image Solomon Benjamin

In an article entitled Service Design for India: the thinking behind the design of a local curriculum, Professor Soumitri Varadarajan shares his experience of designing a service design curriculum for an Indian University. In a detailed and personal account that begins in India in the 1970s, he unravels the thinking behind his proposal for a contemporary service design course in India, where the location of consumption is out in the field, embedded in the community and its voices. His curriculum is based on the notion that design is "primarily a dematerialized practice - where technology constituted an instrumentality of this practice". Professor Varadarajan's premise is to achieve with service design what traditional product design failed to do i.e. improve the quality of life of India's unserved poor by incorporating two key approaches to service design - Design for the Service Sector and Design of Public Services. The result is a master's course in design for field workers to acquire design abilities, and for designers who wish to work in the field, which will go through a consultation process later this year.

Here below are the basic principles of his course:

To locate the practice in the field or among the people – creating a link between design and sociology.
To use Ethnography as the primary research method and consultation as the primary design practice.
To replace the 'client' with 'Community'.
To create projects as campaigns to benefit society.
To involve designers in converting their knowledge orientations to align it to the greater community need.
To keep the structure of design education familiar to India.
To substitute technical methodology by engaging with materials and processes.
To adopt a social method that engages people and their practices.
To create a system "under which every teacher appointed would be attached to more than one School or Centre".
To apply a multidisciplinary teaching practice where teachers from the disciplines of Design, Technology, Management and Social science teach into the course.

Read the full article on the Re-public:re-imagining democracy website.