View from the frontline

11 min readNov 4, 2022

by Ashish Deshpande

multitasking designer, elephant design, india.

“You and I are destined to do this for ever…You complete me”, reflected late actor, Heath Ledger, as The Joker to Batman in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. This sentiment captures the relationship between Design Education and Design Practice, which represent the two indistinguishable ends of an infinity continuum. Strangely, both exhibit polar behaviours and yet seem destined to feed each other that intrinsic energy pool of thought, value, understanding for their survival. What began as two sides of the same coin are now trying to define and establish their presence in a professional world. In a world that has little empathy towards the sublime, the subjective and the un-measurable — something that these two faces brought along — has created a gap between the education and practice of design.

This article is based on my experiences as a young student who underwent design education and then followed it up with years of practice. Someone has said, “Design is a journey of discovery”. These thoughts on Design Education reflect my journey of what I describe as the frontline of practice of design to the world of business.

The Journey

My journey began in the year 1983 at the National Institute of Design, where I trained to become an Industrial designer. My design education, much like the strong tree that adorns the Gautam-Gira Square within a campus courtyard, helped develop a sense of rootedness to the cultural fabric while encouraging me to explore the skies. I was fortunate to learn concepts like responsible | rooted | sensible | clean in Design, through project work for the underserved. Many skills learnt lay in hand work: be it drawings, representations, documentation, and the craft of building with materials. We were happy to work with handmade prototypes and the fact that our design worked, gave us immense joy.

In this spirit of exploration, I started by journey as a designpreneur. My design practice at Elephant was founded on the story of blind people. The story goes: Some blind people of a village come across a large object in their path, and, through an introspective discussion, discover the big picture of the Elephant. Design is remarkably similar in practice, where, as a process, it puts together various perspectives, and the solution as a whole is always larger than the sum of parts.

The rule of togetherness

The realisation that a co-creative approach is essential for a good outcome comes late in a design career. Design education flounders between solo project programs or group projects within the design class, and rarely is there an effort to teach the value of working with other professionals to achieve a common goal. 33 years of working with business experts, engineers, craftsmen, machine operators, feet on the street sales and service people and more have taught me that design in practice is not a solo profession by any yardstick. The earlier we learn this in our design education, the better it will work in practice.

The shift

Design practice in India country had a slow start in the 80’s and early 90’s. Businesses could not see where to place design on the balance sheet and the engineering world utilised it for glorified paint jobs. There were few practicing designers at that time. The industry itself was a big silo and design was the new little upstart, reflected by the emergence of design consulting firms trying to bridge that gap between the industry and the underserved consumer. It was definitely a struggle, but today, it is a struggle of a different kind.

So, we ask ourselves, what has changed?

Design practice has evolved in process & effect from design as aesthetics to design-led approaches that drive businesses. We are seeing design thinking morph into a corporate mantra. In a study conducted by the Design Management Institute (DMI) where they tracked the share value of design-centric companies2, the DMI monitored investments in design and their impact on companies’ performance relative to the S&P 500 Index. Over a 10-year period, the Design Value Index (DVI) demonstrated that design-centric companies have outperformed the S&P 500 Index by more than 200 percent. This was further reinforced by the 2018 report on the Business Value of design from Mckinsey3. In India, this seriousness has created design-led brands like Titan Ltd, Godrej Appliances, Mahindra Farm Equipment Div., Symphony Limited and Hector Beverages. The adoption of sound design practices has enabled these companies to outperform their peers.

The process of addressing business problems is going to change radically with increasing use of design as a strategic asset. The last two decades have witnessed the adoption of design sprints and an increase in the availability of design tools — apart from design thinking occupying a key role in process-based decision making. From a practice seen as subservient, these shifts have had a democratising effect, opening design up to a diverse array of professionals.

The acknowledgement

This shift in the role of a design professional is witnessed in research, technology solutions and business offerings. We should value this change. My own work for Symphony Limited, an appliance manufacturer & marketing company that undertook design consultancy from Elephant for years, is a good example to reinforce this point. For Symphony, design has been a strategic tool and has played a significant role towards making their public listed company the number one evaporated cooling manufacturer in the world. Today Symphony’s market capitalisation has grown to about 64 billion INR4, retails in 60 countries and has offices in five countries. Due to the strategic significance of design in building Symphony, I was appointed to the Board of Directors, as an Independent Director5 in 2017. I still run my own design consulting practice, as Elephant, which is one of the largest design consulting firms and has had a strong impact on India’s business growth and the design landscape.

