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Somnath Bhatt
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Somnath Bhatt is a Designer and Artist, who was born and raised in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. He graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 post which he associated with the Walker Art Center. Seeking the new in the old, and the old in the new is his favorite form of making. He advocates for the peer-to-peer model of designing and explains how decolonisation of the field cannot be taken lightly. He has worked with Nicolás Jaar, Hyein Seo, New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Creative Independent, Border&Fall, Reebok, BOMB Magazine, Walker Art Center, AI Now Institute, SE SO NEON etc... In the past his work was shown at ICA, London, Art Week Dubai, Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète, Acud Macht Neu, Berlin, Wrong Biennale Oslo, The Picture Room, NYC, Yale Odd & Ends Book Fair, and New York Art Book Fair, MoMA PS1, Brooklyn Art Book Fair, NYC. He has presented/spoken about his work/led workshops at California College of the Arts, Rutgers University, MacAlester College, UPenn, Interview- Somnath Bhatt
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Fig 1 Artwork for Misery, a song made in collaboration with Julian Tran. Somnath Bhatt 2021
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Babycastles, Guggenheim museum, The Packet in Colombo and Oakland University. SM SB
Could you tell me a little bit about your background? How did you get to where you are today? Have you always been creative?
My family tells me that I would draw all day long on any surface I could lay my hands on. My grandmother’s bedroom wall is still covered with my earliest drawings; as I got taller, the drawings of animals and figures crept further up the wall and became increasingly elaborate. Growing up in Ahmedabad was to live in a city constantly in the making and breaking. I was proximate to makers, objects, and stories that formed an exciting and messy hybrid of daily use, fantasy, craft traditions, rituals, and free market capitalism. The city had its own excellent museums, like the Calico Museum and Sarabhai Foundation, but the streets were their own sort of exhibition space. Thousands of nameless vendors at phool bazaar and the ravivari market created and articulated a complex visual grammar to arrange and display flowers, fruits, electronics, textiles. Until college, I had little formal training in art. I would mostly make experimental videos. I studied Graphic Design because it felt like the most versatile of all the disciplines, and design education taught me visual thinking, methodology, and systematization that were broad enough to apply to many forms. But as useful as design education was, I also often found it boring and cruel.
To those who haven’t seen your work before, how would you describe it? My family tells me that I would draw all day long on any surface I could lay my hands on. My grandmother’s bedroom wall is still covered with my earliest drawings; as I got taller, the drawings of animals and figures crept further up the wall and became increasingly elaborate. Growing up in Ahmedabad was to live in a city constantly in the making and breaking. I was proximate to makers, objects, and stories that formed an exciting and messy hybrid of daily use, fantasy, craft traditions, rituals, and free market capitalism. The city had its own excellent museums, like the Calico Museum and Sarabhai Foundation, but the streets were their own sort of exhibition space. Thousands of nameless vendors at phool bazaar and the ravivari market created and articulated a complex visual grammar to arrange and display flowers, fruits, electronics, textiles. Until college, I had little formal training in art. I would mostly make experimental videos. I studied Graphic Design because it felt like the most versatile of all the disciplines, and design education taught me visual thinking, methodology, and systematization that were broad enough to apply to many forms. But as useful as design education was, I also often found it boring and cruel.
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SM SB
The dichotomy of belonging from India and studying and practicing in the USA, how has this informed your practice?
I would push back on this East v. West dichotomized notion. I’ve been in the USA for 6 years which have been incredibly formative. I’m not sure if duration matters as much as the intensity of the exposure. Art scenes are small and have the same amount of cliquiness anywhere. I don’t think the “creative culture” in India is any less hyper-individualistic than that of the States. The Indian art scene can be way more hierarchical, loaded with social baggage, and filled with gate-keepers. I am happy to see the shift away from disdain and devaluation towards creative labor in India. Art and design education are increasingly valued, as evidenced by the increasing number and enrollment of design schools in India since I was there. The Indian fashion and film industries have always maintained their homegrown integrity despite the homogenizing efforts of neoliberal globalisation. I love seeing the volume of radical thinking and work that my peers in India are coming up with – part of me wishes to be amidst them in India. The way I create is always changing – that is a sign of a healthy practice. University in the United States didn’t change the way I create, I just became better at planning my time and verbalizing my thoughts. And, I get my interest in world music from my grandmother!
You have a style that I believe is one of a kind. How did you develop your signature style? Could you explain a little bit about your art/design process? I’ve heard others describe it as techno-mythic. We often end up with the descriptions others give to us. But identifying too deeply with that tag feels self-orientalizing to me.The purpose of the mythic register is to render the distant past as immediate to us as our own lives, to make the stories of long ago beautiful and painful now. However, I’m not thinking about either technology or mythology on a daily basis. My process entails a lot of anxiety. Typically, I plan a lot and then BAM! I sit down and hope that everything will just click into place. By default, as image-makers today we’re always co-writing with machines, co-writing with data, co-writing with algorithms. I work towards: – drastically altering our contact with these tools – re-encountering objects, bodies, and language as strange things – making odd, bent, overlayed, twisted forms – using tools for synthesis rather than editing
Do you believe in self-expression and authorship as a designer? How important do you think it is in the bigger culture-in-design conversation?
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SB
I do believe in self-expression. But not as self-assertion. Expression should be a means of discovery and not a claim to authority or a mode of status-signaling.
SM
How important are tools in the work you do? Do you try to break away from traditional design tools and techniques?
Lately I have been trying to. I do wish I had more time to draw. I try not to depend too heavily on Adobe CC, I recently commissioned my friend and animator Ted Wiggin to custom build an image processing software to draw in – this seems like a fertile direction to make my work within. Other softwares I use are TinkerYonder, Lizard Ladder, Aesprite, Golly and others.
Is there a spiritual side to your art? I am asking this because, to me your art has this mindful quality, feels resolved even though they feel like parts of puzzles of this bigger picture. Someone I am very inspired by lately is Acharya Vyakul1. I wish my practice could be like his. I am not sure if this spiritual aspect is unique to just me. I believe every human being has a spiritual drive, just as we have libidinal / biological drives. Part of being a person is the spiritual drive to deepen the understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.
There is also a lot of social commentary and political views that you express through art and design. How prevalent do you think dissent by design is? Is there any of your work on social reformation that you are particularly proud of? No, not really, because I don’t really actively reform the world at large through my practice. It’s not direct action. Usually I’m just pointing at the enemy. The only thing I would mention is Śilpa: Catalogues on Craft is a particularly meaningful project I worked on with Malika Verma Kashyap of Border&Fall [2], a cultural agency shifting perceptions of Made in India with an evaluative and inquiring lens. Śilpa (शिल्प) is a Sanskrit word whose translation includes art, skill, craft, labor, ingenuity, rite and ritual, form and creation... The Śilpa digital catalogues are an ongoing non-profit initiative by Border&Fall with the goal of connecting consumers directly to karigars (craft-makers). It strives to be a crowdsourced directory of craft-makers in India. This was the only instance of direct action because it extends Border&Fall’s existing platform to a group of craftspeople who don’t frequently have direct contact with buyers online. It does the important, unprecedented work of creating a living database of contemporary craft workshops across various regions of India. Śilpa has published work by Mathew Sasa from Manipur, Khalid Amin Khatri from Bhuj, and Chato Kutsu from Nagaland, with many more to come.
