Till a few months back, India seemed to have mapped the design education goals for our imaginable future. Bolstered by the ambitious scope of the National Design Policy (2007) with it’s stated objective of “Making India a major hub for exports and outsourcing of designs and creative process for achieving a design-enabled innovative economy.” However, after being led by the modernist led approach to design education (developed since the ‘70s), design education in India was coming to terms with contemporaneity and an SDG led idea of future mapping (SDG: Sustainable Development Goals – by United Nations). This growth and its acceleration was made possible by a steep rise in students wanting to study design along with their capacities and willingness to pay for expensive privatised higher education.

This structure and its scaffolding has been under attack as COVID 19 began creeping in and eating into our civilizational fiber, killing thousands and attacking some of the most important institutional and structural pillars. Universities and colleges need to be reimagined and remodeled to be able to adapt and grow through these times.

Right now, the immediate response has been to digitise the classroom and to go online. These measures are helping us to plug the gaps right now, but their sustainability needs to be put up for discussion. Also, the ‘learning process’ in a university or a college happens on the campus, rather than strictly in classrooms. This has to be acknowledged and we need to imagine technology + concept led design solutions.

Also, we might take some longer view and think about the learning infrastructures to be developed, both conceptually and logistically. Craft-based skills in resonance with a complex systems approach combined with computational design! Lifelong learning vs classical curriculum building. This opens the terrains to be explored in order to provide “creative education for creative leadership”. This questions the offering of design tools and methods for a design-enabled innovative society, ranging from economy to culture and caring for all the stake-holders.