4-YEAR UG Professional Program
Creative Education
To define is to limit. – Oscar Wilde
You are creatively inclined, click on the Srishti Manipal website and find yourself reading this text. Learning at school is ending, and you need to figure out what to do next. “What do I want to do? Where’s the world heading? How do I prepare for the future and learn to keep up with it?”
Dear Learner, these questions are real and you have experienced massive change already. When the pandemic struck and everyday life was suspended, within a matter of days, you had to learn an entirely new way of learning. Classes moved online; your room became your classroom, studio, and lab, and working from home became the norm. For your parents, too, it was a time of uncertainty with the world of work within many industrial landscapes changing and professional profiles mutating. You have experienced this and know what learning the ‘new normal’ means.
Every aspect of life around you – past, present and future – is in persistent production and can be deconstructed, understood and learnt. The Creative Education program, while rooted in ideas of curriculum, pedagogy and teaching, takes learning outside the classroom and locates it in the emerging future. Learning is a core transferable skill that contributes to many aspects of our daily lives. The future is shaped by how teachers, designers, managers, and administrators learn and how institutions, organisations, corporations, and governments learn. At the Creative Education program, we employ strategies, systems and methods to design learning experiences that play a critical role in shaping how we engage with this new world and facilitate the engagement of others.
You may be getting impatient at this point. “But I’m interested in image making/ moving image/ graphic design/ product design/ accessory design/ furniture design. What does lifelong learning have to do with me, or my creative expression?”
Creative Education is built on a symbiotic relationship with all other disciplines at SMI. Learning is influenced by how a space is designed; it includes the furniture used in the space, the size of the space, where it is located and who it is for. Similarly, visual communication materials such as charts, textbooks, workbooks, and game boards facilitate learning. 21st century businesses require capacity building and instructional design learning designers, audio-visual designers, platform designers. As such, all disciplines at SMI contribute to Creative Education and vice versa. Learning is all pervasive, and we invite you to explore with us your forms of creative expression and collaborate with other programmes to grow in the many directions that you desire. Film, Public Art, Graphic Novels, Product Design – all this and more will connect your practice to the projects, publications and public events we undertake. With a Creative Education major, you will be actively engaged in the continuous reinvention of the world around you. The whirlwinds of change demand adaptability, which is rooted in the skill of learning.
LEVEL
Undergraduate Degree
AWARD
Bachelor of Design (B.Des)
DURATION
4 Years / Full-time
ROUND 2
31 March – 20 April 2025
Course Structure
The curriculum comprises different ways of learning as follows:
- Foundation introduces students to basic principles and tools of Art, Design and Technology as methods, tools and processes.
- Disciplinary Studios are learning spaces where students develop core disciplinary capabilities while navigating a trans-disciplinary environment.
- General Studies is a common and compulsory programme of study that integrates Humanities, Sciences, Maths, business and finance.
- Interim is an immersive introduction to practice in new and emerging areas of art and design and environmental exposure.
- Electives are of three kinds – this program allows students to expand their skills, develop their interests as well as provide opportunities for travel exchange.
- Internship/Apprenticeship is compulsory work experience done over the summer-break between the 6th and 7th semester.
- Project based learning involves the application and synthesis of capabilities acquired. Two projects, pre-thesis and thesis, is culmination of the 4-year undergraduate program, which allows for demonstration of an integration of values, positions, capabilities and practice.
You are now intrigued by what you are reading, and wonder “But what are the opportunities open for me after the program? How do I define myself as a learner in this program?”
We invite learners with multiple interests and skill sets who want to learn how to develop their creative ecosystem. In this program, you will build extensions and constantly evolve your profile across various domains. We encourage you to expand beyond a single creative identity and explore multiple aspects of your practice. Are you the illustrator also writing a script for a film while launching your startup with friends, showing your artwork in a gallery, volunteering for your local NGO on weekends and thinking of starting a podcast? Are you a comic book artist, a filmmaker, a public space designer, a publication designer, a concept artist, a graphic designer, a brand strategist, an e-learning developer, an interactive exhibition designer, an edutainment specialist, a corporate trainer, an edu-tech consultant, a systems gamification specialist, a climate crisis storyteller, a regenerative systems designer, an organisational culture catalyst, a planetary health educator, a resource resilience innovator, a sustainability education strategist, a cross-sector innovation facilitator, a neurodiversity inclusion trainer, a climate resilience campaigner, a curator, an entrepreneur, a storyteller, an educator, an artist, a changemaker, a leader ?