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Fig 2 & 3 “Work is Love Made Visible” for the 40th anniversary issue of BOMB Magazine.
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The project connects people with singular makers, not brands – which is important because these craftspeople are often behind the scenes and their labor mostly anonymous. It is exciting to transition from viewing the hands that craft these objects to valuing the minds who make them.
SM SB
I love how you write and present your work. How and when did you find your love for writing? Do you have any recommendations to designers like me, who are not very gifted in this regard?
I am also not gifted in any regards either. Also, I think the way that we speak and the way that we sound in writing are always very different. I am curious and selfishly love talking to people. The interviews and the writing enable that. One of the promises I made myself in 2020 was to have a culturally relevant and research-based practice. One in which I develop my voice as a critic, ask questions, and engage with the field of design with a sense of poeticism. I want to write more about Indian craftspeople. My writing process is always more social than I anticipate – I am constantly in touch with other people and manage schedules to arrange an interview, which can take months of planning. I want to write humbly, lead with curiosity and carry a desire to learn. I want to thank brilliant editors like Elias Chen and Meg Miller for encouraging me and refining the things I write. Here is some advice the writer Mayukh Sen[3] recently gave me, it is specifically about food writing but it can apply to other things as well. Mayukh Says: “On the pure prose level of writing, there are small stylistic choices that one can make that have broader political implications. I teach my students not to italicize non-English food words, ingredients or recipe names. It asserts to the reader that this word can be part of one’s everyday vocabulary in the same way spaghetti or croissant can be. I’ve found that within food media, first person plurals like ‘we’ or ‘us’ always signals a certain kind of reader who is white, affluent and just barely left of center, politically. This kind of presupposition and centering of a flattened reader no longer serves us. I encourage my students to be as precise as possible in defining who belongs to those groups. I also try my best to avoid using declarative language when talking about certain national or regional cuisines. There have been times in the past where I’ve probably written stuff like, “Bengalis love X food” or something. But, Bengalis are spread across two neighboring countries and include a myriad of caste, class, religion and geopolitical alignments. There are a lot of nuances that you skim over when you write using declarative language. Qualifiers like: “some” or “many of,” can actually help bring a lot of nuance to writing.”
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Figs 4-7 Enshrine – The elements as freedom fighters: Freedom is composed of inseparable connective elements. Enspirit: air, the gentle messenger, flickering and fighting for freedom of thought and movement. Enchant: water, the empath warrior, who flows through sensitivities looking for truth(s) Enrage: fire, the warm agitator, transmuting rage into strength and solidarity Endear: earth, a champion who holds with care, through disruption and foundation building Somnath Bhatt for Kapy Earth. 2021
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SM SB
You have formed your own brand of ornamentation that to me, feels like this fusion of folk tradition, language and technology. What is your relationship with ornamentation and how do you define it in a design context?
I often think of this Quote by the poet Anne Carson: “What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning ‘placed on top’, ‘added’, ‘appended’, ‘foreign’. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.” I believe “ornaments” are visual adjectives.
I believe “Ornaments” are visual adjectives.
END NOTES:
1 https://64.media.tumblr.com/364ea714e3555eacb43c0f683e838c89/ccb629e387c82a4c-d5/s1280x 1920/7cfed53298d7fe9f678b65b9a68d55ce87b865b6.png [ ]
2 https://www.instagram.com/borderandfall/ [ ]
[ ] 3 https://thisismold.com/profile/ gut-vision-mayukh-sen
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Vaishnavi Mahendran
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Vaishnavi Mahendran is an Indian-born designer and researcher based in New York City. Vaishnavi holds an MFA in graphic design from the Rhode Island School of Design, an AAS degree from Parsons School of Design and an MA in Marketing from Durham University, UK. Her practice centers on exploring cultural synergies & examining decoloniality, with an emphasis on re-structuring archival power through documentation and translation. In her MFA thesis EthnoGraphemes, she explores linguistic systems through metaphorical iconographies, arguing that preserving indigenous languages and cultures through visual translations can shift historical and future narratives. From 2013-2018, Vaishnavi was a co-founding partner at BLŌK, an award-winning Mumbai-based multidisciplinary studio that focused on designing brand identities, packaging, books, posters, installations, signages and objects for corporate and cultural clients. Vaishnavi currently teaches typography at the School of Visual Arts at Boston University. Interview- Vaishnavi Mahendran
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Fig 1 Lost in Translation, Installation, Poster series Augmented Reality, 31.5×40in. Vaishnavi Mahendran 2020
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VM
Hi Sohini, tell me a little bit about yourself—I’m curious about where you are from in India!
SM
I’m a Bengali and I’m born and brought up in Kolkata. I did my Bachelors in textile design from Srishti institute of art, design and technology.
Back when I was in Mumbai and running my studio BLŌK, we would have a lot of portfolios sent in from different art schools and I always found Srishti as one of the stronger schools portfolio-wise. We had a few students from Srishti intern with us as well. I’m always happy to see the student-work coming out of there. Yeah, I loved my school, it was a lot of fun! I feel that that background really helped me as a designer in general. Going ahead, I think because of my interest in textile I always put a lot of importance into culture and authenticity. Right after my undergraduate years, I worked at a small home studio run by a French designer which was almost like a passion project and she used to work combining Kantha hand embroidery of West Bengal and kind of mesh her own Western aesthetics into it. It was very interesting, but unfortunately it shut down because she had to move back to Mauritius. Soon after that I joined a fashion house in Kolkata and worked there for two years and then I came here. Yeah, I think that’s one of the strengths of our cultural foundation, growing up in India as a designer. I feel like working in India offers you a valuable, hands-on training ground for a lot of things that you might not perhaps have the opportunity to have access to elsewhere as easily. As young designers, you have the option to pursue design through art school, but there’s also so many opportunities to train and learn on the job with a large range of entrepreneurial enterprises in the handicraft industry and independent, small-scale studios which are popping up all the time, so there’s plenty of chances for hands-on work experience and learning on the job right after school. I am from Mumbai by the way, I’ve always wanted to visit Calcutta—as people used to call it back when I was young—(laughs) but yeah, great! I’m ready whenever you are!
