Crafting Expertise: Art and Design Pedagogy and Professional Values at the National Institute of Design in India, 1955-1985

Abstract

“Crafting Expertise” studies the pedagogy of the National Institute of Design (NID) in India over a thirty-year period. Established in 1961 in the city of Ahmedabad, the NID was the first design school of its kind in independent India. Its pedagogy borrowed from contemporaneous global art and design theories, as well as from the legacy of colonial-era art and design education in the Indian subcontinent. This dissertation argues that contrary to the perception that the NID’s work and professional ethos were primarily configured by state and industrial interests, artists, designers, and their affiliates at the institute explored design as a field reinvigorated by modernization discourse, but that addressed socio-cultural conditions beyond the agendas of postcolonial bureaucracy and industrial capitalism. Each chapter draws on personal and institutional archives to explicate design and art objects, pedagogical assignments, representations of art and design in the mass media, and debates on professional values that embroiled artists, designers, craftspeople, and critics. Values in this sense encompassed the economic costs and benefits of art and design work that could be researched prior to commencing a project; concepts and ideas such as efficiency or modernity that could be conveyed through the visual and material properties of art and design products; and the more intangible and oftentimes contradictory ideals, ambitions, and principles underlying the crafting of new professions, guided by the motivations of designers, artists, industrialists, intellectuals, bureaucrats, and craftspeople. Collectively, the chapters reconstruct the experimental NID pedagogy through its cross-cultural and interdisciplinary frameworks (Chapter 1), assess its application in photography-based projects during the 1960s and 70s (Chapter 2), analyze ideological debates on design, art, and the NID method from the 1970s and 80s (Chapter 3), and explore the application of the revised and reformulated NID pedagogy via textile arts and crafts through the 1980s (Chapter 4). The case studies elaborate specific works and projects alongside the individual and communal priorities and ambitions that affected art and design practice at the NID and beyond. The dissertation shows how designers, artists, intellectuals, bureaucrats, industrialists, and craftspeople, all affiliated with the NID in one way or another, addressed the needs and problems of postcolonial industry, art and design education, urbanism, consumer culture, the market, and village economies in ways that tested the authority of the modern designer. They merged ideas about art, crafts, and design, and gave equal relevance to theorization as they did to practice. Their work highlights the changing terrain of design education between aesthetic priorities and socio-economic developmentalism, and the contradictory positions on professional values that emerged from the exchanges between internationally resonant art and design pedagogies and the needs and goals of India’s postcolonial present.