Challenge of Teaching Product Design in Master Course with Heterogeneous Qualification in Indian Context
Year: 2012
Editor: Lyndon Buck, Geert Frateur, William Ion, Chris McMahon, Chris Baelus, Guido De Grande, Stijn Verwulgen
Author: Shende, Avinash; Das, Amarendra Kumar
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India
Section: Postgraduate Design Education
Page(s): 711-716
ISBN: 978-1-904670-36-0
Abstract
Globalization has increased awareness of design profession in India. Initially design education started in premier technical institutions like IITs, IISc and specialized design school i.e. NID and had limited capacity. Entrance criteria being undergraduates in technical disciplines and highly competitive, these were out of bound for most aspirants. The type of design education practiced in these design schools created a big gap with common art education. PhD being qualification required to join these premier institutions, except NID, getting designers with academic bend of mind to be design educators are always in short supply. IIT Guwahati is the first to offer PhD (1998) in Design in India. With opening of the design education in India, more design aspirants are coming up from diverse fields such as fine arts, fashion design, architecture in addition to students with technical background and have created a new challenge. This created two distinctly different challenges: one to acquaint people with nontechnical background with technical vocabulary and technical students to acquire skills of drawing, visualization and aesthetic sensitivity. This challenge is compelling design educators to evolve design teaching methodologies. One way being practiced in IDC, IIT Bombay is to have separate specialization to suit the back ground of the students and segregated Industrial design, Visual communication, Interaction, Film & Animation and Automobile design. Educational qualification for entrance is based the course requirements. The other one is specialization through projects and electives. This paper studies various issues regarding the above challenges and methodologies being evolved.
Keywords: Design education, art education, technical education, imagination and visualization, creativity