DEAN'S MESSAGE

We have barely got a toe-hold into the 21st century and our nation is going through revolutionary changes. And Design has a huge role to play in this.

In a country where even 1% of the population amounts to a million and a half, designing products and systems that work and impact on scale-able quantum are the need of the hour.

In India we value ingenuity and innovation, indeed the world has once again started to look towards us for directions in manufacturing that they term as “frugal engineering”, innovative solutions in mass multi lingual communications, crafted solutions to both micro scale and macro scale needs and design processes and thinking that could give tangible answers to these many tasks at hand.
With 35% of the Indian population at below the age level of 28 years, the Indian nation is one of the youngest in the world and rearing to go. Design education and the empowerment of these masses is the need at hand and vocational and design education will furnish that tipping point to where our nation will head towards in the future.

Every design school is known for its own unique design pedagogy. And in the discipline of design it is more so. When design started as a separate discipline at Bauhaus Dessau in the 1920's, it developed a unique blend that incorporated the arts, technology and self exploration into a continuing evolving search for the new and indeed what was developed then, still continues to look contemporary today, a disciplinary approach so developed that its exponents and their creative output forever remained timeless and ahead of its time.

Most design schools still use this approach as a benchmark, but we at Arch are in the process of developing a process to pedagogy that will take in the sensibilities of the local environment, Indian cultural sensibilities, a collaborative approach that brings in the local environment of crafts and tradition into the classroom, fostering ingenuity and innovation to develop sustainable practices and disciplines. We hope and know that our approach will indeed expedite the spirit of entrepreneurship and we will groom the next few generations of change-makers that will ever question all possibilities of the true creative spirit and propel a revolution in design thinking in our country. This is what will drive us at Arch, to develop this design pedagogy which could give Indian designers that “tipping point” that sets them apart from the rest.

Join us then in that journey of nation building through appropriate design thinking to put us in the driving seat of change makers of the future.