Preface: Travelling concepts beyond the Bauhaus
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The study collection of the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad brings together 20th-century design objects whose connection does not fit into a linear narrative of Western design history defined by stylistic characteristics. Fragments of Marcel Breuer’s B3 chair are found alongside MP Rajan’s Bamboo Cube, an object that he designed with students in collaboration with rural craft communities. Chairs by the Japanese designer George Nakashima, who taught at the NID and drew on Asian seating traditions and materials, are juxtaposed with furniture by Gajanan Upadhyaya, who likewise taught at the NID. Some of these pieces point to a collaboration with Hans Gugelot from the Ulm School of Design, who briefly taught in Ahmedabad. Chairs by Charles and Ray Eames, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto are also present. In the wall cabinets, there are stacks of baskets and pottery water containers collected by students of the NID in so-called craft documentations during their courses and excursions to see rural craft traditions. The collection of Western prototypes mixed with other objects originated from a travelling exhibition curated by New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which toured several Indian cities from 1959. This exhibition titled ‘Design Today in America and Europe’ is not merely a typical example of American cultural diplomacy during the Cold War; it also ascribed a specific role to ‘good design’ as ‘machine-made’ product design and a commodity aesthetic firmly linked with capitalistic industrialisation and modernisation according to a Western model. Thus, while the exhibition showcased design achievements of the Western world, it also served the purpose of ‘teaching’ the message of ‘good design’ to a non-Western public. After the exhibition had toured for two years, the objects were handed over to the newly founded National Institute of Design, the design institute of a modern India. The fact that this prototype collection has not been handed on in its pure form as a display of functional, capitalistic-industrial mass products of highly technological processes may be traced back to the controversies about the repositioning of the profession of the designer that began with the founding of the NID against a backdrop of both geopolitical and social-environmental transitions. Singanapalli Balaram, a tutor at the NID, had attested to a deep crisis in the ‘modern movement, the reductionist, the rationalist and mechanist-type design movement’ and, with his ‘Barefoot Designer’ programme, proposed places of learning in rural locations for a collective design practice in step with local conditions of production and making.[1]
The 1979 international conference ‘Design for Development’ at the NID was the high point of this design discourse, which aimed to step away from hegemonial Western design paradigms. International organisations such as ICSID and UNIDO, who arranged these conferences, represented an understanding of design firmly rooted in a development paradigm, at the same time they formed platforms for the critical examination of questions of environment and design in the Global South. In the context of Western exports of modernisation models in the developing nations, alternative practices were sought for both economic and social change. In Ahmedabad, the international delegates argued in support of a postcolonial understanding of design, expressing a desire to disengage from the Western hegemony that associated design with formal aesthetic ideals and universalistic claims to validity. The Ahmedabad Declaration, states Alison Clarke, came out in favour of ‘design as a tool for social change within a humanist paradigm that crossed both post-industrial and so-called developing nations’.[2] This represented the emergence of ‘an alternative design movement underpinned by theories of anthropology, intermediate technology, development studies and neo-Marxist critique of Western consumer culture’.[3]
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Why does this collection appear to offer a suitable critical framework for a journal that discusses facets of the decolonisation of education? Firstly, a synopsis of the objects collected here, which emerged in the context of diverse learning experiments, production practices and design schools, contradicts a linear historiography of design. This associated the discipline with Western urbanisation and capitalistic industrialisation, which frequently finds a starting or reference point in the historic Bauhaus and dismisses a now deeply problematic historiography written from the dominant perspective of a Western modernism perceived as universal and its complicity in colonial exploitation, environmental destruction, extractivism and epistemological hegemony. Moreover, this is a historiography which is essentially a narrative about designers and their creations produced from a male stance. Such historiographies, which continue to dominate design education, must be countered by narratives and histories that describe this as a diverse field of collaborative and conflictual practices involving various actors, economies, materials, practices, knowledge types and technologies, and simultaneously acknowledge the way this field is shaped by power structures, asymmetries and inequalities.
