The Design Village was initiated ten years ago by notable architecture firm Archohm in order to elevate the role of design in society. Academic Dean – Mudita Pasari [MP], Vatsal Agrawal [VA] – Director of Internationalization, Sagar Gupta [SG] Director of Growth, Associate Dean of Experiential Learning – Pritesh Maru [PM] and Head of Impact – Anusha Dhawan [AD], share the journey undertaken, the challenges faced to keep the unique philosophy of the school intact, its growing international reputation, student victories and future plans.
How is The Design Village different from traditional design schools? What were some key things you did differently and why?
MP: At The Design Village, we believe in providing avenues for developing each individual and their unique interests as well as inclinations. The journey of each learner is based on the learning manifesto by them and the itinerary chalked out to achieve it.
By the end of the first academic year, every villager is expected to make their learning manifesto. The manifesto is the personal vision of the student that serves as their north star. The Learning Manifesto can be altered any number of times during the journey as per the choice of the student. Therefore, the journey undertaken by every villager at TDV is unique, bespoke and everlasting.
PM: Rarely do learners at the age of 18 get to choose what they study and how they would like to make their journeys possible. TDV provides them with a set of courses they can choose from and earn credits in the domain they would like to develop further. From learning and developing Ways of Reading Context to strategising areas of Who Cares, Who Profits, to taking a Position and defending it and finding ways of Designing for Experience. Villagers learn to be thinkers and doers, tinkerers, systems designers, impact creators and much more.
SG: Of Course while education is a protected world, none of this will make sense if it is an academic echo chamber. Unlike traditional education systems, TDV makes industry projects available for students from Year 2 itself. Every graduate has at least 5 client projects in their portfolio through classroom projects, and sometimes much more. This allows our graduates to have the skills of communication, client coordination, and managing real-world considerations.
VA: For eg: Our second year learners got to do a project called From Waste to Wonder, with the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, as their client. They not only got a chance to display their work at the embassy and the honorable ambassador’s residence but also had the opportunity to revitalise their existing souvenirs and produce them on a large scale, reimagined.
AD: This aspect of education called the taskboxes, is engineered with the help of an extended industry network. From proposing strategies for a global tech company for positive systemic change in the APAC context to designing a cat shelter for a local non-profit, there is a wide spectrum of design briefs that bring a whole lot of diversity of stakeholders, contexts and scales to the Taskbox as an academic exercise. This osmosis between academia and industry is where a learner is actively negotiating a position of their belief systems and their practice at the village.
Decolonization, Inclusivity and Sustainability – these are a few keywords of our times. How did you apply the same to educational processes and activities at TDV?
VA: The Design Village was not envisioned to champion any one cause, it was rather designed keeping a holistic development in mind which allows for intellectual development and gives the agency to each learner to differentiate between multiple stands. As soon as each learner is able to define for themselves ethical boundaries in practice, they automatically start to keep decoloniality, inclusivity and equity at the core of their design interventions. Not only this, but they are able to define better ways of doing things for the future.
SG: When we talk about sustainability at TDV, we do not treat it like a separate small course but it is inbuilt in everything we do. TDV’s campus has been designed keeping adaptive reuse at the forefront, for we believe in practising what we preach. To us everything we do impacts the learner and their learning environment. Our space is our teacher, as much as our context and our community of villagers.
PM: While DEI, decolonisation, inclusivity and sustainability may be key words of the now, the curriculum and pedagogy at TDV have been designed to ensure we imbibe a keen sense of awareness and compassion in students, which allows them to be inclusive, sustainably conscious and break socio-colonial borders. We believe these keywords have evolved over decades and are likely to in the future as well. As long as our graduates are humble and curious individuals they would be able to respond to the now, as well as the many futures to come.
MP: We create an environment of facilitating pedagogical aspects like unlearning, re-learning, exploration through iteration, questioning preconceived notions, reimagining our ways of world-building and constantly re-assessing the impact that designers can have on our collective ways of being. These educational modalities ensure that our learners are astute in their observations, analysis and approach.
For us it is important to ensure that these are not just our report card but what we imbibe – learners and facilitators alike, ensuring all we do and approach has these lenses and many more. Our students have won accolades at The Good Intervention prize by Parson’s New York as well as at The Biodesign Challenge for their work in systemically addressing the concern of marble slurry being accumulated in Kishangarh, Rajasthan. Our classroom work encourages learners to pick and understand micro-contexts and work on solutions that directly benefit communities while balancing the need to impact large world concerns.
AD: There are many things about life at TDV that help us model these values and ensure that we all walk the talk. One of the things we actively do is refer to all students as learners and all faculty/staff as facilitators, who believe they are learners for life. This value and the conferred nomenclature of a villager keep us all grounded and connected. Small mindful interventions like sharing our lab spaces with women and girls learning to stitch, from the Savera Foundation, allow our community to be connected to contextual realities. We also have the privilege of having incredible national and international partners which help us to bring projects related to such concerns, allowing us to share positions of action and advocacy. On that front, we have some wonderful formats coming up for changemakers and design visionaries to participate in. The What Design Can Do Festival in 2025, is one such coveted avenue we are excited to be partnering for. On 8th March 2025, WDCD Live Delhi will feature a day-long program, highlighting the intersection of climate action and social justice to envision a fair and regenerative future. This will be the inagural edition of this global festival in India.
Could you tell us something about your Transdisciplinary programme?
MP: TDV’s curriculum was designed on the principle that a good designer can design anything. Unlike traditional systems of seeing the world in silos, we have always wanted to have cross-cutting programs which allow learners and graduates to approach a problem from all contextual perspectives, rather than the lens of “what will I make in the end”.
