Dr. Suman Devadula

Message

Dear Students and Esteemed Parents,

Following my experiences in both design industry and academia, I feel honoured to be the chosen one to initiate and lead the MIT-WPU School of Design that provides exceptional design and applied arts programmes at the undergraduate level, post-graduate level and the doctoral level.

As we approach completing a decade with our unique offerings, I am glad to inform you that our graduates have added significant value to the design and creative industry. Their work reflects our values and mission in the design and creative landscape, both locally, nationally and internationally. Pursuing a career in design and applied arts allows for creative freedom, but it's important to balance that with responsibility. Designers have a responsibility to others because their work is not just for themselves. Understanding the needs of the people for whom one is designing is the foundation of user-centred design, which is crucial for successful and sustainable enterprises. However, a designer's responsibility goes beyond just focusing on users. This also applies to careers in applied arts where client requirements are foremost. 

Although there may be some exceptions, it is not realistic to expect users to know everything about a design they will be involved with, nor can we anticipate all their needs and desires, whether explicit or implicit. Furthermore, what is very feasible, viable and economically desirable might derail eco-systems. A very useful service of alerting a user when you miss a call can be misinterpreted socially and misused unless communicated and alerted appropriately for both the giver and the receiver. On the earth day or on any other day, what happens if, a popular search-engine with billions of visitors everyday chooses to invert colours on its homepage? A very playful looking synthetic garment, a co-molded and easily affordable toothbrush, or indiscriminately used synthetics in the interiors could despoil waters with microfibers affecting aquatic life, polluting shores along the supply chain and decrease indoor air quality, respectively. We are hence looking at an extended responsibility. As creatives and designers, we should strive to be fully aware of the history of design, and the consequences it entailed across systems and pay heed to the environmental footprint of the lifecycle of design, the consequences of introducing the design into society, culminating in the contribution of the design towards sustaining welfare for people, that this prestigious university, MIT-WPU, envisions to be a forbearer of. Design actually entails so much. The earth is a family. In essence, design involves more than creating desirables; it is about being simultaneously mindful of the consequences of design for the habitability of the earth as a global community.

As creatives and designers, creativity should be our forte, but it takes a lot of training to be truly creative, possess the strength to take responsibility for our design and be able to redesign or improve the entire system. This requires critical and reflective thinking in addition to creative thinking, and it is the intersection of these thinking types that we cultivate in our students. Our aim is to equip them with the skills to become entrepreneurs, leveraging technology and partnerships for innovating for socially relevant causes.

We strongly believe that lifelong holistic learning is crucial and that industry will need to catch up with this idea soon. I am happy to say that the MIT-WPU School of Design is committed to this learning journey, with updated curricula, pedagogies and andragogies for facilitating this journey with a continually innovative faculty team that takes pride in holistic education. Our creative and design education is situated in a context that naturally progresses from being client-centred, user-centred to human-centred to life-centred, offering a wide range of thoughts that make it highly relevant for posterity and hence for leading oneself sustainably.

To summarise, I urge young and aspiring artists and designers to explore and push their creative abilities to discover their full potential, while also considering the potential impact of their design choices, responsibly.

I wish you all the best in your efforts and look forward to welcoming you at the MIT-WPU School of Design as prospective students and further as student ambassadors of our unique offerings, and as proud alumni.