Secondly, the collection’s dis-order generates unexpected conversations around the objects that entertain speculative approaches to and redefinitions of design activity, learning and knowledge. Ultimately, discourses on the decolonisation of design also propose an ontological new perspective on the activity of design in the light of challenges facing the entire planet. Here, design is no longer understood as a mode of action that underpins the binary codes of the notions of the passive, malleable, voiceless material to be shaped by the human hand and, on the other side, an autonomous cultural superiority of the world of ideas, forms and meanings. The baskets in the NID’s study collection could be regarded as silent witnesses of a completely different understanding of design knowledge and activity. Tim Ingold extrapolates this new perspective from the practice of basket weaving: ‘I mean to suggest that the forms are not imposed from above but grow from the mutual involvement of people and materials.’[4] This radical ontological transformation aims to not only overcome the inherent anthropocentricity of Western design thought and in doing so call for a learning of indigenous, non-Western epistemologies. The idea of the resolvability and feasibility of problematic constellations, no matter how they developed, is replaced by a mode of design activity as a continual process of co-habitation, co-constitution and becoming, as a reciprocal mode between multiple types.
From this, we arrive at the third aspect of the practices and epistemologies of decolonisation central to this journal. Decolonial thought, as Ramón Grosfoguel suggests, projects ‘a pluriversal as opposed to a universal world’ which develops in ‘critical dialogue between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political projects’.[5] Associated with this is the call to no longer consider design as universally valid, but as a situated mode of action and thought. Arturo Escobar speaks of ‘multiple transition narratives and forms of activism … veritable cultural and ecological transitions to different societal models going beyond strategies that offer anthropocene conditions as solutions’.[6] Places of learning and initiatives for cooperative and supportive action emerge as ‘minor gestures’ of structural transition in a variety of local projects, especially in South America and Southeast Asia.[7]
The thoughts outlined above prompt the following question: Can a journal whose frame of reference is situated in the educational legacy of the historic Bauhaus – a problematic legacy deeply intertwined with the modern tradition – contribute at all to the decolonisation of design and offer a way forward that has evolved from the epistemological and practical necessity of detaching from the modern tradition of design, but without utterly disregarding its connection with it?
Here, the pedagogical approaches associated with the Bauhaus are not understood as a legacy in the sense of a tradition that perpetuates itself, which revolves around the ‘original’ of the Bauhaus. Rather, the e-journals pursue a methodical process that draws on notions such as ‘Travelling Concepts’ and ‘translation’. Learning experiments, ideas, materials, narratives and radical educational media move through time and spaces; however, this journey does not follow the linear notion of a universal claim to validity of these ideas. Of interest here are the complicated and often also bumpy paths of translation processes that, as Walter Benjamin proposed in his essay ‘The Task of the Translator’, only coincide with the original ‘just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point’ and are likewise subject to transformation through time. [8] How can these ‘acts of translation’ in historical contexts be apprehended as continuous productions of meanings through contextual shifts? The journals are structured with reference to the discourses of ‘Traveling Concepts of design and art education’ which, with always shifting connotations and attributions of meaning, keep the schools’ and initiatives’ movements in search of answers in a process of constant exchange and motion. In the process, how do they resist the temptation of a continuity-minded concept of legacies that are linked with the Bauhaus tradition? By also bringing into view divisions, the untranslatable, faults that, as Doris Bachmann Mehdick emphasises, place historical processes of change ‘in a tension-filled confrontation with contrasts and similitudes and, in doing so, brings into focus a fractured range of meanings through distortions of history‘.[9]
In this sense, the ‘Travelling Concepts’ describe instead ‘routes of appropriation’ that do not follow the notion of a chronological sequence of past, present and future, but move between different geographies, times and cultures. This publication aims to examine this branched ‘bumpy route’ of the reform of design education as a pluriversal, supportive, reciprocal design practice that aspires to manifest as practical utopia in the web of asymmetric knowledge regimes, geopolitical structures, hegemonial institutional frameworks and imperial economies. In conversations, field notes, reports and historic essays, absences inherent to the modern design discourse come to light, failed endeavours, departures and distortions are reflected alongside alternative forms of collective design activism that give voice to the many diverse movements in search of emancipatory, supportive, pluriversal design activity in historic and contemporary transformation processes.