Prof. Kumar Vyas
The Design in India New Experiment: The Making and The Journey
Vyas harbored a deep desire to work as a Hydroelectric engineer [8] However, his eternal love for Design, People, Spaces, and Social values pushed him effortlessly within the arenas of Design in India and for the people and systems in India.
In 1970s, Vyas helped innovate and introduce NID’s first undergraduate program—the five and half year-long professional education program. He was entrusted with the tasks of formulating a complete curriculum and course contents for the proposed Professional Education Programs at the undergraduate level. In process, he had numerous co-discussions with his colleagues at NID then; regarding the nature, purpose, and meaning of a course in ‘design history’. How would a course called ‘Design History’ be introduced and sustained amidst the new forms of teaching-learning at NID in those times? He has penned a detailed account of how ‘Design History’ becomes instrumental to explore and discover the historical basis of design process in his paper, Design History: An Alternative Approach published in Design Issues | Vol. 22, No. 4 (Autumn, 2006). These events in the making involving Vyas sowed the seeds of the NID education and value systems [9].
His ideas and efforts on building the course on Design History [9] are an inspirational offshoot from the likes of Siegfried Giedion, an eminent Design Historian of the later 1940s. Vyas course of ‘Design History’ required students to apply ‘the typological approach’ / ‘the investigation of the history of a ‘preferred type’ (neither periodic, nor stylistic vis-à-vis the style inventions by different designers in time). The unconventional method laid a strong pedagogy to the extent; that 1992 onwards, this became a regular course as part of the educational programmes at the School of Interior Design (SID) at the Center for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT), Ahmedabad.
At NID, post 1962, during the development of the institute’s ethos and learning along with his contemporary, Late Prof. Dashrath Patel; and also along with Gautam Sarabhai, Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, Dr. Kamala Chaudhari, and Prof Ravi Mathai of IIM-A, Kamalini Sarabhai, Director, B M institute; certain value systems [10] were laid out. To name a few, total denial of rote-learning; discovering theory only through practice (Learning to know, learning to do); a system of continuous feedback and qualitative evaluation replacing formal exams, marks, and grades; collective peer reviews instead of ‘ranking’, etc.
Around 1977, at NID, Vyas was extensively engaged in evolving processes of Design and Design Thinking along with students and faculty colleagues. As the foremost Systems Thinking educator at NID; Vyas has designed a framework where learning could take place in an atmosphere of great freedom, learning based upon experimentation and a spirit of enquiry.
In an interview record of his given to Prof. M.P. Ranjan; included in the revised version of the ‘Man and environment’- a design primer (dated June 19, 2009) – Vyas asserted the spread of ‘Information Technology’ as an enhancement of a designer’s toolkit [7]. According to Vyas, this could become an innovation for both design-practice-based and design-led interventions.