Design Research: The Ethic of Service

Design research in and for India has a history. The 1958 India Report by Charles and Ray Eames - from which flowered design education and the development of a contemporary profession of Indian design - underlined research, training and service as overlapping, supportive and mutually corrective. The Eames’ brilliant meditation on the lota with its 20 questions (“But how would one go about designing a lota?”) was perhaps a first example of what design research should be: a systematic investigation into the dimensions of the creative process, to help establish facts and options as well as to suggest new conclusions. Perhaps there is an even earlier example – the spirit of enquiry with which the late Pupul Jayakar and Charles Eames reflected on what a 1955 exhibition of Indian craft at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) actually represented: were these great crafts about the past or about the future? It was those conversations that were to bring Charles and Ray Eames to India. Their visit would lead to the India Report and on to the founding of the Nation Institute of Design (Ahmedabad) as the first experiment of its kind. Early Year Around this time, in the 1960s, design research was emerging as a recognizable field of study at the Imperial College in London. A 1962 conference led to the Design Research Society in 1966. Four years later the Department of Design Research at the Royal College of Art was founded under the late Prof Bruce Archer. He would emerge as one of NID’s most important mentors and champions. It was at...