessly. The passion drives the journey to

excellence.

When there is no time to explore and

discover one’s inner nature,

when one agrees to be locked in the tyranny

of fixed time-tables and obediently and

dutifully doing only as told by others;

such a system is guaranteed

to kill all possibilities of any excellence

ever emerging.

The best design schools in the world,

allow complete freedom and provide

open-ended learning environments.

The Royal College of Art,

London, 1972-1974

No formal coursesNo fixed assignmentsNo time-tableNo grading

One planned what one wanted to do, RCA supported it.

Architectural Association School of Architecture

No compulsion to attend classes.

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What the AA seeks above all are self-motivated students who are able to bring with them interesting personal, professional and other academic qualities that will allow them to contribute to a school filled with like-minded students and staff.

Students learn best by working in small, highly focused groups around a single tutor or team for an entire year, allowing them to direct their own path through a school.

L S Lee School of Creativity, Hong Kong

Lets do something interesting, something we'd like.

Let's Upgrade Ourselves

There are various projects going on at the Haja Center. Youth can choose and participate in whatever project they are interested in and that they would like to try by themselves. In the process, they teach and learn from each other at the same time.

Dept of Visual Communication, Xinhua University, Beijing

It takes time, great effort, total focus, and

complete and passionate involvement of

one’s whole being to work towards

excellence.

The best that a design school can do

is to let individuals experience

the joy of creating excellence,

and set them on the path of

an open-ended life-long journey.

Once acquired, excellence flows effortlessly

and naturally.

Vibrant BooksMethods and Philosopy of Kohei Sugiura’s Design

designing like God

The Work of Prof Kohei Sugiura

An endless flow of creativity and excellence.

Centres of Learning must help the students

and the educators to flower naturally.

- J. Krishnamurti

If a place like IDC, where the best of young

Indian minds come, does not see its role

primarily as a place to nurture excellence,

who will?

Let us do great things together

May our studies shine

-Invocation by the teacher and the student

The Earth bows under his walk.

– description of the walk of a confident student.

Presentation made in 20 minutes by Kirti Trivedi at the Degree Show Conference at IDC, IIT Bombay

on 28 June 2014.