Design and A.Chakravarty

Reflection Week 5: Design and the Human Condition

This week’s class started off with a guest speaker; Arnab Chakravarty who started off by describing how he was an artist, designer and technologist but now aims to let go of all these labels and just exist or “be.”

I found this introduction of his inspiring in a way. Personally, I jump from one medium to another very often. My design or artwork has never been focused on one subject or medium for too long and this bothered me (sometimes it still does) for a long time. Hearing Mr. Chakravarty say how all these labels didn’t stop him and he experimented, explored and did what he wanted to do was something I had not really heard before. Most designers I follow online are obsessed with finding one particular thing and just sticking to it. In fact, I must have seen countless videos and posts that create such strict boundaries between categories of design, art or science. It felt really freeing to hear someone who is a designer and particularly, a designer educator, to say that putting yourself in this square box and stamping on labels was unnecessary.

I enjoyed how Mr. Chakravarty spoke about history and culture. How he related Hindu and Islamic heritage in their commonalities when it came to giving form to ideas was very eye-opening. His statement that the West has not come near to thinking about design as giving form to an idea was striking. I’d like to know what his design experience has shown him to make him think this because when I think about other classes, design resources, syllabus, readings and assignments, they are all so influenced by the West and we follow so much of their design philosophy yet Mr. Chakravarty placed our own Eastern design above it all.

I also liked how he focused more on our individual selves as designers. Even with our relationship with capitalism as designers, he talked about reconfiguring our own engagement with it and trying to be designers who produced something essentially good and needed.

Overall, the class was actually full of quite of lot of ideas but at the end, I really appreciated everything that was brought up from what is craft to our heritage and the connection of form and philosophy.