The impact value of any profession lies in the proof of success. Companies are wearing design on their sleeves and taking about the difference it has made to their bottom lines. The focus has increasingly shifted to empathetically understanding consumers, with many organisations investing in design departments and allocating fair budgets for design & development.

Let us take the example of Hector Beverages, an Indian start-up in the indigenous drinks space that created the popular brand Paperboat. Neeraj Kakkar, CEO of Hector says, “At Paperboat, and as a company, we owe almost everything to design. When I look at Design Thinking, I look at in three ways: our packaging, our tone of communication & I look at our recipes all as a form of design. Getting those recipes is culinary design & all these three things combined and put together is the basis of our company.”

Today, many designers are finding their place at the ‘C’ level in business boardrooms. Design is no longer subservient. It has taken the leadership role. Designers today are in leadership positions, have taken on varying business roles as entrepreneurs and consultants, transcending their core skillset and expertise. We are seeing this shift from a subservient profession to a leadership role on a day-to-day basis and we are witnessing these successes.

The first chasm: Low differentiation

The importance and success of design has created increasing awareness for the profession. This has also led to a profusion of design institutes and design education programs.

Today, as an employer of design talent that is dependent on the output from design programs across the world, I face a dilemma in India. One key challenge faced by a design talent employer is the inability to distinguish between a graduate and post-graduate program. Globally, graduate programs provide the foundation in the field of design and post graduate programs help students specialise in a specific nuance in the discipline. For example, one may train for 4 years in a graduate level program to become a Product Designer and then move toward a master level program in, say, Human factors or Sustainable Design.

In India, Post Graduate programs rarely build over the graduate professional programs by applying the core training that they acquired during graduation.

This creates a major human resource issue between two design professionals, where there is no skill level differentiation despite one being a graduate and the other a postgraduate. This concern becomes acute if the post graduate professional does not apply his or her core graduation skill. In context of the change in the awareness and application of design skills within the industry, it is important that graduate and post graduate programs are clearly distinguished and augmented/specialised skills are acquired.

This paves the way for a better deployment of talent and clarity. This clarity is also in line with the perceived shift of a fuzzy subservient understanding of the function of design on to a clear leadership role in businesses.

The second chasm: Operational skills

As graduates increasingly look at leadership positions, be it a corporate career or entrepreneurship, they will have to take up strategic roles and arm themselves with skills that go beyond design-focused ones. While fresh designers are well equipped with traditional domain skills, there is a distinct lack of skills that are necessary for an involvement in elevated management and business decision processes.

At present, it takes anywhere between 3 months to 3 years to train fresh graduates & postgraduates into operationally proficient professionals. At Elephant7, where I work, we qualify these professional requirements under 5 Learning & Skills abilities that are imparted through training and close mentorship.

One: Strategic leadership skill.

This ability is of critical importance for a designer to possess and allows them to understand brands and the systemic context of what is happening, giving them a macro-overview of the world. This enables understanding of market segments, micro trends, and the competition. Designers understand audience choices, why people buy and why people use things in a certain way. This skill helps the design professional communicate effectively with another leader (a client, a business head, a policy maker, or a person benefitting from design practice). Lastly, this skill helps maintain the continuity between design education and design practice.

Two: Opportunity visualization skill.

It is crucial to grasp the end user’s perspective. A design professional breaks through the constricted boundaries of business and is a visionary — someone who can solve complex challenges, who thinks out of the box. Visualizing form, colour, a layout or motion is part of the core design training program at all design schools. But fresh design professionals (exceptions aside) demonstrate limited ability to visualize business possibilities as a factor of design. This ability is about understanding future trajectories, the impact of opportunities and the construction and communication of stories/scenarios, which can be demonstrated to stakeholders and understood by others. This skill involves the visualisation of new applications based on new materials, content, emerging technologies, emerging concerns that positively impact existing markets, service new segments and assure ROI. This skill empowers design professionals to showcase the future to a board room of executives.

