Explorations in Design Anthropology HM 330 Padmini Hegde 201114009 3/29/2012
Design awards aimed at diffusing best practices in product design have become an important part of the design industry worldwide. Although a number of studies have advocated that design awards are increasingly and widely perceived as a model for world-class firms in global design competitions, less attention has been paid to the explorations of their values. The primary question addressed in this paper is whether the introduction of “I-mark” can be located in an appropriate context of design thinking. In the course of this paper, I will be referring to the ideas of design process as explicated from the writings of Balaram and Papanek. Introduction to I-mark: India Design Mark is a design standard, a symbol, which signifies design quality. India Design Council grants India Design Mark after evaluating good design through a systemized process. India Design Mark is initiated in cooperation with Good Design Award, Japan. Designed by Yusaku Kamekura, the G-Mark has had a strong nation-building agenda from the beginning, hoping that design would be able to pull Japan out of its post-WWII depression. Created by the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization (JIDPO), the focus was on raising “product quality” and advancing “lifestyle and industry.” Its timing was perfect – the world of international design already had its eyes on Japan, and the game-changing days of Sony were yet to come. The JIDPO now gives the G-Mark to designs from neighboring countries as well. Winners may use the G-Mark free for one month, after which they have to pay the JIDPO an annual fee for the privilege of promoting their products with the mark. According to JIDPO, design links industry and private lives, and creates a virtuous cycle to build a prosperous society. Design's ability to paint a picture of our near future is first embraced by the public. If design can pick up on the public's will and present specific measures to earn its support, design will be able to play a major role in moving society forward. The Good Design Awards is a social tool to generate the virtuous cycle described above. Similarly, through India Design Mark, the India Design Council (IDC) seeks to inspire India manufacturers to bring to market well designed products that enrich the lives of people. I-mark aims to provide strong differentiation and market positioning as a design and innovation leader. It also aims to act as a brand extension and imparts competitive advantage to the product in local and international markets and to serve as a unique promotional launch pad for new products and services entering the market. The symbol can be used in a wide range of ways, such as advertisements, catalogs, product packaging, and other promotional mediums. All types of mass-produced products are eligible for India Design Mark. This can include consumer electronics, computer and communication products, machine tools, construction machinery, lighting systems, white goods, household appliances, capital goods, medical equipment, toys, vehicles, agricultural machinery, etc. But, there seem to be two polarizing issues with I-mark. One is the lack of clarity around what the criteria or standards of this mark will be. The second is the design of the mark itself.
The I-mark is admittedly inspired by Japan’s G-Mark, which, like many other “good design” programs of its kind, was born in the post-WW II era. Economies and industries the world over were recovering from a period of immense stress. Governments and cultural institutions were pulling out all stops in their effort to mobilize public awareness and participation in things like design, which was broadly seen as a catalyst for growth. The Japanese program was rooted in nationbuilding, the American program was unashamedly commercial, and the Italian program was concerned with matters of high taste. There is also a very broad range in the graphic identities for these programs, but the successful ones were all commissioned from well-known, established designers. Some, like the Italian Compasso d’Oro or the G-mark, have reached iconic status. The Red Dot has undergone several iterations, but none of them came from an open design competition. Only our closest design mark cousin, the Thai DEmark (also inspired by the Japanese G-mark) hasn’t been much luckier than India in its graphic identity. Most of the entries that made to the final round of selection are uniformly similar, almost as if our collective thinking (or lack of it) prevents us from moving beyond a certain cliché. Surely, the tika is not the only way to represent Indian-ness.
