Last week I was given the opportunity to participate in a workshop sponsored by the AIDI (Association of Industrial Designers of India). The deliberations of the event were intended to inform the implementation of India’s national design policy. It was a sort of pre-conference workshop held just before the Leadership Through Design conference here in Bangalore (more on that later). Many design professionals and educators came together from across India and the world to develop strategies and actionable recommendations.
There were a handful of breakout groups, each dealing with a different focus area. These were: Education (Srishti was a partner), Design Parks (these are intended to be urban design “hubs”), Branding and Communication of Indian Design (ahh, identity politics), Culture, Environment, Social Development & Effective Public Spending (the ‘everything else’ category), and Competitive Advantage by Design (my group).
All in all, it was interesting to gain a sense of how this is being approached. India is, after all, partially concerned with having a dialogue about such things. Could you even imagine a national design policy in the United States, much less a dialogue about it?!! So in that respect, I have to give those that have put in heir time and energy a LOT of credit. Mind you that this policy is seen as a partial solution to India’s competitiveness on the global scene. My impression is that by having a national design policy, India can put it’s financial, intellectual, and social capital resources into creating better solutions and opportunities…at least that’s what one would hope.
Designing for Competitiveness
Our group was fairly well mixed with Indian-based designers, design managers, and even two professionals from major U.S. design firms. Needless to say there was a lot of expertise willing to put their heads together and try to identify how India could become more competitive in design and design thinking. I hate to say it, but I do think we were hampered a bit by our group facilitator. Given the combined problem-solving techniques that the group had at its disposal, it was a bit disheartening that we took as long as we did to develop heuristics to accomplish the task. Every time we got something going, our facilitator would step in and question the approach, needlessly diverting our efforts. Nonetheless, we took it on and made a lot of progress in the end.
We started by brainstorming challenges and ways to build India’s competitiveness in design. Each of these was placed on a post-it and then one of the group members got the process going by verbally grouping them into common themes (my favorite which got lost in the end was ‘Design for Corruption’). That seemed to work because it got us to the next stage which was to develop further those ideas into specific strategies. We decided to split up into two groups because we were short on time and we had ten themes to work through. At the end of the day, each of the main groups got up and presented their deliberations. I’ll list them at the end, but before I do I want to address two things that really bothered me and that I want to avoid in future interactions like these.
Group Dynamics
The first was that one of the other groups (Design Parks) spent a lot of time deliberating around the issues. I am close friends with on of the participants from that group and he told me that the recommendations that were presented were not actually the ones discussed! It seems that the leader had actually prepared a powerpoint before the day even started with his recommendations and then presented that to the entire assembly. I do remember that the presentation looked way too good, but I didn’t ask. I guess the lesson is that we have to aim and ensure that the deliberations around these kinds of things are genuine. I’m not saying that his were bad ideas. I just don’t know why people’s time was wasted if their work wasn’t going to be represented. I didn’t participate in the group so I really don;t know what happened, but it certainly sends the wrong kind of message.
The second was that we “americans” really did create an imbalance in the conversation. I don’t know if it had to do with language (I doubt it) or what, but our Indian colleagues really backed off. This bothered me. I couldn’t tell if they were following our lead or that they just felt uncomfortable. Not all did of course. When we split into two groups though, one of the groups was entirely composed on people who either were from or worked in the U.S. I don’t think it was intentional, but it certainly was cultural in the sense that I wanted to just get to work and the group that just started doing it seemed to nucleate. Then again, I can’t really say how the other group formed. In any case, I was disappointed because group level diversity is something I try to implement, especially when approaching roblems like these. I don’t know how important it was in the end; you can judge by the recommendations. Can you guess which is which? I’ll give you a hint. One group did five themes; another did four.
Networked Design
I am convinced that two of the themes our group proposed are critical. ‘Human Power’ (or social capital) and ‘Designers and Opportunities’ seem to be the key distinction in terms of what it is that designers actually do. By bringing together concerns, ideas, methods, and interactions from all over, designers leverage their own social capital to bring something into existence. Designers (like artists) do this because they can sense opportunity, much like entrepreneurs. How we develop our abilities to sense these opportunities is what will make new innovation possible. Bringing that innovation into existence only happens when good ideas are encouraged and allowed to form from the opportunities that social capital provides.
Here is an example of how new opportunities could be realized. Hidalgo, et al. (see below) argue that “The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations”. The authors use a network analysis of the relatedness among products to show that more sophisticated products (such as those exported by industrial, developed nations) are more closely connected. Their assumption is that “the ability of a country to produce a product depends on its ability to produce other ones.” They measure this in part by using the overlap among markets (read: concerns) for exported products. This has definite implications for the artist-designer that seeks to build relationships between people, services, and things as a design strategy. By creating and making dense connections, designers have a greater chance of developing new hybrids or artifacts that satisfy multiple concerns (cute and cuddly, for example). This is the essence of interdisciplinary strategy and approach.
Take a look at these graphs from the Hidalgo, et al. article*. On the far left are all nations combined along with a key. India is in the middle and the US is on the right. The thing to notice from this comparison is the distribution of the squares versus circles. Circles are the overall network. Squares denote the “revealed competitive advantage” for the product for that country. Thus, squares are where the country has an advantage. As you can see products which are more closely related (such as those that form dense clusters) are those that give the U.S. a competitive advantage. In India, the square tend to be at the periphery (in textiles and garments, for instance). The point is that so-called innovation is happening in these dense clusters. If designers begin to form networks and social capital among these disconnected hubs of innovation and expertise, then they may be able to leverage these as opportunities for innovation. Maybe that small metal cluster between garments and textiles needs to be remixed. Bronze kurtas anyone? Better yet, take a look at the electronics cluster and maybe we’ve got electric saris on the way!
*The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations.
C. A. Hidalgo. R. B. Klinger, A.-L. Barabasi, R. Hausmann.
Science 317, 482-487 (2007)