OK so I think my first question will be how do you think culture in design has evolved during the pandemic like since we are so far away from local and social interactions, how do you think is changing? We see a lot of work is becoming digital these days. Culture is a broad term, so we’d need to talk about specifics in this case. In general, I think it’s pretty early to comment on any of it because right now we are in the process of kind of seeing what the transition from last year is going to be like because we’re living all of this in Interview- Vaishnavi Mahendran
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real time and don’t have enough distance from these times. It has not even been a year so I think it’s pretty difficult to speculate or gauge in any kind of definitive sense since we’re still in a nascent phase of this. I mean, no one knows what’s going on! It seems like it took around six months for many of us to adjust and figure out how we were going to adapt our practices to this situation. Especially for artists and designers working in industries like textiles, or anything which has a lot more physical engagement, it’s taken some time to recover from the initial hit and build towards a semblance of previous strength both artistically and commercially. I was writing my thesis at the start of the pandemic, wrapping up a lot of what my thesis was. A lot of my research required a lot of travel, physical prototyping and working with artisans and people between here in the US and rural India. For that kind of collaboration, we had to adapt and figure out alternate tools and platforms of making and communication. Through the power of tools like 3D digital fabrication we can realize these ideas through virtual showcases and exhibitions. I think I see a shift which I don’t think is going away, I think there’s going to be a lot of virtual happenings with in-person optional. Last year when I reached out to 3D printing companies to create these prototypes that I was working on for my thesis, it was really great to see how quickly they turned around their usual process and had online methods of adapting their mechanizations as per the specifications of artists and designers who are working remotely from home, to sent them back really quickly. So, I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the next couple of years but right now I would say it’s still early to sort of tell what the impact of culture in a wider sense, because in my view culture is a macro phenomenon that we need a bit of distance from to understand it. I feel like we as designers are in the process of essentially creating this new creative culture right now through our everyday shared experiences.
SM
VM
Yeah, I was actually asking this because I was thinking about that project I spoke to you earlier about, I was wondering, if you eliminate physical interaction from design how does that work out. I was trying to think, how designers are adapting to it which is kind of interesting to me because a lot of artists and designers used to base their work on interaction and installations and a lot of work has kind of shifted from that kind of a language essentially because of all the necessary social distancing restrictions. It’s interesting to me to understand how people are adapting or thinking about it in terms of creative solutions, and workarounds.
I don’t think that kind of the physical aspect is ever going to go away entirely. As I was saying earlier, I think we’re still in this interim period where we are figuring out how much of this is permanent or is in this ‘now’ for these specific times. We’ll only really know, hopefully next year, or the year after because there’s a lot of us who still want to go back to that kind of practice with physical engagement, as opposed to you know, completely removing it or going virtual in a permanent manner. As such I think it really depends from artist to artist and you based on Confluence
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what your practice is. The minute that our demographic has access to the vaccines I definitely want to bring back that physicality and materiality to what I’m working on (laughs).
SM
I miss that too! (laughs) so I guess my next question will be do you think that apart from language which you largely focused on in your thesis, ornamentation has a hand in preserving culture? …ornamentation and decoration essentially…
Can you expand on what you mean by ornamentation in this case?
I mean minimalism/ modernistic approach is considered likely neutral/ standard but when it comes to ornamentation it’s different in every cultural zone essentially so by preserving those idiosyncrasies do you think it can also translate to preserving culture in a way? Yeah, I mean to put it simplistically, yes? The very act of archiving is preserving these different time periods of cultural evolutions of how these ornaments came into being. With minimalism, I mean if you’re referring specifically to Western graphic design movements and such, or if you just look into the history of graphic design that we are introduced to in art school, you will see it’s often a response to the sociopolitical climate of that time period and how that impacted what artists, designers and intellectuals were making. So yeah, I think what’s interesting is to think about what one would consider ‘ornamentation’, ‘decoration’ or perhaps the who and why we define what is ‘neutral’ or ‘standard’? It’s interesting to look at ornamentation from different time periods and cultures both historically and structurally. In my experience when you deep dive into it’s never arbitrary. That’s why preserving endangered cultures has so much value to it. There’s such uniquely specific knowledge to that culture and communities’ understanding of their environment which reflects in their expression through their artifacts, scripts and language. So, what is interesting at that point is to question our notions on ‘decoration’ or embellishment which often has a frivolous connotation of having perhaps only surface level aesthetic value. I would recommend my classmate Aleks Dawson’s thesis[1] which you might find interesting. He was in my RISD cohort and had researched extensively on ornamentation looking at its context both historically and in contemporary graphic design.
My next question is do you think imperfection or human touch is important in representing a culture? This can mean many different things based on what our specificity of culture is here. For instance, if we are speaking about human touch in relation to perhaps AI, the digital revolution and contemporary societies that could be a different conversation. I guess you could say, in your case as a designer, if you are working on an artifact or manuscript perhaps that Interview- Vaishnavi Mahendran
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Fig 2 Chromascript– Synthestic Composition Generator, Vaishnavi Mahendran 2020
Fig 3 Sonic typeface,Vaishnavi Mahendran 2020
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specifically represents an ancient culture, for example, in India would your focus lie on preserving its existing imperfections?
SM
Yes.
OK so I see what you’re saying. For instance, in the space of endangered cultures as a graphic designer you might be working ethnographers, you’re working with type designers, you’re working with anthropologists and then you’re also working with people in the community. If you have this 200-year-old alphabet chart or a manuscript that is kind of like dilapidating and dying out, the intentions of preservation of different people in this group are often very different. So yes, I’m documenting the object in its entire authenticity and if by that you mean the imperfections of the human touch, I think that there is a lot of value in that, but I think us as graphic designers, we also have this really wonderful space for speculation. There is this idea of static preservation versus active preservation that cultural anthropologist Genese Sodikoff [ ] 2 puts forth that I reference in my thesis as well. Static preservation is often seen in anthropology where it’s preserving a community’s culture as a ‘frozen ark’. Then we might also consider a fluid, non-static or ‘active’ methodology to preservation, where we consider culture as living processes. Once you have that initial act of anthropologically ‘preserving’ an artifact for example how can we speculate for future narratives of how that object could perhaps exist and evolve in contemporary and future time periods as well. So, when you go to that next point in the spectrum of archiving, or what I like to consider as active archiving, it’s interesting to speculate on what lies beyond the imperfections. That being said, as a graphic designer I think there are ethics that one has to strongly be self-aware about when we are working in this space of cultural conservation and preservation. We can’t work in these isolated silos but must consider a collaborative approach that engages the community because these things don’t belong to a specific person but to the group at large. That makes a lot of sense. I think the terms active and static preservation do define that act of cultural preservation much better and let us reflect on what we can do as designers and how our approach can be evolved.
