Designer Michael Johnson of johnson banks, looks back at his recent visit to India, where he found a design scene that is beginning to reflect the country's unique and rich visual language...
On my first ever trip to India, I managed to embarrass myself before I'd even landed. As the plane banked and approached the runway, I noticed multiple blue rectangles on the ground and thought 'wow, that's a lot of swimming pools'.
Those 'pools', I soon discovered, were the blue tarpaulin roofs of the slums by the airport, protection against the imminent monsoon. Before stepping off the plane I already felt like a colonial plonker, and shame has stopped me retelling the story until now.
My tarp/pool story is typical of the experience of the firang (foreign) designer, flying in with his/her stock speech, clear views on everything from typeface choice, logo design and precious little knowledge of Indian culture and design, other than replayed sketches from 'Goodness Gracious Me'.
On that first trip, I was bombarded with questions from students on how they could learn to design 'more like me'. What they really meant was 'how could they make their designs look more western?' - I put that down to a kind of emerging market insecurity and assumed it wouldn't be long before Indian design found its voice.
But it's taken longer than I expected. Seven years after my tarp shame, I've just finished judging an Indian design scheme, and whilst there were many pieces that could and should hold their own in award schemes worldwide, much of the work could have been done, well, anywhere. None of the shortlisted work was in any of the local Indian languages, and only a small proportion seemed to pick up on vernacular design.
It seems, to a semi-outsider such as myself, that by looking West, Indian design has slightly lost its own identity, settling on something more mid-Atlantic instead.