Kumkum Nadig — “ If we could construct situations where design professionals and design students come together, the creative energy and output would be rhapsodic!”
Kumkum is a designer with a multidisciplinary background in architecture, industrial design and graphic design. She has founded two design practices, Leubin Design and Kena Design (where she currently works). Apart from her professional practice, she engages in design pedagogy as the programme head of Visual Communication at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology.
Your work deals with enabling and bringing about change. How have you had to change in your various roles as a designer?
As a studio head, you not only work as a designer but also as a mentor, as a critic, as a marketing person, an accountant, admin and HR person, as a friend and as an associate. You need to wear various hats within the lifespan of a given project. During the client interactions you become the marketing person, selling ideas, promoting your studio and also educating the clients about values of design and design process. Given all these various roles that one ends up assuming, there are times when I look back and feel that my role-playing as a designer constituted perhaps less than 10% of my time!
How do you balance professional consulting and pedagogy? How do both of these practises influence each other?
For me practice and pedagogy feed off each other. I honestly cannot see myself only as an educator or a design professional. Rowing the boat with both the oars is something that I enjoy as the energy of one oar compliments the movement achieved by the other. On the practical front, balancing professional and academic lives requires tremendous amount of self-discipline and huge time management skills. Life rooted in practice can at times go into an auto mode that can have a numbing effect on some of us. It is easy to find yourself in a situation where you may begin looking at the design projects as “yet another logo design project” or “one more brochure coming right up”. Whereas it is impossible to fall into this sort of numbness especially at Srishti, where the interactions with the students, peers and curriculum are like challenges that are refreshed almost round the clock! It is during those periods of apathy in practice that one can take inspiration from teaching and from interactions with students. Being surrounded with fresh and young minds is a blessing that every teacher feels very fortunate about. The experiences and encounters during these interactions are invaluable as they teach aspects about your way of working and thinking that you wouldn’t have known otherwise.
What is the most valuable design lesson you’ve learnt from someone who is not a design practitioner?
There are times I feel that we do not need design schools if only we learnt to observe. Of course, an observant nature leads you to a treasure trove of revelations and learning, but observing people on the street — those who learn to make do with less — offer some amazing lessons for us to learn from. Simply by walking the busy streets of our cities, we encounter Jugaad solutions all around us, and these are never designed through research, ideation, or through consciously applying design thinking, and yet they offer us new way to think constructively and imaginatively about innovation and strategy.
You have a unique perspective being engaged with both students and experienced creative professionals — what can both parties learn from each other?
I wish there was a way for me to allow for greater interaction and intersection between professionals and students. The culture of professionalism, deadlines and economics is something that a design professional is always surrounded with… whereas a student is preoccupied mostly with research, ideas and critiques. Design professionals do not get to engage deeply in the design process and end up taking shortcuts most of the time due to tight deadlines. Students tend to get lost in the Design Process and find it very hard to get down to focusing on ideation and development of an idea. They generally never ever have time to fine-tune an idea. If we could construct situations where design professionals and design students get to come together, the creative energy and output would be rhapsodic!
What would you say is the defining characteristic of “Indian” design? Do you think there is a modern visual language that is specific to India?
Search for defining “Indian” design has been our muse since at least three decades now…and I feel that the only thing that has emerged is a mash-up of vivid hues with earthy tones, combined with decorative elements inspired from Victorian and Islamic textiles, and ancient Indian temples. I find this approach rather superfluous. Allowing vernacular visuals and art forms to influence and dominate our visual design and calling it “Indian” does not work either. It is like covering up a cabinet with colourful shutters. Instead of making something appear new and beautiful on the surface it is important to examine what is inside to discover its inherent form and function. Instead of seeking inspiration from the decorative arts of the late 18th to 19th centuries it is important to engage in processes that help us understand Indian way of life, Indian values, our culture and our responses to modernism and globalization. If a design is rooted in this process of research, enquiry and observation then it cannot miss being rooted and contextual to its purpose.
How has being in Bangalore enriched your creative process? What have you learnt from the city?
I moved to Bangalore as a young professional after having worked as a Graphic Designer with Philips International in The Netherlands and in Bombay over a period of 5 years. This was year 1990 and Bangalore was still a sleepy old town in those days. Even though I loved living in Bangalore of the 90s, the city in those early years of my professional life didn’t quite support my energy, enthusiasm, professionalism and ambition! But it was almost as if Bangalore went through rapid industrialization during the late 90s to early 2000. While traffic congestion, infrastructure and changing weather patterns were the price we paid for this growth spurt, professionally for me the city became a lively, nurturing place for creativity and I could see numerous opportunities and spaces for expression of individuality and imagination cropping up. Bangalore today is a good mix of cosmopolitan and heritage culture and this brings in a unique potency to feed the artist in any creative person.
This interview is a part of a series of conversations with designers from Bengaluru called ADI Diaries. You can find more interviews here.
