As with much else in the world in 2025, the world of education—and more specifically design education (which is perhaps the most inter-disciplinary of all learning fields)—is in a state of flux. Debates about artificial intelligence, climate change, identity politics and the future of the workplace are swirling all around us with accelerated ferocity. India, as a fast-growing economy, is repositioning itself geopolitically, while simultaneously redesigning and reconfiguring many of its institutions, systems and processes. Or, as one could also argue, the present Indian government is re-designing them, re-aligning them as per a cultural, moral and institutional vision considerably at odds with that of Jawaharlal Nehru. These are times of instability and, not surprisingly, there is a sense of uncertainty about the future.
Amid this larger swirl of history, Sanjeev Bothra’s book Design Education in India: Values of Socially Responsible Design comes as a calming breath of fresh air. In his multi-layered analysis of the evolution of design education, Bothra interrogates the fundamentals of design thinking as the world appears to be at a crucial tipping point in which all received orthodoxies are under critical scrutiny. Where, one may ask, are past visions of holistic and responsible design today, not just in the Indian context, but globally? And how do we find our way out of the several existential predicaments we face today? For Bothra, the answer emerges out of his passion for teaching, which led him to settle on the idea of ‘socially responsible design’ as the starting point for a regenerative and sustainable future.
Questions of ‘design’ lie at the heart of all systems, processes and institutions—as well as the material artefacts—that we rely on as a part of our daily lives. Literally every object in our midst and its usage exists because of a design imagination. Modern design thinking in India has a long and complex history, shaped as much by the vagaries of its colonial past, as by the intellectual currents that drove this movement in Europe in the early 20th century (and before that, the Industrial Revolution). In many ways, the arrival of design education to India was an integral part of post-colonial India’s attempt to embrace modernism, something that was central to the Nehruvian vision that animated the earlier decades of independent India. During these early years of post-colonial institution-building, the interplay between modernist forms of knowledge and traditional, indigenous culture threw up a range of fascinating experiments, impacting material culture as well as the urban landscape in complex ways.
The National Institute of Design (NID), founded in 1961 in Ahmedabad, and informed in its content and scope by a vision articulated by the team of Charles and Ray Eames, an eminent American design couple who produced the India Report at the request of the then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was one such pioneering experiment. NID was deeply influenced by the Bauhaus and Ulm design traditions (from Germany) but was also committed to building on India’s rich legacy of craftsmanship that had, for centuries, shaped the country’s material culture in a sustainable and ecologically responsible way. Through its alumni, the legacy of institutions like NID has had an enduring impact on generations of Indians, among whom Sanjeev Bothra’s was a voice of calm and reason.
Some years ago, in his 2016 book, The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh lamented humanity’s ‘imaginative failure’ in the face of the planet’s looming climate catastrophe. More recently, in 2022, the distinguished theorist Nancy Fraser, in the preface of her book Cannibal Capitalism, provocatively asks: "Are we toast? Can we figure out how to dismantle the social system that is driving us into the jaws of obliteration? Can we come together to address the entire crisis complex that system has spawned—not ‘just’ the heating of the earth, nor ‘only’ the progressive destruction of our collective capacities for public action, nor ‘merely’ the wholesale assault on our ability to care for one another and sustain social ties, nor ‘simply’ the disproportionate dumping of the ensuing fallout on poor, working-class, and racialized populations, but the general crisis in which these various harms are intertwined?”
As India hurtles towards a future in which the forces of climate change, the ‘4th Industrial Revolution’” and nationalist jingoism pervade our mainstream discourse, Bothra’s soothing book, through the prism of design education, provides a tentative roadmap for the larger community of planners, designers, educators and institution-builders. His reasoned analysis attempts to guide us on a path out of this morass of disenchantment by outlining the fundamentals of a new paradigm for design education and education more generally.
At the heart of Bothra’s ambitious project is a desire to outline the key elements of what he describes as ‘socially responsible design’. This multi-layered concept, which emerges out of his career as a teacher and practitioner, is outlined over seven meticulously crafted chapters. Four of these chapters provide the historical and conceptual scaffolding of his construct; one that describes his research and case studies; and two that sum up his core proposals. Bothra places emphasis on the need to build on what we have learnt from the multiple paradigms of design thinking that have impacted the world over the past century (especially India), but have not allowed us to truly confront our world in environmental peril as it exists today. In this, he builds on the ideas of a range of influential voices ranging from William Morris and Paulo Freire on the one hand, to MP Ranjan and the pioneering faculty of NID on the other.
For the past few decades, deliberations about the need to address the needs of India’s demographic dividend, i.e., India’s predominantly young working population, have been at the centre of discussions about the form and content of our educational practices and institutions. At the heart of these discussions is the creative tension between the need to balance the skilling needs of the youth (so that they may find gainful, sustainable livelihoods); their capacity for critical thinking (so that they may navigate the challenges of life with a sense of perspective); and values (so that they may live ethical and fulfilling lives).The sad truth, unfortunately, is that the design of an educational system that can reconcile all of these elements within an elegant paradigm still continues to elude us. Bothra provides us with the foundational vocabulary for a possible solution. The complex relationship between the learning of skills, having a sense of the bigger picture, and a humanistic, moral imagination—all of which are integral for the development of the young when they enter college—has been masterfully distilled by Bothra in his book.
Bothra’s argument, elegant in its simplicity, is that it is crucial for designers—and, indeed, this applies to policy-makers, planners and institution-builders, as well as students around the world—to approach real world problems through an elaborate ‘filtering system’ that requires them to exercise a sense of responsibility not just to clients, consumers, the government, or society; but importantly, to the needs of the environment as well. The technical aspects of what is done on the ground follow from such a filtering process. This is where Bothra confronts the challenge posed by Ghosh and Fraser And all of these responsibilities have to be filtered through the moral and ethical filter of personal values. For Bothra, this all-encompassing filtering system—in which the institutional/global is interlinked with the personal—serves as an indispensable and holistic framework to work towards responsible design outcomes. In other words, designers have a responsibility to fulfilling the needs of multiple stakeholders while locating themselves at the centre of the task at hand so as to achieve a complementarity of the self with the world; indeed, a sense of unity or singularity that serves humanity as a whole.
Bothra’s is a lofty, idealistic vision—one that is acutely needed in our troubled times. All he asks, in the end, is that we reconcile our journey through life as professionals and social actors with our commitment to our moral core, and to our natural and material environment—so that future generations can live and breathe in peace. For all these reasons, his multi-textured meditation on the foundational attributes of a design education paradigm for India, as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, is an important contribution in the ongoing debates about the future of learning in our tumultuous times.
Author: Sanjeev Bothra
Publisher: Routledge, London
Price: Rs2,944 (paperback)
(Vivek Bhandari is President of Bhartiya Skill Development University, Jaipur. After a decade as a faculty member of Hampshire College (US), he served as Director of the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA) and has taught at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, for several years.)
