January 19 issue of the magazine is focused in many ways on conversations around Design. Design as a broad field of practice has a strong presence in India today — besides architecture and cities, fashion and product design, or textile design and the multiple forms of Design Thinking, are all drawing attention one way or another from India. The practices and productions involved are at a large scale, not maybe in the size of establishments always, but in the number of studios and practices. At the same time there is an emerging and growing ‘creative class’ population involved in ‘design’ in one way or another. What is coming about in this scenario is a serious problem — there is no history or practice of critical research and review of design around, especially at the moment. And a parallel issue is the lack of educational institutions that offer formal and university education in design – there are hardly a handful of that impart sound and contemporary design education. Critical writing is totally missing and the glamour associated with many areas of design takes over the talk on design, minus the discourse. The field of design needs to be developed and shaped.

The informality in the practice of design is not as true as it appears, with a good quantity of production, material, and labour involved and all along there are financial exchanges at many levels. Yet in the discussions on design or design practice it is talked about as artistic flair, creative flows, star individuals, and often it is imagined as if all of this happened only yesterday!

There have been a few academic programmes of importance and have attempted experiments and drawing out debates for a contemporary practice  but much more work and active debates are needed here. Books and magazines are practically missing, and a creative leap will be required to build this space of ‘design discourse’ and ‘design debates’.