In his 1999 article titled – The “Ulm Model” in the Periphery – Gui Bonsiepe discussed the various manifestations of the “Ulm Model” especially its reach and establishment In India in the process of bringing design education to India. He states: “HfG influences had a part in the founding of the National Institute of Design (NID) at Ahmedabad in India, where HfG faculty members gave guest courses (Hans Gugelot, Herbert Lindinger, Wolfgang Siol, Christian Staub and others). These institutions based themselves in policy, design, curriculum and teaching methods (problem based learning in design courses), on the experience of the HfG. This experience was brought to them through contacts with HfG faculty members, through Ulm alumni who came there to teach, and also through the publications of the HfG, especially the magazine 'Ulm'.” This statement from “Ulm Design” (1999) provided the setting for me to research deeper the connections between HfG Ulm and NID in the early years as well as in contemporary times.
I had detailed interviews and videos recorded from former NID faculty members who had substantial contact with Ulm and Ulm faculty staff in the 60s and 70s and these interviews as well as other resources and information available with me I proceeded to build the final article. I interviewed Kumar Vyas who started the Product Design Programme at NID in 1966 after spending 11 months at Ulm in Gugelot's office in 1965-66; Parmanand Dalwadi who set up the NID Photography Department and was a student of Christian Staub at NID in 1963-66; and Wolfgang Siol who was at HfG Ulm in 1970. Gajanan Upadhayay started the Furniture Design activity at NID and worked with Hans Gugelot during his brief visit in 1965 and finally Jayanti A. Panchal who also worked with Hans Gugelot in 1965 on the tangential fan project at NID and later went to Gugelot office in 1970-71 as a product-engineering designer. All of them had intense interactions with Prof. Hans Gugelot when he visited NID in 1965. Hans Gugelot passed away in 1965 some time after his return from India, but before he had set up the faculty training exposure programme for Kumar Vyas to undertake at Ulm over 11 months in 1965-66. I also got in touch by phone with Prof. Sudha Nadkarni in Mumbai and reviewed his papers for the “Ulmer Model Exhibitions” in 2010 at Ahmedabad and Bangalore. Sudha Nadkarni studied at HfG Ulm from 1962 to 1966 and came back to India to work at NID 1966 to 1969 and then went on to set up the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay in 1970. Kirit Patel of CEPT University had apprenticed in Frei Otto's studio in the 1980s and this interview, too, provided insights about the approach to design that was followed by one of the prominent guest faculty members at HfG Ulm.
Herbert Lindinger tells us in his foreword to the book “Ulm Design” that the HfG Ulm had been through six phases of development and before the NID teams interacted with them they had already developed a critical approach to design education and design theory that was well documented and disseminated by the Ulm magazine 1 to 21 from 1955 to 1968. He states: “The third phase, 1956-58, was dominated by the teaching of Otl Aicher, Maldonado, Gugelot and Vordemberge-Gildewart. These instructors tried to build a new and markedly closer relationship between design, science and technology. This was the first manifestation of the Ulmer Modell (the Ulm model) which has lost none of its relevance. The HfG evolved a model of training that aimed to give designers a new, and rather more modest and cautious, understanding of their own role. As design was now to concern itself with more complex things than chairs and lamps, the designer could no longer regard himself, within the industrial and aesthetic process in which he operated, as an artist, a superior being. He must now aim to work as part of a team, involving scientists, research departments, sales people, and technicians, in order to realize his own vision of a socially responsible shaping – Gestaltung – of the environment. Under Maldonado, a new Basic Course came into being, which broke away more and more clearly from Bauhaus concepts and absorbed the lessons of perceptual theory and semiotics.”
The National Institute of Design (NID)
It was this Basic Course that Kumar Vyas understood deeply at Ulm and introduced to the new batch of Product Design students when the Postgraduate course was offered to graduate engineers in 1967. The NID documentation from 1964-69 shows examples of the Basic Design assignments as well as the early projects and the methods used in these projects that echo the Ulm paradigm as well as the muted shades of grey and colours that were a hallmark of the HfG Ulm way. According to him, while the spirit of Ulm may have directed the assignments, a lot of innovations were brought into the teaching to meet local needs and challenges. I joined NID as a student in the postgraduate programme in Furniture Design in 1969 and Kumar Vyas, Sudha Nadkarni and Rolf Misol conducted the interview. While the Furniture Design projects that started from day one were formulated by Misol and his teacher and chief consultant, Arno Votler, the Basic Design assignments conducted by Kumar Vyas were the same as those done by the Product Design students. The evening discussions that we had with the Product Design students and those from Graphics and Textiles did show different threads of pedagogy that were being explored at NID by the various departments and each was informed by the specific positions of the selected consultants and visiting faculty who were involved in these programmes. While Product Design was based on Ulm the Graphic Design programme was modeled after the Swiss school at Basel and the Textile Design programme came from Cranbrook and the Scandinavian traditions of weaving. Furniture Design and Ceramic Design had German consultants to set the curriculum and to conduct the early programmes. Arno Vottler and Hans Theo Baumann developed the Furniture Design and Ceramic Design programmes respectively.
