The Government of India has unveiled several initiatives aimed at generating employment and employability through initiatives such as ‘Make in India’, ‘Startup India’ and ‘Skill India’ to name a few. These initiatives aim to transform opportunities for India’s youth to move up the value chain of employment and make our demographic dividend a blessing. In this context, the Mumbai Chapter of the National HRD Network had recently organised their 2nd edition of the 'Career Fest' in Mumbai. The aim was to provide the student community and young professionals an indepth understanding of career opportunities in diverse sectors and enable them to make informed career choices. A third generation educationist, Bulbul Chaudhary, Director-Admissions and Outreach, Indian School of Design & Innovation (ISDI) Parsons, possess a diverse yet distinctive academic record. Corporate Citizen presents her talk on career opportunities in design, wherein she comes out with her succinct observation among learners. Working with the very young and the very old appears to her as the need of the hour and she believes that interaction with either lends holism to learning
I did my graduation in Science and I moved to design thereafter. But, one fine day I happened to be in a room like the one we are in and that’s when my career moved from design to business. For the longest time, I have worked in marketing and sales. Lot of people would ask me, eventually, where had I done my MBA from and the honest truth was that I had not done any MBA. I use to feel a little awkward about this and one day I came home and asked my husband that may be, I should do MBA. He said that how many designers do you know who are actually working in the business field-so to that extent you are special. And I just changed the way I looked at myself and thought back—what is it about a designer that allows them to function even in a business world. I have come to realise after nearly two decades that every business must make design sense today.
So, if you go to IBM today there is a design department. Of course, all your FMCG companies would have a design department, but would you expect an IT company to have a design department—probably not. Why suddenly design is something that everybody is talking about and more so in last 5-6 years the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad and IIM-Ahmedabad, has a module called design thinking. I ask myself—I have been doing design for 20 years, why is that people have started to talk about design.
There is this book called ‘A whole new mind’ authored by Daniel H Pink. According to the author, the human mind has two parts, the right and the left and most of us have one part of our mind little more aggressive than the other. In the last few decades, I belonged to certain kind of a person with a certain kind of a mind. So, this certain kind of person is being a computer programmer who could crack codes and who could craft contracts, MDs who could crunch numbers. If you go to Bengaluru, it is just IT—you could be playing golf on the golf-course and you can ask where should you touch the ball to, towards Microsoft, towards Accenture, IBM, or Cognizant—this is the way your roads are laid out now. That’s how much IT there is, but the keys to the kingdom are now changing hands. Future belongs to a very different kind of a person with a very different kind of a mind.
Creators and empathisers, pattern recognisers, storytellers, caregivers, big picture thinkers will now reach societies with richest rewards and share its greatest choice. In times to come, right brainers—right brain is the creative brain—will rule the future.
The world is divided into people who are practical and people who are creative. The MBA persons are all creative—you understand your excel sheet. And then there are the creative types like the artists. But, is it so that business people don’t have to be creative. Is your mother not creative—all these years ever since you were in school, every single day she had to be creative enough to decide as to what to put in your tiffin. Did it not call for any creativity, or is it just a business mind. So, the first creative person you probably know or the designer you probably came across was your mother.
All children are creative, give them a colour pencil and you know what they do to the walls. But you often hear parents say, “My child is just not creative”. What happens to creativity as we grow—we begin to think that we are not very creative and many times we think we are not creative because we cannot draw—drawing is not creativity, it is just an expression of creativity.
“Creators and empathisers, pattern recognisers, storytellers, caregivers, big picture thinkers will now reach societies with richest rewards and share its greatest choice. In times to come, right brainers—right brain is the creative brain—will rule the future”
I was listening to a Ted talk video of Dr Devi Shetty from Bengaluru. Talking about empathy— this doctor runs a very big cardiology centre in Bengaluru called ‘Narayan Hrudalaya’ and also runs a smaller specialist unit in Bengaluru itself. He says, after the surgery happens, the post-operative care is just as important as the surgery. In fact, the first week after surgery is just as critical as the surgery, because that’s the time you are likely to get an infection. That’s the time your body is coping up with foreign bodies. The patients continue to live in the ICU and after five days they are discharged, after telling the patient’s near and dear one’s to take care of the patient. These near and dear one’s have no idea of how to take care and nurse the patient. So, talking about empathy, what this hospital is, soon after the surgery, whosoever is the guardian of the patient, they are expected to nurse and take care of the patient along with the medical staff, for all of those five days. So, they know exactly what the patient is going through. And then, when the patient gets discharged, the family members know exactly how to take care. Can you imagine a doctor has to be so creative? And he is one of India’s leading doctors. But, doesn’t that doctor got to be creative enough in thinking about how to make life for the family members and the patient, a little better post-surgery? And that’s empathy! So, empathy is when you feel what the other person feels. So, it’s that the doctor needs to be creative, doctor needs to be empathetic and so should anyone else. The only place you can’t be empathetic is in the Indian Army.
