I have made quite a few such visits over the last couple of years. Yet I was looking forward to it since such an experience is always enriching. It usually helps me rediscover my roots and think ‘how can the designs we make be more meaningful based on what we have learnt in the initial years?’

So I attended a one-day session, which involved 11 students from various backgrounds presenting work from the Foundation courses.

I was disappointed to find that without exception, they continued to focus only on hard skills. The students were driven by a fixed number of assignments and finished them in a dedicated time frame. Almost none of them had paused to question why these exercises were done and how these could contribute to their holistic development.

The roots were missing. Clearly, this was an issue for Design Education to tackle.

Design maybe an analysis based, iterative, team process but it is also a highly emotional individual activity. Whether it is a problem, domain or technique, a designer requires the same attitude of contemplation and exploration.

To probe this situation, I found myself recalling one of the most exciting experiences of my childhood. One day, our father got us a microscope. It had all the paraphernalia for conducting proper tests and projecting on a large surface for us to observe and record results. We spent the following years dissecting everything we could lay our hands on- from grass blades to hair strands; dead insects to crystalline chips. And while we were doing this on our own, we were propelled by a natural desire to find out more about what we were seeing. ‘Why things are they way they are?’

The gap in design education seemed like the ‘microscope’- a tool to inspire this ‘spirit of inquiry’; an enabler to ‘magnify through one’s own eyes and understand better’.

Emotional intelligence is increasingly recognized as a potent force for managing oneself, thereby improving both the ability to question and to develop.