You talk about the importance of language in preserving culture. We belong to a generation where computers are one of the main tools of communication and the keyboard is based on the Latin/English language. So, it’s easier to type in English rather than any other language, especially the world script languages. What is your thought on this and have you ever thought about this kind of restriction that we have in approaching design particularly?
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GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. DAWKIW GNAB MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY-ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW BABDA. DAWKIW GNAB MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. DAWKIW GNAB MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW. AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. SNUDU GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. DAWKIW GNAB MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB.
GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. DAWKIW GNAB MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY-ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAWCALLIGRAPHIC AAMN ENQUM 400 PT KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAW DAWKIW GNAB. DAWKIW GNAB MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. DAWKIW GNAB MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. SNUDU GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. DAWKIW GNAB MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY
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ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. DAWKIW GNAB MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY-ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. DAWKIW GNAB MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. DAWKIW GNAB MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB RAAW HARO KAKAW. SNUDU GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDR-AW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BABDA CTTUZ DAW. DAWKIW GNAB MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM. KTDRAW UHDA OTY ER ZHGUN. SNUDU GAWNIW BAB-DA CTTUZ DAW DAWKIW GNAB. MARA WL LAVU NATTU VAW PATTA YAW. RAAW HARO KAKAW QAADN XWAW AAMN ENQUM.
Fig 4 & 5 Ellipsis– Sora Sompeng script revitalization typeface design, Vaishanavi Mahendran 2020
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VM
I don’t know if you’ve been following the work done by Unicode [3], there’s a significant amount of type designers and linguists coming together to work on this for languages worldwide, in terms of adapting these machines which were created in the western world that are now global objects. There’s still so much work to be done in terms of adapting keyboards to work intuitively non-Latin languages and scripts. In India most widely spoken regional languages have been adapted on the keyboard for tablets and smartphones. Interestingly in the case of when I was working on the Sora project which was a remote tribe in Orissa, some of the translators and people who were working with me had their keyboards all set in Odia.
SM
oh really?
Yeah and they were you know typing away in their language in all their devices. We’re constantly seeing more progress and representation emerging and there’s of course definitely room for a lot more. yeah that was super fascinating. I didn’t know that keyboards in another Indian language exist! There’s a couple of other designers who have given a very interesting type talk that you might be interested in where they kind of talk about how they’ve adapted marginalized African Scripts for the smartphone keyboard. The studio is called Jamra Patel— take a look at their talk [4] and take a look at their website [5] as well, you might find their work really interesting. Oh yeah, I think I had seen their website actually… They also did a lot of research on the Bengali script I think. Yeah! Go through the talk specifically, they really take you through some fascinating process details of the way they approached this language specifically, because of course the Latin alphabet has 26 characters in upper and lowercase but as we know even in the case of with Indian languages it can go into hundreds of characters, conjunctions and half letters. I cannot even imagine what it would be like with a language like Chinese, there’s so many characters! Yeah! Thank you I’ll look at it.
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SM VM
I wanted to ask you something similar to what you just the link you just sent me I was researching on Bengali script and the kind of typefaces that exist currently and I realized there are very few and mainly I saw that Jamra Patel was one of those people who were researching on it. I also found Fiona Ross..
Actually I had the opportunity to speak with her and she’s in my thesis book as well! Yeah, I saw the interview in your book and I was like oh wow! Yeah! Yeah, I mean if you’ve read the interview, she was not just speaking about her work but also gave some really good advice for designers interested in multilingual, specifically nonLatin type design and are looking to expand further on the work done in this field. She has a ton of talks online that you should definitely look at.
How did you feel was your experience talking to her? She’s got such encyclopedic knowledge in working with non-Latin type, and has been instrumental in the expansion of this area since the late 70s and so she’s just been iconic for the work that she has done for South Asian particularly Indian languages and scripts. It was just really inspiring to learn about her views. A lot of what I’m interested in my own practice is to kind of bring together this confluence of different streams of research groups and expertise into the project. Also, as graphic designers, we tend to work within our specific space and established graphic design parameters. Fiona kind of takes down those invisible walls and opens this up. I mean she has several linguistic degrees and a PhD in Indian Paleography, connecting that to her type design work it’s such a powerful force in terms of bringing a complex level of nuance and understanding of culture while designing for scripts that’s not native to you. It was just great to learn about her process and advice for those who’d like to bring different streams of research into their own practice. And she is very nice as well, so!
Fiona built typefaces for Bengali, a language that wasn’t native to her and similarly, you also designed the typeface for Sora Sompeng. How is that experience of building something for another culture but being authentic to it? I think at the core of things, projects like these are about community-lef collaboration and us as designers not taking a ‘prescriptive’ approach. Traditionally, in commercial graphic design where we’re working with a client, we’ve heard for decades now about how graphic design is about problem solving. When you are designing for culture, community and especially when it’s Confluence
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not for your own community or culture, the question is how do we as designers kind of locate ourselves in that space? I feel it’s really about listening and absorbing first and then having constant dialogue with the community throughout the project. Absorb as much as you can, ask as many questions, and involve as many relevant contributors from that community that you’re working with where it becomes a truly collaborative effort. I think it’s really about being a mediator rather than being sort of a problem solver or providing a prescription for an issue to be solved. It sort of puts everything in perspective where you really don’t have to be from that culture but you’re basically facilitating and providing any kind of resources, tools we as graphic designers have access to and facilitating collaborations and bringing together a plethora of perspectives to the table. There is something that we as designers can distill from that and I find that to be a really exciting space to work within.
SM VM
So, do you enjoy the research part more or do you enjoy the form making of it more?
Yeah, good question. I think that with form making and research, what really started to evolve for me when I think about my semesters in grad school to towards the end of my MFA and now current practice, is that the more I started to research, speak to other people, and keeping making in parallel, I stopped looking at them as separate things was beginning to understand them inextricably woven, where form-making could be a method of research and vice versa. I think that the line starts to shift and blur the more you start to question them being binary or perhaps looking at it linearly. A lot of times when we are doing commercial work for a client, you would perhaps start with doing a lot of online research or you have like this interview sort of meeting with the client and then you go and sit in front of your computer and you start designing things. I feel like that linearity of research and then making is what a lot of traditional graphic design, client-driven projects exists upon and I think that that’s of course value in that process for certain aspects, but when working with community-led projects I think the lines of research and form making get a lot more blurred because there is no specific linearity of process.
