THE ORIGIN OF DESIGN EDUCATION

The Rhode Island School of Design was founded in 1877. But, it was not until the Carnegie Institute of Technology opened its design program in 1934 that historians began to recognize design as a profession.

Bauhaus, a German art school founded by German architect Gropius after World War I, is now a hundred years old.The devastation of World War I resulted in a rethinking of art and architecture in Germany and led to the first concrete foundations of modern design. In the midst of the People who fled Nazi Germany to other parts of the world, particularly Bauhaus artists, took the art with them and established it in cities around the world where they sought refuge.

Bauhus resisting the Nazis

Among them was Walter Gropius , who years later founded the Bauhaus school in Weimar in 1919 after becoming the he Chair of the Department in 1938. As per the Ulm model , the students were taught in cross-disciplinary subjects, including art, architecture and crafts. The influence of Bauhaus to modern architecture in India or the'The First Generation of Modernist Architecture' was well known till around 1940's. In 1913, Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore had set up Visva-Bharati University – a liberal arts school in Santiniketan, Calcutta, with the prize money from his Nobel Prize in Literature where an Austrian art historian Stella Kramrisch,the then-educator at Shantiniketan , invited the Bauhaus to send some representative paintings and graphics for a joint exhibition with leading Indian artists from the Bengal School.The exhibition featured over 250 works by Bauhaus teachers and students.By the 1960’s, India’s first industrial design institution was being established in Ahmedabad.

By 1947, newly independent India had only about 300 trained architects in a population of what was then 330 million, thanks to the flagbearers, the only training institute for aspiring architects Indian Institute of Architects in Bombay which was set up in 1920’s, While JJ School of Bombay preceded the norm.National Institute of Design (NID), IIT Bombay and CEPT were amongst the several specialist institutions being created by free India to ensure that its youth were at the frontiers of knowledge.NID was amongst the first to adopt the teaching principles of the Bauhaus through the Ulm Model which focussed on approach of integrating arts, crafts and technology through a focus on multi-disciplinary and humanistic education.National Institute of Design ,an autonomous body under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Government of India has been declared an Institute of National Importance by virtue of the National Institute of Design Act, 2014 .It was located first in capital Delhi before being moved to Ahmedabad to be away from political interference.

NID was deliberately is placed under the Ministry of Industry and Commerce because design was seen as an essential service to the industrial development of India. Kumar Vyas started the Product Design Program at NID in 1966.

Industrial Design Center ;which works on infusing tech with design elements , was set up in 1969 by the Government of India under the auspices of IIT Bombay.It began with an academic programme in industrial design as it was marked that industrial design in a developing country with its varied cultural heritage has a vital role to play in national development.Responding to the changing conditions in the visuals domain in society and the country at large, the first Master's Program (M.Des) in Visual Communication (1984) started. Further, to meet the liberalized economy's demand, specializations in Interaction Design and Animation Design (2006) derived from the Visual Communication discipline. The Mobility and Vehicle Design (2010) from the Industrial Design discipline.

Set up in 1986, NIFT is the pioneering institute of fashion education in the country ,providing continuous professional human resource to the textile and apparel industry since decades now.

Rathi Vinay Jha, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, the founded the National Institute of Fashion Technology . Under the under the Ministry of Textiles, Government of India , NIFT has encouraged the rich Indian Heritage, traditional arts and handicrafts sector mainstreaming the craft communities through engaging students in ethnographic studies. The primary focus has been diligently to work along the ever-updating model of adopting the global standards in fashion education.

While NID is a core Design -centric Institute focusing Art being an extension of design., IDC IIT (B) is meant to be for creative technologists which rests on the philosophy that Design is an extension of engineering. While NIFT is considered to be the best Fashion institute in India. India now has 1,900 Design colleges. , out of which 1,200 are fashion colleges . For a number of years, the National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad was the only stand-alone design education institution.Since the advent of Design Education in India 55 years ago, it has been growing at a steady rate.n. In 2004, a few institutions from the private sector entered the field of design education. Since then, there has been an exponential growth in design education in India.