Designing a better future

PAGE Junior College, Banjara Hills, is walking the talk of making students creative with its unique design master class last weekend.
Designing a better future

HYDERABAD: If you thought it was impossible to convince a group of teenagers to happily attend a hands-on workshop on weekends from 9.30 am to 4 pm, then you should have been present at PAGE Junior College, Banjara Hills, over the weekend (July 14-15). It was quite an unusual sight. A group of 25 intermediate students aspiring to be designers/architects found themselves going back to kindergarten as they started drawing cats. Yes, cats! As their hesitant hands slowly started getting involved in the activity, the classroom was full of drawings of cats of all sizes and shapes. What was going on? The students were attending a “Masterclass in Drawing” conducted by Francis Joseph, an engineer and designer, who has been in the business of international product designing for the past 15 years.

Why though was he asking a group of 16-year-olds to draw a cat, you may ask. “Well, it is to teach them the importance of lines in designing and help them distinguish between a good and a bad line,” says Joseph. As the class goes on and the students hold up their drawings, while complaining that they don’t know how to draw a ‘proper’ cat, Joseph shakes his head in disagreement. “It is not that you don’t know how to draw a cat, you just don’t yet have the skill to draw. The knowledge already exists in your brain, but what’s lacking is the body-mind coordination,” he says.

Later, talking about the Masterclass, Joseph said that he was there to “teach students to become masters in drawing in a day”. “Through these exercises, I am imparting them with the basic, necessary drawing skills in just a day. If they practice daily these set of exercises for two hours, they will become masters in drawing within just six weeks.”

This workshop is a series in a line of other such initiatives conducted by PAGE, in order to inculcate lateral thinking in students. Srinivas Rao Pattur, Industrial Designer and Mentor at PAGE, says that apart from regular junior college studies. “We also emphasise on innovation and lateral thinking. We believe that this will help the students to have a better livelihood. Livelihood doesn’t mean making money, it means having the skill sets needed to navigate through life.”

As part of this approach, Simran Sawant (16), a design aspirant, says that they have had many other such workshops. “We have had an origami-architecture workshop, where we learnt how to incorporate origami into architecture. Then we had a lateral thinking workshop, where we learnt the importance of thinking outside the box,” she says.

Adding on about the benefits that they have reaped through these workshops, Puneeth Boni,16, one of the design aspirants, says that these workshops and Masterclasses are like a cement to your building. “You lay the bricks and these masterclasses help in cementing your knowledge,” he says. When asked what was his biggest takeaway from Francis Joseph’s drawing Masterclass, he says he learnt about the importance of talent or lack of it. How much does talent really matter in the drawing? Joseph said that everyone starts off on an equal plane and eventually.

“It’s your desire and hard work that takes you somewhere.” Besides teaching the importance of drawing good lines and being confident, Joseph’s Masterclass also included other exercises like creating a grey scale, knowing and experiencing the different types of pencils, controlling the pressure one exerts while drawing, understanding which joints are involved while you draw different shapes etc.

While these may sound quite basic, they are quite fundamental skills to learn, believes Satavahana, 16, a design aspirant at PAGE. With a dream of becoming a product designer and running an entire design team by himself one day, he says that any idea demonstrated visually is always better than said verbally. “Drawings and sketches show a product’s depth, its aesthetics, form and so on. So it is important for us to know the basics of holding a pencil right, which pencil to use and so on if we want to become product designers,” he says.

Such design education is crucial to not just be able to make good designs, but to also understand the needs of society, believes Srinivas Rao Pattur. “Design education is about identifying needs, challenges and gaps in society and how we can make it a better place. It’s not about what we can see, but what we experience,” he says.

Abishai Choragodi, 17,  another design agrees. “As a kid I was fascinated with cars. I just felt they could lift my mood. So, evoking such emotions became my dream. I believe empathising with customers is the core responsibility of a designer. It is with this dream of creating wholesome products and becoming world class product designers, young design aspirants at PAGE Junior College, called it a day on Sunday with the end to Francis Joseph’s “Masterclass in Drawing”.

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