Did you face any challenges during your thesis like while researching the Sora Sompeng tribe, did you face any challenges and how did you overcome it? I am asking this because obviously when it comes to ground research there are a lot of unwanted delays that happen or something always goes wrong. Yeah, I think that for me it was really about distilling all of the research from different fields since I was speaking with NGos, making my own field notes, looking through research papers by linguists and ethnographers, as well approaching this project through the framework of the decolonization movement. With each field there’s a universe of research so it was really about dipping into these different worlds and then building arguments from insights of each field Interview- Vaishnavi Mahendran
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without the danger of getting lost or overwhelmed in these research rabbit holes. This was one of my biggest challenges because it’s like, Oh my God, am I writing a paper on anthropology (laughs) in a graphic design program?! Because, sometimes it would just be days of speaking with people and meeting with people and reading. At some point I found myself reading for days on linguistics and semantics and French philosophers! I think it really was kind of looking at the balance between immersing yourself in these pools to gain relevant insight, while also not drowning yourself in the process. I also think speaking with my thesis advisors and various faculty not specifically limited to the graphic design Department was really helpful to manage these challenges. I was reaching out to professors and students in the Global Arts and Cultures department as well as friends in non GD departments like architecture and industrial design and sharing my work-in-progress and being like ‘what do you think?’ I also think one of the key things with all of this is time management with such cross disciplinary approaches to working. I was told projects like these working with language revival usually go on for many years so compressing this into an MFA thesis was really about effective time management which was definitely difficult to do!
SM VM
So you worked on this from the start of your MFA?
My interest in cultural conservation and endangered language began prior to my MFA, more so from my own experiences in the lack of diversity in type design while working as a design professional for many years before. So, while my work with the Sora community did start during my MFA at RISD a lot of the preliminary research and my interest in this area and the potential role of graphic design began maybe a few years earlier.
One more question related to this is how do you communicate with the Sora Sompeng tribe? since I’m guessing they were a different language altogether like how did you communicate? It was both synchronous asynchronous in the sense that I had the help of a patient translator from the Sora community for one and I also had a lot of email conversations with organizations, and nonprofits that worked in the space of language revival not just in India but in the US as well. Thankfully after a lot of cold emails and cold calls one of the NGOs put me in touch with this translator who has worked with people from Nat Geo and likes in documenting the Sora culture. So thankfully, I found a Sora native to kind of help me out. But a lot of the preliminary conversation that I was having with the tribe was asynchronous. I would send in voice notes or texts and then he would send me the translation and then I would check if that’s accurate to what I was trying to ask them particularly with the type design project where a lot of their input was needed. Then of course, when I visited the tribe I went with my translator. It was interesting because Hindi is such a universal language in India, where even if you don’t know the language you kind of understand it anyway and that’s how I could find a common
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ground in terms of communication between the locals and myself. A lot of really broken Hindi, apart from you know them speaking to each other in Sora and translating back to me!
When working with community-led projects, the lines of research & form making get a lot more blurred because there is no specific linearity of process. Fig 6 & 7 Ellipsis– Sora Sompeng script revitalization typeface design, Vaishanavi Mahendran 2020
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SM VM
Yeah, I worked with the Dhurrie rug (flat rug) weaving community in Warrangal,
Oh, where is that? Warangal is in Telangana. And... I don’t know any Telugu (laugh) I’m South Indian but I don’t speak Telugu but you could kind of, sort of, you know get by with the basics of understanding it if you speak one of the South Indian languages. I mean I speak Tamil so yeah, there were some basic common words that you know the neighboring states share. I think that’s why my friend who was Kanadiga, she could speak a few words and get by but I was like completely isolated with one family and I was standing there awkwardly thinking can we start working...? (laughs) That was another challenge, which was interesting especially when you are doing ethnographic field research for the first time and you know traveling to on-site areas to interact with locals. One of the important things for first time field note-ing that I took away from it was to really be prepared about your methodology of translation. A lot of times I had maybe like I would say a 3-minute question with multiple parts that I had posed for the group and then they’re speaking to my translator in Sora and they have a 20-minute response to it. He would translate it back to me as a 1- or 2-minute response. yeah (laugh) ...one way to do it is to always have everything recorded that you can go back to later and then select specific parts for your translator to do a long form subtitle-styled translation where you get word to word. A lot of things which translators often do when it’s live spoken translation that is happening in conversation is to take subjective liberties to edit themselves but through this, we sometimes miss out on those little nuances which us as designers find so valuable. So, it’s really important to document, document, document! Record everything that you see when you’re on-ground, during your field research. I would say if I had to put a percentage to it it would be maybe 75% of the time just being a sponge, absorbing and recording as much as you can and then 30% of it asking questions. Then you can kind of take all of this back to revisit and analyze. That’s really good advice. I faced the same thing. We had gotten a translator for our initial visit and we just got a summary of the whole conversation! Yeah, I know sometimes you miss this little anecdote that they share or maybe a little reference that they make to a specific thing that you’re talking about or they make a cultural reference
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that the translator might miss out on while translating that back to you. I think it’s just super important to have everything recorded as a sort of macro archive that you can then keep returning to and distill things from.
SM VM
You are an Indian designer practicing in the USA. How does this dichotomy of identity show up in your work?
I think it’s an organic thing that happens with so many of us designers who have either grown up as part of the South Asian diaspora here, or have spent half of our lives here, half our lives there, so it’s inevitable I will say! I feel like this is something that is uniquely based on your own lived experiences and reality, in both places and how you perceive and react to the world around you and express yourself. What’s always exciting and fun for me is when we discover patterns and commonalities we have as shared, similar experiences. I completely agree. One feedback I received from someone outside college, was that I should incorporate more of my culture into my work and that was the only semester when I was trying something different, trying to learn something new. Yeah…... What did you say to that? I didn’t know what to say! I felt extremely guilty, I didn’t know if I was doing something wrong... Then I realized well I don’t need to be guilty! This is an important issue and such a complex terrain. I would urge you to bring these questions into your thesis work as well. I feel it’s not really about pointing fingers but perhaps understanding how different people perhaps perceive you and how you perceive yourself and this unintentional guilt or subconscious cultural guilt that many of us designers who are POC experience. I think there’s a lot of value in more of these stories being shared from subjective, personal experiences of POC designers because so much of what we make and put out to the world stems from how we see ourselves, whether it’s like subconscious guilt of should my work be more ‘Indian’ or if I’m in an art school in America should my work fit better to suit the canons of Western graphic design principles. It’s just a very, very complex and necessary subject to have a constant dialogue on. Yeah, I’m sure that’s why I feel that I’m also stuck in that lingo where I don’t know where I belong or which way to go. I think a lot of us are. I have two Instagram accounts. One is very illustration; pattern and one is like oh serious typography (laughs).
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2 2 1
Fig 8 & 9 Ellipsis– Sora Sompeng script revitalization typeface design, Vaishanavi Mahendran 2020
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VM
It’s interesting that you make those demarcations, like who told us that they were separate? Who told us that pattern and type cannot be interlinked or are not part of the same world? I’d love to see how you explore these synergies in the context of your own personal, evolving voice and identity as a designer.
SM
So my last question is do you have any advice for someone like me or some anyone who is into this like space of design trying to find their way?
