The Face of Contemporaty Indian Design

It is and has always been true (with respect to art n design) that the "contemporary "has no form or face and will be "defined" only in the future.

True design really goes much beyond the visual parameters.So I am not going to be talking only about the visual aspects.

However, would like to say that its one thing to design for an Indian consumer(keeping in mind the cultural need gaps ), "Development of Indian design/style" another. From a consumer's point of view, we as designers need to fill the existing gaps, rather holes and thus are born utility - based products. In my opinion, these are hard core products, which have more utility and less emotion. Now this, is far removed from the Indian design ideology/language. At this point itself, I'd like to make a slight deviation and would go on to ask you all, which nation in your opinion, has managed to develop a strong, continual design language and would stick to it for atleast 50 more years?

In this era of globalization, its very difficult as well as nearly impossible to have a distinctively Indian design style. There are infinite influences from across the globe that are perpetually altering the way we think , the way we perceive. The world has never ever changed so hurriedly. We define things for ourselves today and our definitions are challenged tomorrow and we begin to think all of it, all over again. In this constant turmoil, its extremely difficult to pin point to one way of thinking and label it Indian or for that matter even French or Italian.The irony is that today an American understands the Indian culture more thoroughly than an Indian. I then, do not understand how design can be confined to borders.

Coming back to the fact about aping the west and the repackaging bit, this is only a reassertion of the fact that innovation and originality is almost missing from our work culture. Our profit centric approach and the unrelenting pressure to achieve targets has severely weeded out the urge to innovate among us designers. I cannot say about others, but I strongly feel this has happened. I was a more original person before NIFT and on a lighter note, as they say, "I was born intelligent, education ruined me".

Like the alternate design approach wherein the user becomes the designer so to speak, I am sure there could be many more approaches circling around. I am not an expert and I cannot say precisely how closely related or unrelated design is from profitability, but to achieve an original design language, somewhere the ropes need to be loosened. Many big firms are emphasizing Research & Design and incubating what are called Innovation cells, where the ideas shall be allowed to flow freely, many a grave mistakes would be overlooked ,interactions between manufacturer,consumer, designer,technologist etc shall be encouraged,short term profits and targets would be taboo and the outcome of this indefinitely long experiment may provide us the next best definition of "true design".