Around 48 leading tribal designers, design academicians and design students from various disciplines got together to forge a community of designers online recently that could work as a consortium for projects related to tribal people and tribal communities.
Dak_ti Craft that creates unique range of hand crafted products made from natural materials in Meghalaya is amongst the other designers to participate in the forum with those from Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and Mizoram.
All the designers have expressed their determination to create multiple platforms to collaborate and co-create local solutions for local needs and thereby, play an active role in local development for tribal communities.
At the forum, Rida Gatphoh and Peter Marbaniang from Dak_ti Craft highlighted the role of a tribal designer. They said, “Tribal designer can play a very important role in keeping the balance between traditional knowledge and modern aesthetics, between what the local community needs and what the global consumer wants, between how much we take from nature and how much we must give back to it.”
Design professionals from various parts of the world like Dubai, London, Berlin and Helsinki also participated in the forum and reiterated the need to design products and services that accomplish appropriate and meaningful solutions for problems faced by various sections of the society.
“It was really amazing to see the number of design professionals coming together from so many varied tribal communities, each doing excellent work in their field. Before this meeting, it was impossible to imagine the role that designers have been actively engaged with to help their tribal communities develop socioeconomically and culturally. As a collective, this is a unique group with the potential to transform lives of tribal communities.” said Sudhir John Horo, the convenor of the Tribal Design Forum.
Tribal alumni of some of the leading design institutions like National Institute of Design (NID), National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Goldsmiths (UK) Aalto University (Finland) and others deliberated on the potential role of design to create products, services, systems that would be focused towards delivering value to their respective tribal communities while leveraging and enhancing local skill and indigenous knowledge systems to create sustainable livelihoods.
During the forum, the members deliberated on possible design interventions in areas like education, crafts, skills, employment, migration, agriculture and agro-products, tourism, textiles, fashion and tribal identity among others.
One of the key issues voiced during the forum was that very often design solutions and various developmental policies are often thrust upon the tribal population which is often incongruent with the local culture and context. And a strong need was felt to engage tribal designers to understand local problems within their respective communities, work with the local people to develop solutions that are relevant, responsible, ethical and appropriate to the communities.
It was also felt that despite having very qualified and experienced design professionals from the tribal communities across various states, the local authorities have been unable to leverage this invaluable human resource adequately to engage in the socio-economic and cultural advancement of local tribal communities.