I think that I think we already kind of touched upon that and I’m really happy that you brought it up and my advice to you know young designers who kind of come from different worlds is to feel less guilt and more curiosity of how these different worlds can evolve into new worlds. It’s really not so much about ‘I need to represent my culture’ but more so that we now have this exciting canvas to create new interpretations of what we perceive our culture to be and what being part of a global diaspora means to POC artists and designers. I feel like it’s a good time to be a designer who comes from a spectrum of cultures. There’s a lot more conversation brought to the table about inclusivity and expression while understanding the nuances of people’s cultural backgrounds. I would say speak your truth, bring your personal experiences into your work and you’ll see exciting things shape up that you want to explore for yourself. I would say that this is coming from just my own subjective experience, once I started to really drop many preconceived ideas about what other people had for me and then you think, “OK well what do I want to make? What are my experiences?” Those prompts spurred the projects that were most fulfilling for myself. Yeah! I would urge you to pursue that for yourself as well. Thank you, that was great advice! I hope this was helpful for you! Definitely, certainly! thank you for your time!
END NOTES:
1 2
https://thesis.aleksdawson.com/
3 4
https://home.unicode.org/
5
https://www.jamra-patel.com/
[ ] [ ]
The Anthropology of Extinctinction: Essay on Culture & Special Death [ ] [ ]
Beyond Letters: How an African Typeface Project Became More Than Just Type Design. https://vimeo. com/331480676 [ ]
Interview- Vaishnavi Mahendran
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Ishan Khosla
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Ishan is an artist and designer who works on a range of projects that combine design, technology and craft in different ways. He has an MFA in Design from the School of Visual Arts (SVA), New York and moved to India in 2008 to start Ishan Khosla Design. Ishan has spoken at various forums in places such as Australia, France, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and in India. Ishan Khosla Design has been called the 100 Best Contemporary Graphic Designers in the world by Charlotte and Peter Fiell in their book, New Graphic Design. He has been published in India: Contemporary Design — Graphics, Fashion and Interiors (V&A London), Bi-Scriptual: Typography and Graphic Design with Multiple Script Systems, Tokyo Type Director’s Club Annual, Asian Graphics Now! and several other international books and publications. Ishan teaches design at various Indian and international universities and colleges. He also conducts workshops on typography. He also is very interested in international collaborations and exchanges in design and culture and projects related to ancient to contemporary art. Interview- Ishan Khosla
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Fig 1 Exhibition at Atelier Muji– Ginza, Handcraft for the digital : Type design from India, December 2019- March 2020
Fig 2 Exhibition–Bold, India Design Pavillion at the London Design Festival, Godna Typeface on Display, August 2017
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Typecraft initiative is a Type Design initiative found by Ishan based on India’s Rich Living Craft Tradition.They work with Indian craftswomen to create beautifully designed typefaces, while also inspiring them to learn design skills via training workshops.
SM IK
Hi! Thank you for meeting me today!
Yes, before we start could you explain again what your thesis is on? Yeah, so my thesis is connected to expressing my cultural identity and displacement. I am using the tools through which I can further explore the idea of interactivity and accessibility - tools which are easier for people to try out on their own. So that is why I was looking at the typeface building website called fontstruct and tools that are available online, or tools that people can customize on their own, without the need of specific softwares that is hard to have access to. In that way I am exploring the accessibility of the ability to design. I feel it is very important that my work is accessible for others to try out. To start off, my question is, what was your design education like and how has that experience shaped you as a designer? I had both non-design and design education. I did my undergrad in computer science and then I did my masters in Design. Design education exposed me to a lot of work, people and ideas which I was not aware of before that. For me that was my main design education. The kind of faculty we had at SVA and how they expose you to all sorts of ideas and concepts and read this book and here is where you can get that resource from. And then, of course, their own ideas that they would bring to class and how they talk about their work, so I think that was the learning other than any lecture or class. I will say my education was from that whole environment plus I also learned a lot from my peers who had already done undergrad in design and related fields and I also think that there is merit in liberal arts education. So earlier I used to regret that I did computer science because I’ve wasted five years. And I did it for five years instead of four years because I also did a lot of other courses like architecture, art, and photography. Actually those courses did help. So, I don’t regret it now, but back when I was younger maybe your age, I used to regret it that oh why did I do this, I should’ve just done design. But actually it’s useful to have a non-design degree in one of the two degrees. So, if one does an undergrad in design then they should do a Grad in non-design, in my opinion, but everyone has their own Interview- Ishan Khosla
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thing to decide so yeah that and I mean of course, I also feel that I learned even more when I started working in all the different design studios and then, of course, starting your own studio in India where I learnt the most. I learnt more about running a business, dealing with clients and all that entrepreneurial stuff but in terms of design knowledge, it was more detailed in college, but I would say I learnt more on the job than college.
SM IK
That is very interesting.
I wanted to ask you about the dichotomy of studying in the USA and then practicing in India. How was that experience, and do you have any interesting observations?
Yeah, I mean it’s true I studied in the US and I’ve worked in the US also. But not for as long as I have worked in India and now I’m teaching also. I don’t know if you know that but I am a full-time faculty. Yes, so that’s another change but yeah to answer your question, I think the main difference for me were two things. One was that when I was in the US, I was always an employee. I never had my own studio so I was always at the mercy of whatever job was given to me. I had to do that job. There was no freedom in that sense, of course, some of the jobs were great depending on which studio I worked at, I really enjoyed some of the work, but some studios were more corporate. I always preferred more cultural work. So that was one change and the other, of course, was the whole cultural aspect of India, the work culture, the client culture is very different from the US especially when I returned in 2008, which is 13 years ago. I think now India has come a long way in design, but at that time, most people you talk to about design, they think it’s fashion Design. Yes! Clients had no clue about what design is and what I can do for them, you know they thought it was more about beautification and colour and that is it. (laughs) So a lot of it, I realised, is education related. So it was about educating the client. It was as much about education as it was working as a designer. So I think that was a big difference for me. Yeah, I can understand that. I have to explain to my relatives again and again what I do, but they still go back to fashion design, but I did work in fashion for a bit, so I am like okay, at least, they are not wrong! you know I did do that. (laugh) You worked in fashion? Yeah, I was actually a textile designer, I studied textile design in my undergrad, so I worked in fashion for two years before getting into graphic designing. Confluence
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My next question is, do you think we have to unlearn certain things to be able to design effectively in a cultural context? I mean in terms of design education, the things we are learning are part of the curriculum, do you think we have to let go of some of those notions, to be able to think in a more cultural lens. Because you know it’s more ornamental it’s more handmade. So, in that sense did you also have to forego some of those rules?
