Mumbai: “Good design is good business,” said Thomas J. Watson Jr., IBM’s second CEO. When Mr. Watson said that, sometime in the 1950s, Sudhakar Nadkarni was studying graphic design at the JJ School of Art in Mumbai.
As a boy, young Sudhakar loved drawing; he would decorate school magazines and help out his neighbour, a signboard painter. This led to a keen interest in graphic design, and with some parental encouragement, he joined the Department of Commercial Design at the JJ School of Art. (Later, the word ‘commercial’ changed to ‘applied’ and it became the School of Applied Arts). “At the time, the course focussed on skills: drawing, illustration,” he says in a phone interview, “but did not talk about things like what communication design is, how information flows around, how to translate information into a graphic form.” While in college, he also worked on events and exhibitions (including ones with legends Charles Correa and Pupul Jaykar), which “helped me develop a three-dimensional view of space, and how to place objects around it.” He then joined an advertising agency.
In the early 60s, a mentor, Yashwant Chaudhary (later responsible for the ICICI logo) had just got back from Switzerland, full of exciting design stories and theories. This got Mr. Nadkarni thinking about design in a different way from the existing discourse in India.
In 1962, Mr. Nadkarni counted his savings, took a deep breath, quit his cushy job, and went off to the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG; literally, College of Design) in Ulm, Germany, to study product design, a field not many in India had even heard of. He didn’t even speak German at the time. At HfG, he studied theories and philosophies of design and communication (one of his projects responded to Jawaharlal Nehru’s ideas of nation building; it was called ‘How design can help in national planning and developmental programs’.)
Then, a stroke of luck happened. His project guide at HfG was invited by Gautam and Gira Sarabhai to help set up the National Institute of Design. And when Mr. Nadkarni finished his course in Ulm, he was invited to return and pass on his learnings at NID as an Associate Professor. He came back to a developing nation that wanted to maximise the impacts of its spends on its people. In the Sarabhais, he found kindred spirits. “Gira was an architect and Gautam a mathematician, and they already had a great exposure of American design themes. So, I went into an environment conducive to my interests.”
Around then, India’s Education Ministry had sent a team to HfG to understand design education. “They already wanted to start a design programme,” Prof. Nadkarni remembers. “There was also an unemployment problem, especially among engineers. So, they thought, why not start one at IIT Bombay?” Of this was born, in 1969, the Industrial Design Centre (IDC), offering Masters degrees in both Product and Communication Design, with Prof. Nadkarni at the helm. There were initial syllabus issues — “At IDC, we wanted to have 30% lectures, 70% practical. At IIT it was the other way around.” — but his view prevailed. He headed IDC for 18 years.
In 1997, he was invited to found the Department of Design at IIT Guwahati. He found himself fascinated by bamboo, which grows profusely in the region. “They were making cane and bamboo baskets, which isn’t really enough to financially sustain them. I thought I should work out different type of products that would. I took to areas like school and hospital furniture made of bamboo and cane, so they could be purchased and, when necessary, repaired locally.”
His next stint was at the Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research (We-School), where, from 2003, he led two-year MBA programme in Business Design. He currently serves as Professor Emeritus, Business Design. Aside from his academic and institution-building work, Prof. Nadkarni also collaborated with Mr. Correa again — including on Vistara, the traveling exhibition of Indian architecture, and CIDCO’s city planning project in Navi Mumbai — and did projects with Larsen & Toubro, Mahindra, and the Tatas, though in his words, they’re “so many, I’ve forgotten them now!”
Through it all, he has focussed on proliferating good design knowledge, of going beyond the conventional understanding of the field — making nice-looking things — to designing real-time, tangible user interfaces with items and objects that make things go smoother, in real life situations, in urban and rural spaces. In short, to create a better standard of living. His incredible journey gives Prof. Nadkarni a unique perspective on Indian design and its future. What, we asked, would he consider ‘Indian’ design? “When you write in English or Hindi, the grammar is same. Similarly, the grammar of design is the same across the world. It’s how you use it in different environments that matters. Our habits, postures, way of living is different, so if you take that in consideration and develop a product it becomes Indian design! It is when you solve social or functional problems in India through design. This is where innovation comes from, and this is what I am trying to do through my course at We-School!”
The Design Journey of Prof. Sudhakar Nadkarni , by Mandar Rane, published by IDC, launches today at the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay, Powai.
