Ravishankar Design

On a different note discussions on his project with Abhishek of the future car dashboard design for a high end prestigious iconic brand which he is signing up for, I got trippy. Went about talking, “most often designers doing UX in a team dominant with techies tend to become incrementally different from engineers in the design process, they follow standard templates of styling, trends, navigation, UI and so on in arriving at the interface solutions. Take a detour, deal with the intangible in conceptualizing the UX, take a walk around the brand and ask. What would be the right interaction gesture for this iconic brand, what is the tone of audio feedback for this brand, how would this brand converse with me, what could be the visual gleam and texture of this brand, how will the material interaction of this brand behave and respond?”

Met Rohan after a long gap today at the staircase landing. He is doing his Information visualization design project with an MNC and we got into conversation regarding his project and usual design teacher questions as to who was he designer for, and so on. The conversation moved on to the topic of familiarity of people with past information media and interactions and how introducing the next version has a tedious learning curve across immediate generation too let alone older ones. New products get introduced with no historic or perceptual connect with added newer navigational logic and semantic. The change is a step up and not a seamless tread. Walk into a bank and see how the middle aged staff struggle with newer systems or software versions. You see the younger staff tutoring them, while their child back home is faster in switching channels. It seems as they/we designers may say, there will always be the gaps and can be bridged, but hello bridges are on rivers, we are talking about e...

A set to formulate syllabus for Industrial Design conceived from the five broad attributes of good design. Download the printable version here.

This is in the context of design education where one is getting carried away by the florescent, gimmicky technology confused notions of innovation and design, etc….fiddling and enticed, start-ups, customized manufacturing, programmable objects, etc… ...in the meanwhile there is lots more to be done, we all know what we mean!! The country needs ants. Design professionals who are experts in providing solutions by: following a systemic process, are contextual in problem solving and giving useful, usable, desirable and empathetic solutions (opportunity vs problem is a business-friendly term agreed and needed!!). The curriculum and pedagogy of design education needs to focus on and train the ants who will sustain growth and the grasshoppers who will reveal the ‘change’ in time. We need the ants, more of them, who have the ability and are trained in the said skill sets above, while letting the grasshoppers of the lot freewheel in design :)  Ants are the support system, the ‘sth...

In one of the recent design conferences in Chennai, the gentleman from Yanko Design asked, “tell me what is Indian design, like you have Italian Design, German Design and others who have distinct terms or adjectives associated”. I said to him, “now this is a big question or rather intriguing thought!!” While starting to write this article for Paperworld 2013, Germany, of which this is an extract, it was Diwali time in India, the festival of lights and New Year for the business community in India. The flavour of ‘Indianess’ if I call it can be seen in traditionally made products such as the accounts book for Diwali. It’s called Chopda Puja, a practise of opening a new accounts book on this festival day and making the first entry. The use of cloth on the cover is centuries old, typical to many ritual texts and books.  Like in any other culture, textile the most visible and used product would I believe reveal the attributes of design in its variety of forms and context. Design in ...

This July, Nijoo Dubey my faculty colleague at the National Institute of Design and I took the FORM course for the PG Furniture Design students. They were asked to concieve a stool in MDF material with an expression, emotion or a metaphor thereby giving it a character. They visualised and constructed seats with overall form and details with characters such as 'Vagabond', 'Anthropod', 'State of Mind', 'Anti Matter', 'Tactile', etc. They were immersed in it during the entire course and the outcomes were amazing. This was truly my most gratifying times of my teaching career. They made it happen.