"Somethings you can only learn by doing"
Product designer and doer of things, Akash Kumar on craft, food as material culture and importance of context.
This interview is part of a new series called "Adjacent,” where we document conversations, interviews and snippets of people in our community who don’t directly work in food, but their work influences food, culture, and eating in many ways.
Adjacent literally means next to something, neighbouring, the periphery of one thing almost merging with another. The goal of this series is to expand the literature, knowledge and ideas that exist in those intersecting spaces. We will talk to environmentalists, business owners, designers, workers, growers and educators who influence what we consume ( literally and figuratively).
This series will be accessible to paid subscribers. Please support the two-people team behind dhoop by paying for a monthly/yearly subscription of our newsletter. We promise to bring only valuable content to you.
Rini: Where did you grow up and what was it like?
Akash: I was born in Bokaro Steel City, Jharkhand and grew up with my grandmother. My parents lived in Bihar at the time - so I spent most of my childhood with my nani and uncle.
The city was established on a steel plant, and the core job of the city was manufacturing steel. But, I grew up in a set-up between the city and the tribal settlement in the Jharkhand area.i grew up in a starkly contrasting ecosystem - heavy concrete on one side, and tribal villages built on natural resources on the other. You see how they use local resources, sell fruits and vegetables from the forest that you don’t find in a typical market in local haats.
Rini:What was your schooling like? What inspired you to get into design and not the traditional industries?
Akash: Studying at a reputed public school (Delhi Public School) in Bokaro gave me a lot of exposure in other (apart from studies) things - I used to design the stage/set for every cultural function in our school. So, this creative process of making things came from an early stage.
Rini: How do you define design or design education?
Akash: Why do you need to define design? Because I come from a place [India] where ‘everything is design’- it is in our lifestyle, in our living. The idea of defining things is also a western concept. Why do you need to define things? Because your definition and my definition are very different. I have my own definition of design,[so] creating a universal definition of things is [also] something I question. Because everyone is a designer in one way or another. [For example] If you are in a bedroom and you decide to move a table from one side to the other, you are doing ‘Spatial design.’ You are trying to design your space depending on your vision. I look at design from that vision.
Also, coming from India, the lifestyle, the way people live is also design. If you look at the origin of design, where it all came from - the concept of kala, craft and design, there is a distinct line [between them]. If you go to villages, women have a way of designing their own clothing, motifs- all of this came much before the concept of ‘design’ originated. So, my definition of design is that it’s everywhere and it is not fixed.
In terms of education, the establishment of NID was a modernist approach. Charles and Ray Eames were brought from America to write the India report. It is very interesting to look that they have take lota as an example of fluid design or a fluid object. They mention in the report that lota is a product that has not been designed by one person, but by [multiple] generations. It has evolved.
I also think about how you can design a product or a lota in an educational set-up because it lives in the social context and amongst the people. In terms of education, the establishment of NID was a modernist approach. Charles and Ray Eames were brought from America to write the India report. It is very interesting to look that they have taken lota as an example of fluid design or a fluid object. They mention in the report that lota is a product that has not been designed by one person, but by [multiple] generations. It has evolved.
I also think about how you can design a product or a lota in an educational set-up because it lives in the social context and amongst the people. And also very much influenced by the Bauhaus principle of getting everything into this setup of closed doors and then designing stuff, making it for an industry, supporting a different kind of segment. I can talk about NID a lot because I have studied there. NID still caters to the elite kind of people.That way the education has been centred upon those kinds of people. When you look at the west side of the country, it's a lot of design, but when you go to the east side it is very difficult to look- there’s only Shantiniketan in Kolkata.
Real design education which caters to a good kind of grassroots level and also industrial level. And I focus on craft education - somethings you can only learn by doing. Since I have been teaching and I tell my students when I am teaching that design is in everyday lifestyle - you just need to see. When you are on the streets, look at the jalebi maker - he is 3D printing. Look at the materials - you eat aam papad in India - that is a biomaterial. It all exist in our lifestyle - I take design from the local context and bring it to education set-ups because it is living in this society and solutions are there.
Rini: The relationship between Textile and Product design. How do you think about these disciplines?
Akash: The reason I chose textile was the amount of things I could do with it, the options I had to play around - printing, weaving , knitting, crochet, felting, natural dying, the techniques were so many, and it also came with the rich culture of India.Textiles were products that were used as a barter system in India. The cloth was so valuable that it was used as money.
Working in the craft sector and working in big manufacturing companies, I understood the contrast between them. Looking at how big companies have started representing motifs of a craft in an H&M print fabric. I started looking at textiles from the level of product. A product that becomes different when it converts its making process. So who is the owner of this knowledge? If you see a ‘tree of life’ motif, people relate to that, there’s a community that hand paints it, but if H&M adds it in a wall hanging etc…so where this product transition happens I wanted to look at broader perspective of the textile. When I was working in a large manufacturing setup, where I was designing carpet, it was all/ONLY about the product , and not about the story.
Rini: You don’t directly work in food, but you mentioned food as material culture (as part of your research) in our last conversation. Could you elaborate?
Akash: Roti, Kapda, Makaan…
Roti is the first thing, food
Then comes clothing, textiles
And makaan is shelter and there I look at vernacular practices and what is this vernacular culture (vernacular architecture, vernacular textiles and vernacular food), ..it has evolved depending on the material it has around it…so vernacular material is using local resources just to make shelter and vernacular textile is using local sheep in Kutch and cotton in South or different fibres depending on what area you come from and food is also that…How are you using your resources that are locally available to make food…and it is a material culture and food is a material culture..how to you use that material to define your culture because you come from that place..interconnectedness that happens and that is where I look at food and the diversity in that - how do you really use that food, it’s years of evolution because some place I go and tell my friends ‘this leaf can be eaten’ and people ask me ‘How do you know that?’ Because I come from a tribal area and I have seen those things sold in that area.
It is material and it has also become a culture of food in those places. When you think of diversity, it is also the diversity of palate- I have grown at 3 different places and now I have moved out [of India], I have started looking at India from a different point of view. I grew up in Bokaro where I used to eat food cooked in mustard oil, and moving to Gujarat it was cottonseed oil and in Hyderabad it was coconut oil…and these are materials available in those regions ( mustard is heavily grown in the Chota Nagpur Plateau area, south is coconut and so on) and how these food cultures have developed because of these local materials available in those regions.
Rini: How do you make sense of this role that you have taken? Working at the interaction of extremely established, isolated industries ? How do you do it?
Akash: Intersectionality is tough. I have been trying to talk about different kinds of systems when it comes to craft. There is a stark difference between how craft is perceived in India and how it is perceived in the west (coding is also a craft). When I look at it from an Indian POV, I look at it more from the perspective of material, culture and tradition and how it has a significance - when I work on those intersections..
I also cook at this volunteer run organisation called ‘Conscious Kitchen’ at The Hague and the food over there is collected from a market - it is one of the biggest markets in Europe. So the food [produce] comes from there, the volunteers collect it on Wednesday and on Thursday we cook a 3-course meal, free for students (an international community). I think there my design intuitions or my cultural intuitions come into the picture because you cannot pre-plan your dishes/recipes because you don’t know what is going to come from the market. And that’s where my design - what’s available and what to mix comes into play. I don’t know what I prepare, but there are certain things that I inherently gathered from grandmother or mother. Those intersections also happen where the lines of professional and daily life blur.
Rini: What are you working on/doing right now?
Akash: Right now, I am at The Hague, Netherlands (famous for its peace and Internal court of Justice).I moved here in 2022, started my Masters in Industrial design - where its not only about designing new products but questioning do we actually need new products, do we actually need the system or can we redesign the system in any way. Looking at this industry from a critical perspective.
I am going to graduate this summer, and my thesis is focused on craft knowledge or the body as a knowledge system - how do you learn from this body, and how do you transmit this knowledge through the body. It’s a series of workshops where I want to engage people in the learning process - gardening, paper making, hand-spinning, cooking series etc. The larger aspect of it is underlying on the knowledge system - to look at explicit knowledge (top of the iceberg) and tacit knowledge ( a knowledge that lies in the experience, nuance).
Rini: What do you think we [India] are doing right? How can we preserve and build on what we have?
Akash: I have been struggling with this question too.
An interesting thing happened a month ago. 15-20 manufactures from India came to show their work in an exhibition in Germany. They came to NID and wanted help with designing furniture (they were making furniture from bamboo and a lot of interesting things) and were not happy with the response they got from the fair. They wanted to understand what European design is and how you design from this market. I was invited to this meeting because I was from India, and they were like ‘you’d be a nice person to give them direction.’ I was quite harsh on them, I realise that because my tutor was like ‘we have never seen you like that - making such strong points.’
The fact that India is still looking at the west as the model of development is a problem. We have so much diversity in our furniture, we have craftsmanship - we already have everything. Why do you have to come here and design for someone else? I was very strict on those angles. What we have as a country is gold, its diamond and we are trying to kill that through understanding everything from the centre [pov] of the west model. And that’s disheartening because that’s what is happening. And this is something by the government, they are facilitating this and giving money to do this.
But a lot of initiatives like PARI give me hope - where you see how these things are documented.
Additionally, India still has a lot of untapped markets but I think we will also have to look at our development very critically. What kind of development are we actually looking for? Is mining the only development that we are looking at? Do we want to mine the whole Himalayas, mine the North East? Or are there other modes of development? Eco-tourism? Trying different ways to ask how we foster diversity and not slash it? I don’t have answers, but it's more about collective answers, how we invite people in the discussion - policy makers, designers, makers, practitioners, community - it’s a collective [effort].
Rini: Lastly [laughs] your top 3 recommendations for readers..
Akash:
First, learn from you home. Talk to the eldest person alive in your family. The amount that you learn from them, you cannot learn from anywhere else about yourself. They are your ancestors. I also tell my students when I teach materials - I tell them to talk to their dadis and nanis. In the course I took during covid, everyone was learning from scattered places. So usually in NID, you are in a set-up and all of you are working with the same materials because you don’t have access to everything. What covid it - it brought knowledge from all different places. I have stories from Jharkhand, stories from Goa, stories from Kashmir..students talking to their grandparents and through that came material culture. In Goa, the family's history was to make white paint from seashells. A student's grandmother used to do that - she used to collect sea-shells and make white paint for her house. And this could have never happened if this interaction between students and their grandparents never happened. Look at what you actually have first
Donna Haraway’s work
If you read this whole interview, thank you! To be honest - making dhoop into a screen-friendly reading space has been a new. But, this conversation with Akash turned out to be a reflection of things we hope to embody as a publication. To know that to move ahead, we need to look back and carry things worthy of preservation into the future. This is ofc beyond the nostalgic interpretation of material cultures, this is bringing the good of the past into the possibilities of the future. This is knowing that we need to look around before we look elsewhere.