Among other methodologies, our students learn to use the VIP (Vision in Design Process), which pushes designers to delay form-giving, till the problem is truly addressed and radical change in future world-building has been made possible. As soon as we start designing for a better world, instead of the best product or graphic, we are able to provide a wholesome education that has a relevant impact on the world.
SG: Our goal is to nurture and educate individuals by not limiting them to any singular design field. Students may choose not to specialise in a particular discipline like fashion, graphics or product design, but can be independent non-silo designers who can impact and change the world through design in any and every medium imaginable. While interdisciplinary design is quite popular, we feel this too gives emphasis to disciplines, while at TDV we want to break apart the idea of thinking in these narrow ways and expand.
To create impact through design in the world, TDV believes that one must investigate what impact a particular design will have. Therefore, students at TDV learn how to dream that dream, understand the future, and take responsibility for shaping the world. In essence, they design the reason first. Over 35% of our Bachelor’s learners prefer doing our flagship program, as it gives them a purpose and unique advantage.
TDV student projects have been praised for the transdisciplinary approach at the Cumulus Green competition 2022 and 2024, while addressing themes of Zero Hunger and Designing Healthy Future through interventions centred in the Indian Context. Another recognition is the DFBW – Design For a Better World award, conferred to a team of learners from the village proposing solutions for a refugee community in New Delhi.
How did you manage to be known internationally? What is your vision for internationalization? What are the key activities you offer students?
MP: The Design Village began in 2014 as a response to the India Design Education report [INDEED] under the aegis of the Indo Dutch partnership. An international, multidisciplinary design school entrusted to create an impact through design, where the pedagogy had its inception to serve the community at large through social innovation, sustainable development and cross cultural dissemination.
VA: Over the last decade, The Design Village has endeavoured to be a cradle for student and facilitator mobilities across 18 countries – The Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, United Kingdom, United States and Australia. Our upcoming partnerships would extend to Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines and UAE this year. Traditional student semester exchanges encourage the learners to spend a semester abroad at the partner school/studio of their preference. What they learn during their tenure at a foreign domain is not restricted to a classroom credit exchange but a cross pollination of culture, language, ethics and social customs. To ignite compassion towards communities unlike ourselves lays at the foundation of such mobility initiatives.
As the world is plagued with continuous force majeure situations – the pandemic, the geo-political tensions, natural calamities, excessive tourism and abrupt migration, semester exchanges are no longer the most conducive methods of learner mobility. Not only do they extend an added strain to the host institution but also limit their ways of connecting with the outer world. To tackle this, hybrid and satellite studios have been jointly realised between our partners to encourage an all immersive classroom environment. Studios such as the bio design challenge are an example of such a collaboration.
Ranging from a fortnight to a 45 day programme at an international school allows a learner to experience a dedicated studio skillset, and various mobility schemes are aimed at facilitating diverse immersions.
AD: Academic conferences and renowned biennales have opened up active participation from the students. This allows for a larger school cohort to not only interact with the global academic and industrial community but also extend their summer/winter excursion to explore the host cities and nearby municipalities – as ethnography driven learning expeditions.
Memberships of global platforms like the World Design Organisation and Cumulus association cultivate synergies from like-minded institutions. Our participation at London Design Biennale 2023 as the official India pavilion “Chowk and Charpai” [adjudged the first runner up in public medal] was a testament to such reimagined pathways.
VA: International pathways through culture lie at the heart of what we practise at TDV. One such noteworthy milestone is of our institute being officiated as the Alliance Française de Delhi Extension. It runs French classes to train our exchange students and also acts as a connection for the cultural cornucopia of performances. With support of our foundation, we unveiled the premises in May 2024.
Your vision is to impact through design. What is the kind of impact you have had and how do you measure the impact you created?
AD: From leading arts and culture organisations, top consulting firms to community centred practices that exist as niche homegrown collectives, startups defining the industry to internationally renowned design and impact driven organisations, all hire from the village, A key value we have discovered is that even though a TDV graduate enters the industry with a larger cohort of design graduates, they distinguish off-beat, innovation driven, managerial roles for themselves quite early on in their careers. Many go on to establish self-driven projects and full-fledged creatively and socially led ventures.
SG: The current strength at TDV is about 300 learners and 200 graduates. Each of them has had a unique journey; a very honest translation of the impact is seen through tracing trajectories of students and graduates from the design village. A PG learner from a rural agrarian community joined TDV who wanted to learn how to make garments. Over 2 years, they developed an understanding of sustainable practices in the textile industry and used their cultural setting to build entrepreneurship that recycles pre-consumer textile waste while giving jobs to women in 2 states of India. They went on to display their work at Salone del Mobile and have now built a successful business.
PM: A UG learner, well-travelled and joined us knowing famous designers who made good-looking products, has now evolved into a designer working at the cross-section of mobility, space, urbanism and communities. They have developed a practice in working with problems within the Indian context, jumping scales and audiences from slums in Mumbai, to biopits in tribal areas in the Western Ghats of India, to Speculative Futures proposals for accessibility as well as current applications for making cities more liveable for people with special needs. There is another learner who always maintained they want to be a communication designer making graphics, and probably till they graduated did not realise that they were capable of much more. Today they work with a global social campaigning and impact agency working with purpose-driven design, and this year they have come back to partner with the mothership.
We are an offbeat institution doing things differently and there is no standard rubric through which our success can be measured. Does a semester-long project with 130 learners and 10 facilitators, tackling and responding to the Urban heat Island effect in the context of Delhi while mirroring cities like London, as a brief created and supported through expertise from Foster + Partners, London mean impact?
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