Director’s Foreword

Designing Services

Sometime ago, Design was mostly preoccupied with designing products and images as a response to existing problems or requirements. Design’s real strength is now being increasingly discovered in creating scenarios, envisaging new contexts and giving shape to many intangibles in the form of ‘Services’. Design was also, by and large, perceived as an elitist activity and the time value of design, sensory delights and exclusivity have been the major considerations over the years.

In recent times, Design is perceived as being necessarily concerned with larger meta issues such as ‘sustainability’, ‘global warming’, eco-friendliness and creation of more human centric products and services. Another trend has been a spin-off of service-led economies by which services are seeking to become ‘designed experiences’. More and more technology-enabled services have assumed a critical role in influencing quality of Life. For instance, the mobile phone, is today seen as an identity which cuts across caste, income barriers, creed, social status, and all such existing discriminating factors. This palm sized device has delivered a whole new world to common consumers especially, in large populated countries like India and many parts of Asia and South East Asia. I had alluded two years ago to democratization of design through technology enabled services when I had proposed the concept of ‘Design Democracy’ in South Africa and later recently in San Francisco, USA.

Services are transforming human lives and India has already become a service-driven economy. Empowerment of people can be seen in the number of ‘solutions’ around us that have been enabled by technology and through e-enabled services. I am also greatly impressed that common people have been to large extent beneficiaries in this case who are able to derive great benefit from the new information and communication technologies. Most importantly, these technologies have become very inexpensive whether it is mobile phone, skype, e-banking, e-auctions, matrimonial / job sites, e-ticketing, e-greetings or hundreds of other services available at the click of the mouse.

Design education has been too much preoccupied with form, function, image, aesthetics and clever juxta-positioning of uses etc. I find that there is a bridge that needs to be built to create designed experiences and services that democratize design, making them more inclusive and affordable. Affordability has many models today as proven through Google’s services.

I would be very happy to see in the coming years our design students becoming more in sync with the emerging possibility of ‘designing services’. In a way, this is Design’s Fifth Dimension which is the theme of this years’ convocation.

With the announcement, in February 2007, of the first National Design Policy, for which we all had worked really hard, we do see clearly a greater resurgence of opportunities for Indian design. I am very proud of the achievement of our students in various fields and need to compliment the entire faculty and staff team who make it possible for the students to hone and shape their skills and knowledge during their stay at the Institute.

I wish the Graduating Students the very best and invite them to explore in the coming days, the new frontiers of design especially Service Design by constantly challenging themselves.

Dr Darlie Koshy
Director, NID