The D Word

Painted trucks, Ganeshas on dashboards and disco rickshaws only skim the surface of the Indian public’s collective imagination.

- Spandana Gopal

We’ve all fetishised, through our more ‘educated’ and Westernised lenses, about the ‘kitschiness’ of these gestures and objects — but if we look closer, the themes unify a large part of the country’s unspoken rules around object creation and design. Decoration becomes the only means for the maker to express himself, a trademark that sets him apart within a design and object culture that has largely been functioning anonymously — for who knows who designed the lota or the tiffin box or the jhadoo?

Design in the West continues to propagate the ideologies of the German Bauhaus school that called for an integrated approach where form follows function and eliminates unnecessary features within the object. Decoration is therefore a problematic area, as it seemingly serves no functional purpose.

As a design studio, you can’t help but embrace form following function — which is of course what we did when starting out and launching our brand Tiipoi. But working in India, in the middle of all the ‘apparent’ chaos, informal setups and a pretty laid-back attitude to safety and life in general, opened our eyes to other ways whereby an object could take shape. And the closer we looked, the more we saw it — decoration is everywhere.

But what is its purpose in a country of a billion-something people — where daily life continues, unfazed by a lack of resources, infrastructure and basic amenities. This is the context of India, and the landscape within which design has had to function; the brief is based on a totally different set of requirements — spirituality, home-cooked food or beauty in the smallest of things, to name a few. Intangible and invisible, but nonetheless omnipresent, the emotional quotient is high, and lends itself as the inertia that people rely on consistently to both survive and live well.