The Design Village
Prof. Paul Hekkert
When architect Sourabh Gupta contacted me about six years ago to help him out in building a new design school, I immediately saw the opportunity. As a professor in one of the oldest and biggest design schools in the world – Delft University of Technology– I had frequently experienced how hard it is to change an existing education system. Building a new one would be much easier, a dream school where everything is in place to educate the best possible designer. And in India, a country that has all the resources ( people, passion, ambition) and challenges ( people, pollution, inequality) for designers; a country that I started to love as my second home after so many visits – why not?
The name they had in store was already brilliant: ‘ The Design Village’. It brings images of a campus in lush surroundings, where students, staff and guests would live together to contemplate, discuss and design what is needed tomorrow. Most importantly, Sourabh and I had a similar view on the power and responsibility of designers: they are change makers, people who can envision a better world and realise it by means of their products, services and systems. Where present- day politicians often fail to
deliver, designers should take over and shape society. These were the perfect ingredients to start a joint journey...
We both mobilised a team of trustworthy visionaries. Sourabh brought in his chief advisor Mridu, some of the best people of Archohm, and an old classmate from Ahmedabad, Kashi. I managed to enroll three amazing Dutch designers and educators, Marieke, Jeroen and Nynke. With this beautiful and committed India- Dutch team we started to organise regular workshops in Noida and Amsterdam. We applied our own Vision in Product design method ( ViP, Hekkert and van Dijk, 2011) to organise the process of designing the curriculum of a new design school.
These meetings were far from easy. The cultural gap was never a big issue, but the clash of personalities was! We spent hours and hours discussing the position of the school, the identity of a ‘ Villager’, the relevant knowledge domains, the recruitment and assessment strategy, or the kind of coaching our students would require. These discussions were lively, sometimes desperate, always passionate, and ultimately devoted to one cause: to simply build the best school we could imagine. The Design Village ( TDV) should not become just another design school as we have so many around the world. TDV was to become a global hub for social innovation, where the design leaders of tomorrow would be trained.
I vividly remember the session in which we were to design the interaction between the student and the
school. Students must be challenged to the max, they must learn to deal with criticism and be critical to their own work and the work of others. The keywords here are ‘ friction’ and ‘ madness’. At the same time, students should feel at home, safe to dream whatever they see ahead and say anything they need to say. This feeling comes with ‘ lightness’ and ‘ freedom’. These characteristics of interaction were summarised in the metaphor, ‘ a warm bath full of piranhas’, a beautiful unity of seemingly conflicting forces. What an image!
At TDV, students and staff are villagers; being a villager is a mentality; a villager is a villager forever.
When it comes to the philosophy of TDV, we agreed fairly quickly: “A design villager has the capacity to envision dreams and the skills to realise them.” A villager is courageous and ambitious as to the impact her designs can have on people and society, yet she is modest and realistic when it comes to capturing this impact in new design interventions. A designer may not be able to change the world immediately, but her intervention should be a deliberate and sensible stepping stone towards that world. The type of design that embodies the intervention, a physical product, an interactive device, a service or system, is defined by the effect one aims for. A main feature of TDV is therefore that it is manifestation- independent; we train designers of all sorts that can express themselves in any medium required. In order to educate this type of designer, TDV is organised around three streams of activities.
Villaging; A set of activities aimed to shape the villager as a responsible individual with a personal tone of voice
and the capacity to contribute to the greater good, such as life in the village.
Baskets; Clusters of courses from various knowledge domains, where the villager is trained to see the bigger picture, as well as understand where and how to successfully turn the right knobs.
Task box; Real world design projects that differ in length and complexity, executed both individually and in teams.
After three years of building and polishing, we felt our curriculum was fit to be tested in practice. In the summer of 2016 we started our 4- year program with a first batch of 25 students in the basement of Archohm, through the patronage of like- minded entrepreneurs – Rishi Aggarwal and Navneet Garg, who believed in TDV. The new students are the most courageous villagers of all, young people who willingly submit themselves to the great promise of becoming the ‘ designer of tomorrow’. We took them out on amazing villaging trips, taught them the basic skills of interaction and communication design, and kept on pushing their design boundaries. Many of them are now in their third year and they have adopted and cherished their new identity as a design villager.
The basement of Archohm was soon too small for this new generation of designers and Sourabh and his team did what was needed and without the slightest delay. They bought on old factory across the street and reconstructed it into a full- blown school within months. Now TDV had its own home, with classrooms and a cafeteria, with an exhibition space, a library, and workshops. And with the new building came a new group of committed teachers and new batches of students. Together they form a unique community and design hub in the middle of busy and noisy Noida. The Design Village has come to life!
Are we there? Certainly not. The Design Village as it is now is something to be immensely proud of, a unique school of design in the heart of India. Yet, we have also many challenges ahead of us. One of our ongoing concerns is to find great teachers, villagers that are fully capable of delivering our program and philosophy. We also need to keep on explaining our philosophy and mentality to the outside world – parents, the industry, and the government – a world that still mostly thinks of designers as producers of stuff and not of change makers. And finally, one day also our orange factory in Noida will be too small for the hundreds if not thousands of villagers we aim to nurture. Than it will be time to realise our dream to the max: building a real and global village for The Design Village!