Design education in India

Design is in boom, I am a UX designer, I am in Animation etc. These and such sentences we get to hear nowadays. Nowadays? Yes nowadays, because about ten to fifteen years back we did not get to hear such things. So what is this design and what do One has to do to become a designer?

Before answering these let’s just go back to understand how this field has evolved over last few decades.

It all started with British era, where the britishers wanted to create craftsman out of Indian people. Hence they started Art institutes such as JJ school of Arts and Industry. That was the earlier name, later when the British left, they chanting to JJ School of Arts, so the industrial revolution does not happen. Later the people forgot that the Art school has anything to do with the industry and design and it only remained for the sake of Art.

Although, for a long period of time Art colleges in India has produced talented people who have served in the advertising, publications, films, theatre, photography and other areas. This were the times where all the artwork was done by hand. There were two main stream to choose. One being Applied Art, which would focus on graphic design, typography, advertising industry and commercial art and the second being Fine Arts, which would focus on pure Artistic career path. Besides these two there were Textile, Sculpting etc.

Thanks to the Information technology revolution, since around year 2000, the picture started to change. As came the computers, mobiles followed by games, websites, online shopping, various apps and several other new products which would require research and understanding of the user’s need. The digital platform created a whole new opportunities for interactive and interface design and the other products created opportunities for interaction design, product designs, packaging design and so on.

The government of India understood the importance of Design and with the help of an American. Designer they setup ‘National Institute of Design’, aka NID. Also to turn the engineers and Art students into designers, the government started offering Masters through the ‘ Industrial Design Centre’ aka ‘IDC’ under the umbrella of ‘Indian Institute of Technology’.
As the requirements in the industry grew, the government institutions were not sufficient to cater and hence started new trend of Design institutions. These institutions were affiliated to state universities and private universities. Which started offering Degree or Diploma in Animation, Film making, Photography, Industrial Design, User interface Design, Graphic Design, Fashion Design etc.

Currently to pursue a career in design there are two broad ways to choose from, those are the Art schools and Design Institutions. The major differences and drawbacks of these can be as following.

The Art schools give more importance to the sketching and drawing skills and hence the visualisation becomes the strength. Especially, if you want to pursue a career as an illustrator or a Concept Artist then you need excel in Drawing and painting. But the Art colleges due to lack of government’s interest did not evolve as they should have. So the students need to keep updated on their own. The Design Institutions has a sole purpose of catering the industry and to make business out of it. Hence the fees can be ten times higher than the Art schools. But in return they provide much better infrastructure and other resources. Yet they lack in building strong foundations for visual strength.

The whole idea is adopted from the western culture and hence it lack in solid foundation. The western countries mostly now offer Fine Arts or design education in specific field. While Indian might be the only country to offer Applied Art plus Design. Sadly we still have to rely on foreign countries for good education.