Professor Kumar Vyas, Design Educator, Awarded The 100th Birthday Of Sir Misha Black Medal For Distinguished Services To Design Education

The Committee has announced that Professor H Kumar Vyas Design Educator and Chairman, Educational Council of MAEER’s MIT Institute of Design and Founder of the Faculty of Industrial Design at the NID in Ahmedabad, India, has been awarded the Sir Misha Black Medal for Distinguished Services to Design education. The 2011 Medal marks the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Sir Misha Black.

The Medal will be given to Professor Vyas at a special award ceremony to be held at the Royal College of Art at 6pm on Tuesday 8 March 2011. Following the presentation, Professor Vyas will deliver an address on his design and education philosophy and speak about the development of design education in India.

Born in Uganda, Kumar Vyas studied in India and then was trained as a industrial designer at the Central School of Art and Design (now Central Saint Martins College of Design) in London. He worked in London with Douglas Scott Associates as a designer for five years before returning to India to join the NID to set up its Faculty of Industrial Design and begin training the first cadre of Indian industrial designers and design educators.

Through his pioneering work Kumar Vyas helped innovate a relevant Indian version of the 'Bauhaus/Ulm’  approach to design that gradually made inroads into Indian manufacturing and production which today ranges from handcrafts to the space industry. Today this method is taken for granted but Kumar Vyas and his colleagues worked in the face of immense odds, in an environment hostile to change and loathe to surrender traditional, largely colonial, educational methods. He worked at the NID for thirty years during which span he developed design educational materials which were the first of their kind in the country. These became critical to expanding a national design movement with learning materials relevant to the Indian environment, in addition to the flood of resources available from overseas. Kumar Vyas’ contributions have included a seminal educational kit for school going children. The kit “Design and Environment” was telecast on the national network in a major step toward countrywide awareness and understanding. His other publications include one introducing the younger generation to the rationale of Indian design idioms, “Design and Environment: A primer” and another that discusses design in the context of Indian culture and society, “Design the Indian Context”.

The now flourishing Institute of Design at the Maharashtra Institute of Technology in Pune is Prof. Kumar Vyas creation, its founders travelling to Ahmedabad to seek his advice at every step. As of now he is closely associated with the MIT Institute of Design, Pune where he continues to mentor on curriculum and faculty-development issues. In the course of his career he created design education materials that were the first of their kind in his country. They became critical to expanding a national design movement providing learning material relevant to the particular and very different needs of a country as large and diverse as India.

Kumar Vyas's students formed the vanguard of design professionals in India, many of them now in mid-career and gaining international recognition. Satish Gokhale working out of his Design Directions office in Pune was the recent winner of the 'Design of the Decade Award' given by the Industrial Design Society of America for his 'Swach' water filter designed for Tata which also received an award from the Wall Street Journal and the IF Gold Award in Germany a short time ago.

While Kumar Vyas was a student and later a young designer in London in the early 1960's, Misha Black was ensuring that the UK was being internationally recognised as the front runner in design education, practice and culture. It seems fitting that nearly fifty years later that young designer  who applied and adapted all he had absorbed to his homeland devoting his life to educating designers there, should return to London to receive the 100th Birthday Misha Black Medal.