13/04/2017
The book, ‘An Introduction to PreDesign’ and the PreDesign Seminars conducted by ‘Yojaka’ and COA have focused on the importance of doing Predesign prior to commencing with Design. These on-going efforts have emphasized the importance of grounding the ‘creative’ Design exercise upon 'rational' procedures and 'logical' methods of PreDesign. The book and the seminars show a step by step method of identifying and documenting the problem and the requirements.
Throughout the period of predesign seminars, there were opportunities (requests) for continuing the seminars through design phase. Though this was tempting, we resisted the forays in design field, in order not to deflect our attention from predesign. This was a case of ‘everybody’ teaches design, but ‘nobody’ is teaching predesign.
The situation is somewhat different now. COA has published our book on predesign and has distributed the copies to over 400 colleges in India. We have released an e-book edition of the book, since the COA edition is out of print. COA is continuing the ‘5-day’ and ‘10-day’ seminars for faculty, in Pune and nationwide, where predesign is featured. Some of the faculty members trained in predesign are using the principles in their colleges and are teaching it as 'elective' subject in other colleges. They have also volunteered to assist COA in their faculty seminars, relieving us. It is hoped that the message of predesign will slowly be spread across. This will help us in our original effort to “scale it up”, and to continue to move forward.
This brings us to the ‘transition from predesign to design concept’, as a move forward.
Will keep you posted on this new initiative.
Naresh