NID, too, had a large number of visiting consultants and guest faculty members in the formative years and many were involved in project work where students actively participated. The first of a string of major exhibition and multidisciplinary projects was the designing of the Nehru Exhibition and in 1964 the entire team of faculty and students in the Graphic Design and Architecture programmes were involved with the team from Charles Eames Office and this helped set up a very vibrant work culture at the new Institute located in a building that was designed by Le Corbusier where NID had access to the loft spaces, which had been suitably modified to start the school of design and host its activities until the new building was made ready across the street at Paldi in Ahmedabad. Gautam and Gira Sarabhai with their vast network of contacts in the art and design community worldwide were able to attract the best talent available to Ahmedabad and with the generous grants from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations the talent pool that they assembled reads like a who’s who of world design and the students and faculty were exposed to these ideas and work methods. This procession of international talent continued well into the late 80s with the support of the development grants from the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). The first UNIDO- ICSID conference on Design for Development was held at NID Paldi campus and at IDC in Mumbai in 1979 and amongst the speakers were Victor Papanek and Gui Bonsiepe along with designers from Europe, Asia and Latin America. I mention this here since NID had been evolving internally, as well, towards development oriented design action and there was much discussion at the Institute on what would be an appropriate of design action for a country like India and these debates continued to impact the education programmes at the Institute over the years.
Hans Gugelot and Product Design
For the formulation of the Product Design programme Kumar Vyas was asked by Gautam and Gira Sarabhai to stop by at HfG Ulm in early 1965 on his way back from the opening ceremony of the Eames designed Nehru Exhibition that opened in New York. This halt at the HfG Ulm turned out to be quite significant for the NID’s Product Design programme. Kumar Vyas met Hans Gugelot there and it was agreed that Gugelot would travel to India and help in the formulation of the new programme for the NID. Gugelot traveled to India in the summer of that year and spent a little over two weeks working with NID designers and craftsmen to develop the new pedestal model of the tangential fan with Kumar Vyas and Jayanti A Panchal and with Gajanan Upadhayay a range of furniture using wooden strips in a T-section arrangement and canvas and plywood strip inserts for stiffness. The model making for the tangential fan was made by the legendary Haribhai, a Guajarati craftsman and carpenter of fine skills and an amazing ability to make models in a wide range of materials, plastics, metals and woods. The wooden furniture system was detailed and developed by Gajanan Upadhayay and he made the full set of scale models as well as the prototypes himself. Gugelot returned to Ulm but passed away before Kumar Vyas could commence his planned training programme at his office in Ulm. Kumar Vyas did, however, travel to Ulm and work under the guidance of Herbert Lindinger at HfG Ulm and Horst Diener at the Gugelot office where he spent the next ten months understanding the Ulm approach to design education and practice. He also met and befriended Sudha Nadkarni at HfG Ulm and this set the stage for the next level of partnership since Nadkarni joined NID as a faculty and designer and worked there from 1966 to 1969 before moving to Bombay to set up the IDC as part of IIT Bombay. Jayanti A Panchal traveled to Ulm in 1974 to work in Gugelot’s office under E. Reichl and Horst Diener and during this period worked on many ongoing projects of the office as a design engineer.
Christian Staub and Wolfgang Siol – Photography at NID
The Photography Department at NID was set up by Christian Staub who lived in Ahmedabad for three years and trained the early students at NID including Paramanand Dalwadi who became the main photography faculty staff at NID after his period of training at NID. Dalwadi recalls that period with warmth and deep respect for his classical perfection in his work. Staub introduced Dalwadi to the finer aspects of photography – camera work as well as lab and darkroom techniques gave him confidence to teach the subject as well as carry out complex professional tasks in studio and architectural photography using various formats that were available at NID. The assignments were all refined at HfG Ulm and formed the basis of teaching methods at NID, as well. In 1969-70, Dalwadi was deputed for training at Ulm under Wolfgang Siol for four months. There he had complete access to the equipment in the studio although he arrived as an apprentice from India. This gave Dalwadi insight into the Ulm classic techniques of “isometric photography” that was achieved by perspective correction and appropriate camera position in relation to the subject, unwritten rules of composition learned by practice and attention to detail. He had yet another occasion in 1974 to return to Siol’s studio and spend one month there to be immersed in the studio practice as a refresher dose. Dalwadi had joined NID as a student in 1963, afterwards started teaching at NID and built his own reputation as one of India’s leading photographers and teachers.
