Karim Rashid, a prolific designer, who attended the India Design Forum in 2012 spoke about the change in design industry from designing for mass production to elitism to going back to a ‘ designocracy ‘ as we are beginning to witness now. Rashid fails to appreciate sentimental design e.g. a restaurant services innovative food, but makes you seat on a 16th-century European chair. He is for beautiful objects that make our lives simpler. Rashid created a bathing luxury — all in one TV-tub unit made of acrylic resin with a waterproof LCD-screen that allows you to watch TV and DVDs and listen to MP3 format music and surf the net. According to him, contemporary design has the power to shape the future. The role of a designer today is to make the world a better place by influencing our everyday behaviou r— functionally and emotionally. Good designs reduce the stress in our environments and in everyday life. His best designs function both as sculptural and functional objects. Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher, called all objects obstacles in our experience of the world. Rashid evokes him and says that indeed we are living in poorly designed world.
According to Lidewij Edelkoort, a trend forecaster, India urgently needs to create its own design language. Contemporary Indian design has completely distanced itself from the past. Design schools should take on this task.
International design moves along the continuum of lush-and-plush ( Versace ) to clean-and-simple (Apple ). The extremely of less-is-more has found favour in recent times. Design itself has been used as a strategy by Steve. Dieter Rams, now 80 ( 2012 ), a German designer wrote As Little Design As Possible and put forward the maxim good design is as little design as possible. It stands in sharp contrast to the complex and cluttered Indian design.We focus more on embellishment and less on functionality. A good design is holistic. It is balanced.
In India, we speak about designer dresses or sunglasses to distinguish these from overproduced banality. Design here defines consumer life style. design makes the products desirable.