Three: Human factor and Operational Skill.

Designers must know human factors. Human factors and anthropometry are part of the core design education curriculum. Design professionals are looked upon as experts, but fresh designers limit human factors to ethnographic observations. Ergonomics and anthropometry as a science has become a weak link. I regularly interview design candidates who consider human factors as peripheral, or do not recognize its scientific value. This increases pressure when you start your design practice. As a design professional, you’re supposed to have this inherent knowledge and understanding, whether it is about user experience, research, or usability studies. A design professional must be able to decipher data and analyse the shortcomings therein.

This lacuna becomes more acute when we apply design practice on a global scale. Today, markets and opportunities lie beyond our country of residence. Design professionals must develop the perspective to design for different geographies, different ethnicities. How do we prepare the designer to handle the diverse array of human factors, digital behaviours, usability studies & analysis, ethnography, qualitative & quantitative research methods? This is a question design education must answer to prepare the design professional of the future.

Four: Operational skill and Project Management.

In today’s ever-transforming business environment, project management skills are the key stones to help provide a path to leadership role. At Elephant7, we believe that good Project management skills help us efficiently manage the design process, balance priorities, oversee resources, manpower, timelines, finances, social connections & networks while tracking project progress & achieving business goals. Design professionals with this knowledge can successfully provide strategic direction by articulating their vision for the task at hand.

Five: Entrepreneurship skill.

Designers find themselves working in different environments & contexts. A designer could be playing a consultant role or working inside a design department of a corporate set up or even running a business enterprise as an entrepreneur. Regardless of a design professionals’ condition or context of work, there is an essential quality that needs to be instilled within each. That quality is a sense of design entrepreneurship which I refer as designpreneurship. Designpreneurship can be described as a sense of initiative, a sense of enterprise, to go beyond and discover, to connect, to share, to continuously learn, to apply, and develop the skill to drive exploration. Entrepreneurship here is about building value and profit creation. As designers look for a leadership role, these attributes become your calling card, a means to develop trust with clients and user of design.

At design school level, we don’t seem to allow for sufficient expertise to be developed in opportunity domains. We need to create a migration from generic learning to expert learning in design education in order to prepare the young design student for a leadership-based career in the future.

The Expertise

As careers blossom in the realm of design consulting and design plays a more integral role in a corporate business, stakeholders are seeking domain expertise. You will be employed for your inherent expertise in one or more domains that are relevant to the business context.

Today, there is tremendous opportunity in areas like healthcare, energy, education, nutrition, retail, finance and many, many more. Design schools (except for a few in the craft, fashion and media space) do not showcase expertise in one or more industry domains.

Expertise emerges from continuous research & application programs. Technology & tech education programs have managed this well. In design education, we incubate projects and drive exploration at the graduate level in opportunity areas. This enables students to go further by taking Research & Application Masters in niche areas and develop a deep understanding through PhD programs.

This I believe, should be our seed to entrepreneurship building and leadership in design.

The Continuum

Design education and practice need to continuously feed each other. Being at the frontline of practice with the industry provides designers like me with an overview of expectations, trends, and opportunities. Design education must evolve based on feedback loops. Practitioners need to update themselves with new methods, recent technology & techniques as well as understand design students as they grow into the profession. Some of us might be clever design practitioners while others might be studying at legacy design learning institutes; yet, the future of design hinges on how symbiotic these spheres become.

As Batman reacts, “It’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you.” Time is right to close the gaps, to move from generic design pedagogy to rich pool of professional expertise & training, where the role of design matches the importance of business & technology. These interventions in design education will empower young professionals with critical operational skills, making them more employable than ever before. Lastly, it is worth noting that any reform in design education that synchronizes with professional practice will elevate design from this region into a global force.

References :

Author:

Ashish Deshpande is an Industrial Designer, trained at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. He has been a practicing designer over last 33 years as co-founder of the multi-disciplinary Design Consultancy firm, Elephant. www.elephantdesign.com

This Article is based on the presentation made during a workshop on Design Education at CAAD, IDC, School of Design, IIT Powai, Mumbai on 07 January 2022.