Design, Change and Me - A post written for the India Design Project

Design – the word I heard the most as I was growing up. The meaning of the word changed for me multiple times. As a child, it used to be something that my parents spoke about very often, and discussed over dinner, when they weren’t too busy telling me to swallow my food and “get on with it.” It became a topic that I had witnessed several people have arguments about, as I pranced around the corridors of NID as a child. The conversations I used to overhear revolved around juries, assignments, diploma projects, graduate shows and convocations. I used to wander in and out of the Foundation and Exhibition design studios, watching students working on their projects, listening to music and discussing things with their mentors, two of them being my parents, Nilam Iyer and Siddhartha Ghosh. Several students used to tell me that they were petrified of my mom because she was strict and a perfectionist of sorts. I used to wonder what they were talking about until one day I understood what they meant.I was sitting in the Foundation classroom (which had no walls at the time) and doing my homework, while my mother was conducting a class. Her students were working on their assignments and she was walking around checking their work with a magnifying glass and a ruler. One student called out to her saying he had finished. As she was checking his work, she pointed out to a line he had drawn and said, “this is half a centimeter off the centre, do it again” The students sitting around him exchanged glances and started rechecking all their measurements. Sitting in the corner I wondered how many times the students had to work on their assignments if she didn’t approve of them. On the way home, I asked her why she wanted everything to be so perfect and why she couldn’t just let people be.“You can’t make mistakes when it comes to measuring. They are in a design course for heaven’s sake. If they can’t calculate and measure properly, what’s the point?” she said. I had nothing to say. That day, for the first time in my life, I was glad she didn’t teach me.My father had the most amazing handwriting and everyone knew about it. Wherever I went, people used to tell me how they admired his handwriting, and of course, considering I had horrible writing at the time, it annoyed me. His love for calligraphy used to reflect in the different projects he used to undertake, and the things he used to teach me about presentation. Design was a very integral part of both their lives and was something that both of them held very close to their heart. Be it designing the exhibitions at museums for my father or working with leather, wood and making educational toys for my mother, they were both passionate about design and their work. Design and the understanding of it has changed a lot in the last decade. I remember when I was in school and people used to ask me what my parents did. At hearing the phrase, “they are designers” everyone used to assume that it was fashion designing that their profession entailed. These days, people understand that there are more fields in design than just fashion and they are aware that each sector is becoming increasingly important as the times change.NID as an institute has changed over the years in several ways – the aura of the place, the attitudes, some of the infrastructure and certain procedures, but then again so has design. Designers today, from various colleges and coaching centers across the country, understand design in a different way than what the traditionalists taught and were taught by their mentors. It reflects strongly in their work and attitude towards it. From becoming an extremely creative field, I am starting to feel like there are restrictions being created around design. In my own communication design class in college, I am stunned by the kind of things I was being taught. Design elements are important, but so is creativity. Everyone cannot be called a designer if they are doing the exact same thing as everyone else. NID, back in the day, used to have large open classrooms, whereas now, there are temporary walls and cabins that replace those airy classrooms. It is almost like drawing a box and asking one to think inside it and be creative at the same time. I love seeing the displays in NID where so many of their faculty and ex-students are honoured or visiting NIDUS to see what shape design is taking today. Of course, there is a strange and unsettling feeling of not seeing the old familiar faces smiling at you in the long corridors of the building, but everyone changes or goes some day. It’s the legacy that they leave behind that matters.