Giving Design Back to Craftsmen – Asia InCH – Encyclopedia of Intangible Cultural Heritage

YOUR VIEWS

From Tradition To Modernity The Eames India Report of 1958 is a never ending source of wisdom about Indian crafts and design and looking back we find that little has changed of the core values that, the architects and designers, Charles and Ray Eames had articulated in their monograph that was responsible for the setting up of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. The note of caution that they held out is more real today with the pace of change and communication taking all of us on a roller coaster ride of our lives and with us the fortunes and travails of the multitude of craftsmen who have had an undisturbed tradition for over five thousand years of slow and evolutionary change. All this is gone. The comfort of slow change is shattered by the lightning speed and impact of communication that the Eames’s predicted in their report.

I quote

“ …The change India is undergoing is a change in kind not a change of degree. The medium that is producing this change is communication; not some influence of West on the East. The phenomenon of communication is something that affects a world not a country…

”They go on to add,”…The decisions that are made in a tradition-oriented society are apt to be unconscious decisions – in that each situation or action automatically calls for a specified re...