The Glasgow School of Art

Design in the Real World: A View from India
Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan

Reid Auditorium, 6pm Thursday 19 January 2017
Free but ticketed – reserve place via Eventbrite

More lectures in the 'Race, Rights and Sovereignty' series:
Akala
Dr. Karen Salt

This presentation is a series of meditations on the challenges before the practice of design in India.

The first part explores the nature of social differences and hierarchies in Indian society to introduce the audience to the “real world” in India.

The second part presents examples of design responses to uncover the web of relationships between designers, the market, and the State, which shape design practice.

Finally, the presentation reflects upon the location of designers in the world they seek to transform through design and how design curricula might better prepare them for reflective practice.

This lecture is part of the ‘Race, Rights and Sovereignty’ series, hosted by The Students' Association in association with The GSA Public Lecture series.

Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan is Associate Professor at the School of Design, Ambedkar University, Delhi, India. Her research interests centre on nineteenth- and twentieth-century craft and design in the Indian subcontinent from historical and sociological perspectives. Her most recent publications are "Imagining the Indian Nation: The Design of Gandhi’s Dandi March and Nehru’s Republic Day Parade" in Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization (Kejtil Fallan and Grace Lees-Maffei eds., Berghann 2016) and “Design in India” for The Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of Design (Clive Edwards ed., Bloomsbury Academic 2016). She is co-author of The Shaping of Modern Gujarat: Plurality, Hindutva and Beyond (Penguin 2005), Ahmedabad: From Royal City to Megacity (Penguin 2011) and co-editor of Ahmedabad 600: Portraits of City (Marg 2011).

Listen back to the lecture here: