My Memories of History of Design

An honest confession, I have never understood and therefore almost never appreciated history as a subject, not in school and not after school either!

While the black texts ran for miles together in the text books, while a certain section of the class (those that I now call the 'buddhijeevis') was immersed in deeply understanding every word, while the other bunch was oscillating vigorously to memorize the dates/names/place/events in the book, my mind would be busy weaving stories as snippets and giving life to the characters and events in the those chapters.

I still remember the day, when my honestly very able history teacher in class 8 or 9 was taking us through the chapter on the Ajanta-Ellora caves and the history book, having pre-empted my inability to read copious texts was written in bullet-points, the only thing that I remember from that entire chapter was the information on the caves, specifically the ones that were used as Viharas by the Buddhist monks. As the class went over the rest of the lesson, my mind was stuck on a certain cave and I built an image of a dark cave, with the Buddha's mammoth figure in the centre and his disciples engaged in deep meditation, as little lights shone from inside tiny niches carved out on the cave walls.

Years later, I went on what our design school calls Environmental Exposure, to Ajanta and Ellora caves and I headed straight to cave no: 18 I think, or was it 24 (can't quite remember... told you, I am bad with numbers and dates!), the very cave that I had painted in my head and at the back of my notebook. The excitement of being there cannot be described and what made it special, was that it wasn't too different from how I had imagined it!

Another year later in design school, as an aspiring Industrial designer, we were to study the History of Industrial Design. One can only imagine my long face, so long that it almost touched the floor and yet no one noticed. Four days passed by and I had nothing. Hours of peering at books, ruffling through the pages of history, all I landed up with, was piles of confusion, no grand insights and puffy eyes. What made matters worse, were my able classmates walking in with thick notes on all that ever mattered to the world of Industrial design. With a head hung in shame I approached my faculty in private and told him how much I resented this exercise and that I had nothing noteworthy to show.

I was half imagining him brushing me aside or saying that the submission time is over or that I was being silly or plain daft! However, what transpired next, is what made me look at not just history but documentation of history differently.

My facilitator Jitendra(Arora) responded to my woes on the inability to comprehend so much text, dates and information, in a very colloquial Hindi and said "tumhey photos acchey se samajh mey aatey hain?" (do you understand photos better?) to which I said of course. Then he says "document your History of design through photos only"!

Did I hear that right, I thought to myself! Well of course I did and all it took was a day's worth of work and my project was ready and it looked magnificent, even though I say so myself!

I had a timeline, I had evidence of research, I had insights and I now have that almost tattooed in my head and all this through a visual mode of recording.

I think I now know, that was the day that I became a visual leader myself!