You lean back on your chair and let the last word soak in. “A Leader? How is it connected to Creative Education? “
In a time of accelerating change, being a leader or a changemaker isn’t an exception or a novelty; it’s a matter of survival. Adaptability and agility are essential skills for the creators of tomorrow. These skills are anchored in learning. To engage with leadership is about having an imagination, awareness & engagement with the entire system, its health and understanding your role in it. Leadership is a matter of vision and an impactful & sustainable vision is built on the ability to learn and act on it.
The future’s not so far away, and it is waiting for you to shape it.
Can you see it?
FAQs
Creative Education (CE) intersects art, design, technology, learning, pedagogy and creativity. It is a large ecosystem with many stakeholders that includes creative practitioners, researchers, entrepreneurs, facilitators, curators, publishers, investors and so on. We are constantly connecting and in conversation with this ecosystem through our different initiatives. Some of our past collaborators who form this CE ecosystem are:
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- Kiran Bir Sethi is an Indian designer, educationist, education reformer, and social entrepreneur. With a degree in visual communication from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, she ran a flourishing design practice, but it was when her children started going to school that Sethi recognised her true calling -putting design thinking into education. She founded the award winning Riverside School in Ahmedabad that focuses on empowering children with the I CAN MINDSET. She then founded aProCh ( an initiative to make cities more child friendly ) and Design for Change, which is today the largest movement of change –for and by the children where children use the simple framework of Feel/Imagine/Do/Share to design solutions for some of their greatest challenges. Her most recent venture is the Riverside Learning Center which offers training programmes to empower schools across the world to become ‘I CAN SCHOOLS’ by using the codified processes from Riverside.
- Madan Meena is a practicing visual artist and a researcher working extensively with rural, nomadic, and tribal communities. He has designed two important exhibitions in western Rajasthan based on brooms and pottery. He is the recipient of various fellowships to work on the oral traditions of Rajasthan, among which Tejaji Ballad is a major one documented in more than one dozen languages. He has been involved in the revival of various craft traditions among the indigenous communities. Presently, he is honorary director of the Adivasi Academy in Gujarat.
- Manu Neelakandhan is a creative professional working in the consumer industry since 2000. The combination of his design skills, experience in brand business and training in behavioural sciences bring a mix of emotional intelligence & creative intelligence to the workplace & marketplace.
- Sandeep Rai founded The Circle in 2022, an organization reinventing a network of schools, after-school programs, and teachers working to improve the lives of students from low-income communities. The organization has launched 18 programs serving 5000 students and worked with 8500 educators across India. Since his time in India, he has published multiple articles and works, including Grey Sunshine, a recently released book on the truth and hope of India’s educational system. Sandeep sits on the advisory boards of Saturday Art Class and Teach For India; he’s also on the governing board of iTeach, a school chain located in Pune.
- Kriti Sood is a Curator, researcher and educator. She is the Founder of LAND -( Learning through Arts, Narrative and Discourse). Done her education in Masters in Art History from National Museum Institute, New Delhi. Her practice resides between the intersection of creative pedagogy and contemporary art from the global south. Programming Head for the Speakers’ Forum at the India Art Fair and worked at Rashtrapati Bhavan. She has also curated art educational programs at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. In collaboration with the Helen Hamlyn Foundation, London, Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) Bangalore and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai. Singapore Arts for Good Foundation, Google Cultural Institution, served as chief nominator of India for sovereign Asia prize, Hong Kong.
- Blaize Joseph is an artist and educator based in India. Since 2018, he has been the program manager and curator of the Art Room Project, part of the Art By Children Programme at the Kochi Biennale. In his art practice he engages with socio-economic, political, and ecological relationships with people and place. This has led him to work in remote places and tribal communities across India. His practice is to understand creativity and learning by taking up art based engagements with children as well as adults of the less fortunate, marginalized communities in society.
