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Design is a very old human activity that started with the first steps taken by mankind when they attempted to change their environment for their convenience or to make the first tool to enhance their ability to do some work or to protect themselves. It is a product of thought and deliberate action that is driven by intentions and imagination. The early acts of grasping with the hands leading to the placing of the thumb in opposition to the fingers and palm had resulted in the unprecedented growth of the brain that is yet to be explained by science of today. The fact that grasping and its corelation with the sudden explosion of the brain size has been documented and accepted, the explanation as to why and how this dramatic evolution happened has eluded us so far.
If design is indeed that old, why does it slip our attention when it is critically needed in solving problems of our times? Why do we have slums, and catastrophes that are as yet unmanageable in our "designed" cities, organisations and in our everyday lives? To understand this dilema we must look at how we have developed our knowledge resources to help solve these very same dilemas and also understand why these abilities are failing us in this modern age of rich information access and archived scientific knowledge.
For me, design is a very old human activity that evolved gradually and reached a very high degree of refinement and resolution in our villages and living spaces of our traditional societies in the pre-industrial age. This craft based evolution was permitted by the interplay of time and the ingenuity of the local craftsman and local leadership, which created a vast body of traditional wisdom, that is today still embedded in the rural and village life in places such as India. The Indian village is unique since it has had a long period of undisturbed evolution till it was rudely disturbed by the arrival of ubiquitous communication and globalisation in the post independence era. The Indian village survived the vagaries of the industrial revolution since it could form a self sustaining loop of local requirements and the historical stage of village evolution ensured that it had reached a level of autonomous existence based on the availability of local resources for the most part and with very little dependence on the external world by way of trade or social contacts, although this did exist, it was not absolutely essential for survival.
Today this kind of design, at a fundamental level of form-giving, has all but been forgotten by the mainstream and it is replaced by a form of professional activity that is seen as dealing more with aesthetics rather than with the fundamental structure and meaning production systems of our society. This needs to change in an era where science and technology are being placed at the hub of our decision making pathways when they can only provide information and knowledge about the world and not about what is desirable to be done to the world. So while technology tells us what is possible we do need to look at design with its participative and integrating methods to find out what is desirable and valuable for a sustainable future. It is therefore my argument that education, business and governance must reestablish contact with this very old discipline which has got sidelined in our belief in specialisation and in our proclivity to the use explicit knowledge resources even in situations when values and feelings need to be the decision drivers and not analytic facts couched in scientific arguments.
Design as it is now being understood at the strategic level of application is a modern human activity that can help create the products and services of the future within the constraints of our context. The future is unknowable by any scientific investigation but it can be envisaged and chosen by us through the use of design visualisation and the application of design judgment. According to Harrold Nelson and Eric Stolterman in their very readable book " The Design Way", the process of design is the path of human intentions being pursued by the designer or user of design through the stages of exploration, composition, judgment and action. The stages are iterative and the designer revisits the previous stages to develop conviction and build support for the next move forward towards the articulation of the design form and structure. The process of design does not end here with the action that realises a product, service or change in the environment. It is still in need of active support from the stake-holders and in need of promotion and nurturing if it is to succeed and become sustainable.
Design, unlike science and technology, is not about finding a fundamental truth or about finding what is possible with a material, situation or context. It is about the realisation of our intentions in a desirable manner that can give us a better future, even if the future that we seek is unknowable.
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