Yeah, I mean it’s very specific to the context one is working on. Overall, design education is still very Westernized whether you’re doing it in the West, or in India. There is this whole topic of decolonisation which talks about looking at non-Western, non-white narratives, which to be honest, I never thought about when I was starting design. But uh… I mean in a way TypeCraft, is that. It is a type of decolonization but it was not started with the intent to, “decolonise design”. But in that way when you look at it, it is through the lens of our own context, so in that sense you’re right. When it depends on what you’re working on, but if I’m doing a corporate branding or identity, corporate reports, something very more I guess global, then design education does help a lot with that. But when you’re doing something very contextualized, very cultural, it could also be a brand identity for a culture or region. For example we made this visual identity for Kutch, or a community or something very specific, then you have to put on a different kind of hat, but I think a lot of the skills we learn as designers in college, even though we call it a “westernized” or whatever, they are still valid. That type of design thinking, deconstructing, diving in deeply into something, it just depends on how you express that or how you unbox that. I think a lot of times, we will get tempted by peers and what they see on Instagram and then copy that or take inspiration from that. I am not saying I am not convinced, I’m sure everyone subconsciously does it too. But I am saying try to look at the local context more deeply and I’m sure others do too. I personally consciously think how can I make it something with each project that is relevant to the context. And that is a crucial education.
Now I will get more into the kind of work you do. So, what do you think is the right way to preserve culture in a constantly evolving world and should we strive to blur the boundaries or celebrate them? I think I do both, but I am interested to hear your inputs. I feel culture is itself also evolving. It may not seem so always. A lot of time it does seem like it is static, but it is not. Even small things like Rakhis, when I was a kid, used to look very different from now. In terms of the materiality they use plastic and you actually get LED Rakhis[1]. I mean I’m just talking about materiality and very simple things like that, an instance example, but even other crafts and other cultural context, yes, maybe the message, the story is the same, but the medium or the way it’s being transmitted has changed somehow or even in Kalighat actually, in fact I’m about to be working with the artist from Midnapore, so you must have notice a lot of the Patchitra [2] artists in their scrolls or pats- they talk about Interview- Ishan Khosla
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Fig 3–5 Paakko Typeface and Type in Embroidery
Fig 6 Bhaunri- Book Cover design by Ishan Khosla using Godna typeface
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Fig 7–8 Rabari Typeface and Type in Embroidery
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contemporary issues like Corona. So yes, the style may not have changed that much in terms of rendering in this case, but the topics and the subject matter changes, a lot. I also don’t think that Culture or Craft should be ‘preserved’, it should not be put in a bottle and put on a shelf. Of course, museums do that, and anthropologists and other experts can study it in the future, so there’s nothing wrong with that, but as designers I feel it is really about now, the zeitgeist, what is relevant now, and what can we do now to engage different people and communities. So, I don’t know if that answers your question!
SM
Yeah! I totally do. I love the fact that you said that it’s about the now and that totally makes sense to me.
What does your project timelines for each typeface look like roughly, since the process is so intricate and detail oriented?
IK
Yeah, it varies project to project and various other factors. Like now because of the pandemic we have been working with the artisans through Whatsapp messages, Whatsapp videos, giving them feedback through audio recordings or messages. Or they take pictures of their work and send it and I would annotate, we put numbers and then explain later what the numbers mean in through voice message or something because it is difficult to write in Hindi, then we may have a conversation, so it’s quite complex overall. But then again Typecraft is basically not a profitable venture. The idea was not about profit in any case. It’s just surviving on getting grants, CSR grants, so just that grant is enough money for us all to work on it. A lot of the people are putting their time and effort without any cost, most of the money goes to the crafts people, or it goes into maintaining, website promotions, or entering competitions once in a while, we put in some money to just entering a type competition, or a book or something, just to get the word out. So, a lot of people who work on it, like my designers and all they are volunteering their time. So it also depends on their time. Firstly, type design itself takes a long time, and secondly is that they are also busy people and it also depends on whether typefaces are a Latin script or an Indic script. We have Paakko (fig 3) which is a Gujrati typeface. So the Paakko embroideries have been done already, two to four years ago, and all the embroideries were done by the artisans quite a few years ago. But it’s then it went to the stage of scanning and then characterizing. Now it’s in Glyphs where the font development is happening, but it’s been happening for more than a couple of years because it is complex and does factor time. Whereas there is another typeface called Barmer Katab (fig 9), which is a Latin script typeface, that was just done last year. We were with the artisans and the craftsmen last year in February just before the lockdown. We were really lucky we went there and we did it, so that was just a two-week workshop and then within one-year Andreu Balius who was the partner of Typecraft, he produced it. Basically, we scanned it and digitized it and then he worked on the font development and it’s out already, it was out last year in fact, so less than a year. I’m also working on another version, because there are two fonts we created in that workshop one is a patchwork
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Fig 9 Typeface Barmer Katab
Fig 9 Barmer Katab Applique
Fig 11–19 Haikus written with Barmer Katab typeface
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Fig 10 Barmer Katab Patchwork
and one is an applique. So, the Katab (fig 10) is a patchwork because it’s cut and stitched. The applique one, we are calling it phool patti (floral-foliage)(fig 9). That one I’m working on my own, and I’m not a font designer actually so I’m going to use Glyphs on the go, I thought this is a good way to end up learning and practicing Glyphs. The letters are now finally on Glyphs but it has taken a while to scan, digitize, tweak the forms and all of that stuff. But, I’m teaching and doing other things. Whenever I get time I sit on it for an hour and two hours to work on it, so it really depends. So yeah, technically I should be able to finish it very quickly, but the point is the time commitment because one doesn’t always get the time.
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How important do you think is the role of encouragement is for the work you do? Like towards your artisans. I love the fact that you give the artisans authorship for building the fonts which you go in and tweak later. And how open are they to trying new things? I like that in a small way it lets them break away from the pattern of replicating age-old traditions and kind of mould it into this modern context.
Yeah, so I think it varies from person to person. Some are already very motivated. And you know, some are, I would say it’s all about them. Not being motivated sometimes since it is overwhelming for them to do something so different. And that’s one of the reasons for the letters is that it’s so de-contextualized to their motifs and patterns, so it forces them to think in new ways. One of the ways we try to overcome this overwhelming feeling is by doing workshops and that’s something that came up after the first project of Typecraft is very obvious that one should do a workshop instead of just going and expecting them to start making letters from day one. That’s not the solution. So, the workshop is really a slow process, ideally, two weeks minimum you know which is not enough, sometimes, but at least you know. Then the first day just goes into breaking the ice, getting to know each other and talk about things and then we go away. The first two days, three days we don’t even think about letters actually we’re just thinking about the project and looking at different aspects of form making. Like maybe they can do a diagonal form, etc. It’s like teaching font design in very small ways from the beginning. We look at diagonal forms, we look at straight forms, we look at intersection, curves, and then curves and straights and how they intersect in different forms. So basically just looking at the vocabulary, but even before that we sometimes look at their motives and their backgrounds. A lot of it also requires educating ourselves. What does their motive mean? What is the context of this craft? Has it changed over the years or not? We ask them these questions in person also. Well, you know, the use of it is as well, not only the form. Like Rabari embroidery was used as bridal trousseau, but now that has been stopped and they are turned into purses, bags, cushion covers, all kinds of other products, which was never used to be made 20 years ago 15 years ago, maybe 30 years ago. It was always a garment, and it was always worn by the person who made it and there was no money attached to it. So, it’s changed a lot actually. Crafts are changing and their context is changing, due to various external extraneous factors like economy and other things so yeah to answer your question. The way to reduce their fear or intimidation is through these workshops and taking small steps. Interview- Ishan Khosla
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So, the next question is, I saw that you provide constraints as guidelines to the artisans to build upon for developing the typefaces. What has the ease of communication been like? Were there any language barriers and how did you overcome them like while giving them the constraints and instructions of how to go about it.