Guest Teachers at HfG Ulm and at NID
Herbert Lindinger tells us: “The HfG was planned as a place for experiment, an institution open to new hypotheses, theories, and development, in itself the enormous preponderance of guest instructors (around 200) as opposed to permanent faculty members (20) led to a sustained dynamic, a constant state of mental unrest. The list of those guest instructors, then still young and largely unknown, now looks like a Who’s Who of science, literature and art.” Lindinger visited NID in 1970 to review the new curriculum for the undergraduate programme that was then started.
Klaus Krippendorff, whom I met at the IDSA conference in 2006, writes about his experiences at Ulm, where the visiting lecturers and faculty members included Charles and Ray Eames (1955 and 1958), Buckminster Fuller, Bruce Archer and Horst Rittel– his favorite teachers. Krippendorff’s paper of 2008 states: “The school seemed to look for students who connected intellectual, cultural, political and technological conceptions and willing to act.” He also has a comment on the politics of the HfG Ulm and he states: “Perhaps the lack of appreciation of the virtues of higher education by the design faculty explains at least part of its shortsighted politics.” This seems to be true of NID as well as of other design schools in India where a lack of scholarship and publication is sometimes seen as a virtue.
In later years, both NID and IDC managed to obtain UNDP funding and faculty from both schools revisited contacts from HfG Ulm as part of their training programmes and guest professors from HfG Ulm also came to India as UNDP consultants to bring a renewed level of exchange between these organisations.
References
Otl Aicher, the world as design, Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, 1991
Otl Aicher, Analogous and Digital, Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, 1994
Stafford Beer, Platform for Change, John Wiley & Sons, London, 1975
Gui Bonsiepe, Estrutura e Estetica do Produto, Centro de Aperfeicoamento de Docentes de Desenho Industrial, Brasilia, 1986
Gui Bonsiepe, Interface: An approach to Design, Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, 1999
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, St. Martin's Griffin; 2nd edition, New York, 1982
Charles and Ray Eames, The India Report, Government of India, New Delhi, 1958, reprint, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, 1958, 1997
Martin Krampen & Gunther Hormann, The Ulm School of Design – Beginnings of a Project of Unyielding Modernity, Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, 2003
Klaus Krippendorff, The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design, Taylor & Francis CRC, New York, 2006
Klaus Krippendorff, Designing in Ulm and Off Ulm, University of Pennsylvania, 2008
Herbert Lindinger, Hoschule fur Gestaltung - Ulm, Die Moral der Gegenstande, Berlin, 1987
Herbert Lindinger, Eds., Ulm Design: The Morality of Objects, Hoschule fur Gestaltung – 1953 – 1968, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999.
Thomas Maldonado, Gui Bonsiepe, Renate Kietzmann et al., eds, “Ulm (1 to 21): Journal of the Hoschule fur Gestaltung”, Hoschule fur Gestaltung, Ulm, 1958 to 1968
Tomas Maldonado, Design, Nature, and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology, Harper & Row, New York, 1972
Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World, Thames & Hudson Ltd., London, 1972
Frei Otto, IL20 TASKS, Institute for Lightweight Structures, Stutgart, 1975
M P Ranjan, Lessons from Bauhaus, Ulm and NID: Role of Basic Design in PG Education, in proceedings of DETM Conference, NID, Ahmedabad, 2006
M P Ranjan. Design for India blog, http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.in/. Ahmedabad, (2007 – 2013)
Rene Spitz, HfG Ulm: The View Behind the Foreground – The Political History of the Ulm School of Design –1953-1968, Edition Axel Menges, Stuttgart/London, 2002
Kirti Trivedi ed., Readings from Ulm, Industrial Design Centre, Bombay, 1989
Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimer, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1969
About the Author
M P Ranjan (Professor – Design Chair, CEPT University, Ahmedabad)
Design Thinker & Author of blog www.designforindia.com,
Prof M P Ranjan is a design thinker with 40 years of experience in design education and practice in association with the National Institute of Design. He helped visualize and set up two new design schools in India, one for the crafts sector, the IICD Jaipur and the other for the bamboo sector, the BCDI Agartala. His book Handmade in India is a comprehensive resource on the hand crafts sector of India and was created as a platform for the building of a vibrant creative economy based on the crafts skills and resources identified therein.
His book on bamboo opened up new frontiers for design exploration in India. He has explored bamboo as a designer material for social transformation. Bamboo has been positioned as a sustainable material of the future through his work spread over three decades. His work in design education covered many subjects including Design Thinking, Data Visualisation, Interaction Design and Systems Design
His blog “Design for India” has become a major platform for Indian design discourse. http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com
He is on the Governing Council of the IICD, Jaipur and advises other design schools in India and abroad. He lives and works from Ahmedabad in India. He has been acknowledged by peers as one of the international thought leaders in Design Thinking today.
An interview mit M P Ranjan is published in the fifth issue of the „bauhaus“ magazine.