Thaindian News

New Delhi, June 22 (IANS) A nine-member panel of experts under the aegis of the National Institute of Design (NID) has prepared guidelines to help designers and manufacturers tool their wares to suit the Indian social landscape and open wider marketing avenues.

At a media interface here Tuesday, the panel authors said the Universal Design India Principles (UDIP) are based on usability, equitability, culture, economy and aesthetics.

The UDIP have been modelled on the seven standard global design principles, keeping the Indian cultural context in mind.

According to a member of the panel, Professor Abir Mullick of Georgia Institute of Technology and a scholar in residence at the NID, “The Indian design principles were inspired by Tagore’s ideal - the problem is not how to wipe out all differences, but how to unite with the differences intact”.

“Our primary focus is to make design equitable and democratic so that it becomes an uniting force. Indian designs will have to ensure usability because Indians are pragmatic by nature. We don’t throw away goods if they can be used.”

“Aesthetics has to be crucial to Indian design to reflect the country’s cultural heritage and designs have to be economical. It should be unique to the cultural ambience of India,” Mullick told IANS.

“The contemporary idea of design as we know now has come from the West. Our design has been intrinsic, our craftsmen were designers. But India is now a global economy and has to interpret traditional design in the contemporary language to make it distinctive. The country is now paying attention to the fact,” Mullick said.

He said innovation was the plank on which the Indian design movement would ride.

Disability is at the forefront of the design movement in India - with specially designed products for the disabled driving the design business, Mullick said.

Citing Census 2011 statistics, he said India “has 2.19 crore people with disabilities, constituting 2.13 percent of the total population and nearly one-third of the global population of the disabled”.

“Moreover, the elderly population in the country was the second largest with high family dependency, half of which have at least one kind of dependency. Design has to be accessible to them,” he said.

Other members of the UDIP authors’ panel include experts from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the NID and the School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal.