First things first, I should introduce myself. My name is Alan Manley and I am a product designer, design researcher and for the recent past I have been a design lecturer. I taught product and interface design at a private art and design college in Bangalore, India called Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. It was a delightful place to work with a genuinely warm and knowledgeable faculty, where I was teaching enthusiastic, inquisitive and hard working students. During my time I was lucky enough to experience some unique places and meet some extraordinary people whilst teaching design and one example brings me on to the focus of this article.

[In these series of articles I am going to focus on one object and talk about its influence on my design sense and the potential lessons that can be learnt from it and the issues surrounding it.]

The first object is the tribal mask.

Tribal Mask from Chhattisgargh, India. Bought for only £7

In November 2008, a group of nine students, two lecturers and I went on a trip to Chhattisgargh, the newest state of India located in the mid-east of the country. We went to a region called Bastar in the hope of exploring issues, expanding our knowledge of India and looking at art and design through new eyes. This was a trip where I was more of a student than teacher and the experience gave me a real sense of what I like to think is the real India, or rather the India I imagined, the India of real epic beauty and rural charm. It was the India I had waited to see for nearly two years. Yet in such a setting, the opportunity to explore our understanding of design was at the forefront our consciousness. We traveled to an NGO (Non-Government Organisation) called Saathi who were involved with the preservation and development of craft and the communities that are invested in the art forms they produced. Now, I’m fully aware that I’m speaking to a predominantly western design audience and as such the concept of craft is probably not something that comes up in your design teaching, and neither would it have done. But it should. Craft is the one of the areas within design that I had little to no experience or consideration for, before going to India. Now it’s formed a strong part of my own design philosophy.

Now the mask is an example of the wood carving work being done at the NGO with craft people from the surrounding area.

To describe it from a purely aesthetic standpoint, it is a unique piece. It’s filled with iconography particular to the tribe, the culture and the context. There are certain meanings for certain parts of the mask; the red dots, the tiger (I think it’s a tiger!) at the top with the head coming out its back. In this objects first incarnation these are not decoration but symbols loaded with cultural significance. The interesting thing with this piece is no matter how interesting it is, and no matter how many people are interested in it; people are admiring a fake. Not in terms of its origin, it is from India and the region we went to, but it’s not genuine. It’s a scale model of the Eiffel Tower, a bear in a Beefeater suit or an I ? NY t-shirt. It is tourism fodder and I realized this after the trip was over and reflected on my decision to buy the mask. Should this make me feel bad or lessen the value of my purchase? Quite simply; no. And I’ll explain why.

This leads me on to what the role of this product is. Does it have a function? No, not really. It could have been used in tribal rituals but it’s a souvenir so we can conclude that its function is aesthetic. Yes and no. Of course it’s an object which you can see, so inherently it has some aesthetic impact and value but the real function of the mask is to elicit my own design values and my sense of self. The power of an object in terms of its function is much more than the physical or visual. Even if this mask had been used by tribal Indians it would still have the same function for me; only the details of the information would be different.

Truly great product design sustains the third function of being able to transcend the first two functions; to live on past its initial purpose and contain multiple layers of meaning for often more than one person. It seems a lofty aspiration for a piece of product design but if you think of the types of objects that you might have kept and they will be on the majority, designed objects.

So if you are a design student reading this, or indeed a practicing designer, I would like you to remember that your designs have lives, they are more than the solution to a problem. Products are the language of memories and are worth looking at in those terms so your products talk to us and stay in our lives for longer than the zeitgeist tells us.

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