As the economies are moving from the people’s bags to an intellectual or a knowledge driven economy, that’s what the evolution of man would look like—you know about the Darwinian human evolution from a monkey to a man. In the same way, economy has moved from agrarian to mining, which is the industrial revolution, to the classic briefcase man—the IT and technology economy, which we are living, and the last one is where the man can pick up his art palate and become the artist or the designer. Remember that all designers are not artists—art and design are two different things.
Everyone knows about the food chain, we have microorganisms like algae and fungi at the bottom of the pyramid, followed by fishes, then the herbivores and carnivores, and then the human beings at the top. It means that for one man to survive, you need so much going for you. The remerging value chain looks somewhat similar—we have come to realise that we are just as important as anyone else. The snake may be as important as the human being, simply because there might lie something out there, which might be a cure for a disease, yet not found. So, there is a value chain where there is an equal amount of place under the sun for everyone.
Referring to the story of a man called Doug Dietz—what do you think Dietz does for living? He is basically a technical person, from a company called General Electric (GE). He made large MRI machines, which is a scanner that scans a human body and virtually slices your body. If there is anything like small clot or tumour in your body, the machine can detect it. This gentleman, because he made these machines, he would actually go to the hospitals where his machines were being used. He wanted to know how well the machines were functioning or whether its components were fine, where there any glitches. One day he went to a children’s hospital and he saw the parents with their little five-year-old daughter. He saw the little girl crying. He was a little disturbed, so he walked towards radiology department where the machine was. When he spoke to the people there, he learnt that the child was crying, because kids were very scared to be inside that machine. It is like a spacecraft, where you go in a compact little cell, its dark and you are not supposed to move and be absolutely still. So the doctor said to Dietz that they had a way to solve this out. The kids were given sedatives to make them still. Dietz saw that after the MRI scan was over, parents walked out with the sedated kids on their shoulder. Then Dietz went back home that day and he couldn’t sleep in the night, because till then he was doing a fantastic job, making the best possible MRI machines. So, he thought that something is not right about what he was doing. He thought about to crack this—my users, who are children, don’t seem to like what I make and therefore they have to be sedated. So, he thought, let me do something that changes the way these machines are accepted by my young consumers. He thought, suppose we tell children that they are going to an amusement park and not a hospital and MRI machine is going to be a game where you are going into a pirate ship, where there are going to be pirates out there and you got to be absolutely still. He got the doctors and nurses trained by the people in the amusement park, on how to handle children. He converted the MRI machine to look like a pirate ship from outside. This is a very elementary example where Doug Dietz started thinking like a designer. I just want to say—how everyone is actually a designer.
“‘Make in India’ is great, but if you make and design in India, you have all the value right here. That’s exactly why people are suddenly talking about design and that’s why we are talking about digital India, ‘Make in India’, and ‘Startup India’ and so on”
Imagination, definitely empathy, adaptability and it also takes a little bit of heart which all of us have.
We are big as a country—1.3 billion population, that’s how big we are. We are probably one of the youngest countries, with an average age of 27 years and in a few years, our country’s average age is going to be 25 years. This young population, many of them would go for STEM-Science, Technology, Engineering or Management careers. There is a challenge—with many of these people doing STEM careers, are we going to cope with creativeness in our jobs. We have 22 million babies that are born every year in this country and how many new jobs are created every year? The number of jobs created is two million. So, what are the other 20 million going to do? If everyone is going to look for a job, chances are there are not going to be so many jobs. So, there is unemployment and then there is underemployment. So instead of job seekers, we got to be a country of job creators.
“If everyone is going to look for a job, chances are there are not going to be so many jobs. So, there is unemployment and then there is underemployment. So, instead of job seekers, we got to be a country of job creators”
For example, we have a piece of leather a standard A4 size—probably its worth in the market is around 25 rupees. Now, suppose we turn this piece of leather into a luxury bag—do you see the value added after it is designed into a bag? So, by converting or adding design to an object, you are adding much more value to the object. You make money, but the country also makes money, because you pay taxes. And who is rich, in turn? The country! ‘Make in India’ is great, but if you make and design in India, you have all the value right here. That’s exactly why people are talking about design and that’s why we are talking about ‘Digital India’, ‘Make in India’, ‘Startup India’ and so on. Your cars and watches are manufactured in India. Half of world’s automobiles are manufactured here. But, who designed it—someone in Italy designed the car at one point. If we design in India, the whole world will be happy to make it through us. So, that’s the value a good design could bring, whether it’s a watch, a garment, chair or any product.
By Rajesh Rao