Sometimes there are many barriers like if you’re working with Gujrati craftsmen, or maybe even if I go to Bengal, because I want to work with kantar and other crafts as well at some point. It would be really nice to do that. But then again language would be a problem. I think in Bengal, less so, because a lot of people do speak in Hindi but in Gujrat, they didn’t speak Hindi at all, at least the few places I went to. So that was a challenge, the other thing is that, being a man and most of the craft people are women who I worked with so far. So that’s again something I learned after first experience, you know that maybe they find it awkward to talk to me or also you know, I have to sit there, and right next to them to explain something and they feel awkward. Some of them do, some of them are okay, mainly the tribal women are totally cool with that, but some of the other women and other communities don’t want me to sit next to them. Like especially the ones who are married and also, they become very awkward, so I learned that over time, these are all cultural things that you pick up with the exchange and when you go to different parts of the country it is different actually. So, then I always go with a woman employee or a partner or someone else like my wife comes with me sometimes. There needs to be at least one woman (laughs), because that just eases them like even last time when we went to Barmer and my wife could only have one week out of the two weeks, but they really, really loved her, they all became friends, with when she was going back, they wanted her to stay, they just got the “Saheli (female friend/cousin)” feeling (laughs). They kept asking when is she going to return? She could sit with them very easily like I could not sit there, it was awkward for them. So then I would move away, and I would just document and give them inputs. But I would not sit next to them or tell my wife that, okay, maybe they can try this or that. And she was sitting with them, they were crowding her, she was drawing so it’s a very different thing being a guy so that is another challenge I guess. (chuckles) That is fascinating!
What does the process of building a type specimen look like to you? After you’re done with designing the typeface, how do you go about making the personality around that?
Yeah, it’s a good question. I don’t know if you saw the ones I made for Barmer Katab, where I made these typographic compositions with haikus. (fig 11–19)
Yes, I remember.
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They're basically different like phrases. I actually once visited Jaisalmer when I was your age. I travelled alone, and so it was a lot of fun actually and that time I wrote a poem. Because of the desert and the extremes of the desert. The heat in the day and the cold at night, and you know, basically, the colourfulness of the clothes that people wear against the starkness of the landscape. I thought we did this thing in Barmer last year, so when time came around to let you know, bring it out into the public, I thought it would be nice to look at those poems which are from the desert which was very close to Barmer. So, I guess it depends on the font. Sometimes what happens is I try to do type specimen initially and it's not that great and revisit it after a few months or a few years, and then I can get more ideas and like to give it more personality and to understand its personality to express it again. So, it's one of those things, you know that one tries and tries again. Also, whenever I work on something like a talk for a conference, I try to revisit some of these specimens again because once again it's a good excuse to show something new.
SM
Is there any like specific pedagogy that you follow like when you're teaching based on how you instruct artisans like, for example, the process you followed to teach the artisans how to build the Soof typeface, I saw that you were also applying the same methodology to teach students, can you share some of those ideas?
No, it's just a methodology I created again just from experience, from working with different crafts and I realised, before Soof, we worked with the Rabari embroidery and we realised that the Rabari women don’t know how to draw. In fact, most of the women who do embroidery don’t know how to draw. Before Rabari we worked with Godna (fig 6) and Chittara [3] crafts and both of them were very focused on drawing. Godna craft is used for tattooing on the skin. So they do draw, they are used to drawing on the saris and on the walls of their houses they have Godna designs. And Chittara is the same, it’s drawing on the floors and the walls, so they are used to moving their hands in that way. But with embroidery, this only you realize we go somewhere and you start a workshop and learn that they don’t know how to draw. We even asked the NGO before going, “do they know how to draw?” and they said oh yeah, no problem. This is how it is sometimes in India you know they'll very convincingly tell you that, “yes, they will be able to draw”, and we are like, “can you please check?”. And then you arrive on site and ask the artisans to draw and they are completely blank. They cannot even draw their own motifs, forget about asking them to draw English letters, Latin script. So that was a big challenge, with Soof we didn’t want that to happen. Soof is much easier because it is very geometric, kind of like working in fontstruct, and so you have these basic elements and we made a kit out of it and I gave them the kit and it did seem to work. Actually the kit idea came before I met the artisans, I’d gone to Scotland to University of Edinburgh to do a workshop with design students on Typecraft. And there I thought of this idea of using paper and just scissors on computers, because we're so used to working on the computer as designers and design students. I thought
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Fig 12 Soof Typeface
Fig 13 Hetal Ben in Typecraft Workshop
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that, how do I get them to think about Typecraft and different craft, so we did Barmer applique, we did Soof. We did a few, which are very easy to do with paper. Just paper and scissors. So that’s where the idea came from and it was quite successful so I did the workshop in India as well in some colleges where I taught, and then brought it back to the craftspeople and actually, they enjoyed it! They said that they had never done this before and I remember that very clearly. Hetal Behn said that whenever they go to a workshop, they just give them the fabric and ask them to start working. They said that these were two days when they didn’t have to worry about anything. They just had to play around with the forms and create letters. They just kept doing that, they played with different letters and we took a picture. Then they did the next one, they would just have a lot of fun with it. They said that playfulness wasn't there earlier and that is something that they really enjoyed. Well, I hope all this information was useful for you!
SM
IK
Yes, very much! Thank you so much for answering all of my questions so thoughtfully! So yeah, I would not want to keep you any longer!
You are welcome!
END NOTES: [ ] 1 https://www.hindustantimes.com/more-lifestyle/ raksha-bandhan-2019-significance-facts-and-history-of-the-festival/story-CgDtNFp8ZBwpPb6TuxzRrO.html
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Pattachitra [ ]
3 https://www.typecraftinitiative. org/chittara-typeface [ ]
Interview- Ishan Khosla
As designers I feel it is really about now, the zeitgeist, what is relevant now, & what can we do now to engage different people & communities 251