What is “good design”? One problem with “good design” is its connotation of moral authority. Whose “good” are we talking about? JIDPO’s idea of good, like the 1950s British and European equivalents, implied “good for all” but tended to translate into a Modernist aesthetic rampage against ornament and historicist styles. Victor Papanek, in his book, Design for the Real World dismisses museum exhibits of “well-designed objects” as parades of well-worn genres. “The objects are usually the same; a few chairs, some automobiles, cutlery, lamps, ashtrays and maybe a photograph of the ever present DC-3 airplane. Innovation of new objects seems to go more and more toward the development of tawdry junk for the annual Christmas gift market.” Although it is difficult to decide what is good, we cannot say that good and bad are simply matters of taste, culturally constructed terms serving different agendas. In the 21st century, surely, we need to move beyond cultural relativism, but without resorting to agendas hidden under the guise of good. There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, in order to impress others who don't care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second. Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered file boxes, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people. Before (in the 'good old days'), if a person liked killing people, he had to become a general, purchase a coal-mine, or else study nuclear physics. Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the
world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed. And the skills needed in these activities are taught carefully to young people. [Papanek, 1] Considering the example of Apple, Apple has moved a significant proportion of their products from plastics to aluminum and glass over the years. In addition, because these materials are natural, they are much easier to recycle than plastics. Because of the materials that Apple products use has a high intrinsic value and appeal, they probably aren’t thrown away or replaced as fast as other brands, which improves resource usage. Furthermore with more than half a million apps for the iPhone and iPad, Apple has set up a technology platform for the dematerialization of many hundreds of traditional functions or products, such as notebooks, compasses, cameras, maps, etc. The net effect of this platform is a potential reduction of the amount of “stuff” we need and is a huge improvement for the environment versus where we were ten years ago. As indicated throughout his book, Papanek says that “design is discriminatory against major sections of the population. Just by comparing the controls, switches, knobs, and general design of those tools and appliances which in our society seem to be in the province of women ('homemakers') with those that seem to be 'male- oriented', we can see vast differences. In spite of the clients' differing age, occupation, sex, schooling, etc., most designers seem to design for an exclusively sexist, male chauvinist audience. The ideal consumer is between eighteen and twenty-five, male, white, middleincome, and if we look at ergonomic data published by designers themselves, exactly 6 feet tall, weighing exactly 185 pounds. We have seen that the amount of testing done among various population groups is tokenism at best. Furthermore, designers know very little about what people really need or want”. Supporting his argument, to recognize good design based on established parameters by I-mark will be futile. Balaram, in his book, Thinking Design, gives the example of an indigenous design of an oxygenator made to suit Indian use and Indian production. It was better than the imported equipment in some design features. The design was well acclaimed for its excellence and won prestigious National Award for Meritorious Invention. The product however, could not go into regular production. One of the reasons for that was it had to compete not only with the image of the established brand but also with the Indian attitude that “imported is best”. Similarly, by providing a particular product an I-mark, need not mean it would definitely sell. One of the prime objectives of I-mark is “To serve as a reference for purchase decision as it signifies good design not only in terms of how good the product looks, but also the product quality, functionality, quality, usability and social responsibility”. This is easier said than done. It’s tempting, for example, to simply replace “good” with “useful.” No doubt it would be satisfying Papanek’s idea of needs-based criteria supplanting “eye appeal.” But the problem with usefulness as a standard is that it doesn’t allow for useless objects, which are actually quite an important part of design
practice. Many objects are designed not to be useful but to make an argument and the most valuable effect of considering an object as an argument is that it allows us to consider it not as an inevitable or neutral invention but as something that embodies a point of view. The iPod may seem like an innocuous music-playing device, but in fact it is an argument about how we should navigate, purchase, download, and listen to sound. It’s an argument based on premises negotiated among the various stakeholders (Apple, the music industry, acoustic engineers). Viewing designs as arguments frees one from the art world’s tendency to evaluate on aesthetic criteria alone. It insists on contextual evaluation: design is not just about how a thing looks or how it works; it is also about the assumptions on which it rests. A polished-aluminum case and a user interface rooted in files, folders, and wastebasket metaphors would be irrelevant in rural India. Seeing good design as an argument has one more point in its favor. “Good Design” is a stamp of approval that gives a suggestion of timelessness. As such, it depends on a rather fixed notion of problems and solutions, an old-fashioned model that still persists in everyday design language. But in reality, problems are too big and slippery to stamp or fix. Who would have known in 1950 that we’d be recycling plastic, eliminating chrome plating? Design thinker Horst Rittel once wrote that “a design problem keeps changing while it is treated, because the understanding of what ought to be accomplished, and how it might be accomplished is continually shifting. Learning what the problem is IS the problem.”
References:
Little Design Book: http://littledesignbook.in/ India Design Mark : http://www.indiadesignmark.in/ Thnking Design , Prof. S.Balaram Design for the real world, Victor Papanek