I am a Good Bad Indian Designer

Staying true to your roots becomes a balancing act when design — and by extension typography — exists in a framework that has one foot in the widely accepted euro-centric design canon and another in a more visceral, Indian context. This can often tend to lean precariously to one side, especially with the layers of meaning that contextualisation offers to any design solution. Indian Ephemera is on a mission to address this challenging journey by providing a visual dictionary that derives from the Indian context. The passion project started in the context of this pre-existing framework and tries to bridge the ideals of “good” (read: formally educated) design and “bad” (or not formally trained) design solutions, recontextualising design fundamentals in a rooted context, and in the process trying to discover what design itself is. The talk will prod the audience to think further, enabling them to be more conscious of the context of locality and culture, and try to best reflect the roots that their visual vocabularies draw from. The global audience will be given a brief insight into different aspects of design as well as its implications in a socio-economic context. From appreciating overlooked objects such as repurposed plastic bottles and embossed graphics on bricks to looking at a variety of design solutions created with both unsophisticated and extremely sophisticated tools, the talk will engage the audience by encouraging them to draw parallels to their own cultures.