The Creative Education alumni in the past have taken up a variety of roles. These range from facilitators in museums to entrepreneurs, creative directors, UI/ UX practitioners, performance artists, curriculum designers, behaviour researchers, graphic designers, leaders at independent studios, publishing designers, illustrators, music directors, writers, researchers, entrepreneurs, educators, learning experience designers and practitioners in advertising. They have also gone on to pursue a variety of higher education streams around the world in curatorial practice, education, creative media and technology, animation and other disciplines.
Creative Education continuously responds to the changing world and offers a range of versatile, expansive and relevant courses. The 7th and 8th Semester in SMI are designed to be 16 week long projects which students undergo with a mentor. Here are some projects offered by CE:
- The Boomerang : The Boomerang is a 7th Semester Pre-Thesis Project that explores education, learning, cognition & the institution through the creative practice of its learners. It builds self reflexivity and awareness in the learner about their identity as a final year design student. The project starts by understanding learning at a civilisational scale and goes on to prod them to ask critical questions about modern education, it’s relationship to socio-cultural realities and the role that their creative practice has in shaping it. This group of learners have responded to this through event strategies, community building tools, institutional critique, pottery and sculptural artefacts, advertisements from 2095, tactical art, transmedia futures, typographic experiments, learning programs and a lot more.
- Rabbit Hole Radicals : Over the last decade creative ecosystems have not just been invented, they have mutated. Watertight visions that had earlier separated art, design, technology, and craft as distinct spaces of practice have now blurred to the point of being interconnected. The idea of skill in this context is not just about the craft of creating an aesthetic media experience, but to build cognition around what is the purpose of the practice/vision and where and how it fits. The skill is that of a composer, a scenographer, a curator, and an arranger. It is now no longer just about creating the image but curating the context of creating the media/service/ solution.
Rabbit Hole Radicals is a Final (8th) Semester project that locates itself in the expanding realms of creative practice and how rapidly evolving eco systems allow us newer ways to imagine our identity as artists, designers, and creative practitioners.
- Textbook Workbook Playbook: This project responded to the need for a textbook of the Visual Arts program offered by Delhi Government’s Dr. B R Ambedkar Schools of Specialized Excellence (SoSE) for Performing and Visual Arts. The Grade IX and X learner became the user and the traditional learning environment the ecosystem for the project. Immersing and mapping the needs and roles played by the different stakeholders-government, school, teacher, student, family, community, art world-the project set out to create physical object that facilitates curriculum delivery. There are deviations, stories, activities, prompts, references, and above all visuals that hope to create a usable textbook, workbook, playbook for visual arts education.
As CE we strive to engage with the world outside the institution as much as we hope to redefine the institution itself and what happens within it. In doing so we are engaged in multiple spaces.
- We are knowledge partners for the Delhi Government’s Visual Arts program run in government schools for Grades 9 to 12. In this capacity, we create curriculum, train teachers, develop textbooks, curate exhibitions, design assessments and engage with the entire government school ecosystem. The program forced us to look at how specialised creative education could play out in the K12 context and what its consequence to the entire educational paradigm would be.
- As CE we curated the December Special Issue for Teacher Plus magazine on the theme ‘Learning by Design’. Our impetus for doing this stemmed from deconstructing design in education and design education in India from its genesis via the India Report to its mention in the National Educational Policy 2020. We divided the magazine into three sections – What is Design? What practices demonstrate the workings of this? What are the gaps?
As CE it is important for us that we are able to identify figures and practices that exemplify new approaches, methods and possibilities to work in learning as creatives. We curate a series of online conversations called the Dear Peer Dialogue where we invite an alumni, a practicing pedagogue from SMI and a professional for a dialogue. Based on the thematic we discuss the participant’s practice or a research paper that furthers our understanding of creativity and learning.
At CE we are driven by Oscar Wilde’s golden words, ‘To define is to limit’. We believe that education doesn’t just respond to industry or professional practice but shapes it. As such our graduates take up a variety of roles breaking any boundaries we draw for ourselves. This is a result of their interdisciplinary education at SMI, where each student creates their own learning trajectory which in turn crafts their expectations from their professional lives. Hence, when you graduate you graduate with a practice. This practice is anchored in Creative Education and energised by all other disciplines you choose to learn. With a Bachelors of Design in CE you graduate with a design practice that is agile, adaptable, pluralistic and centered in learning. An evolving world needs evolving disciplines and evolving practices and practitioners, and this agency to create new worlds is the core of CE.
6. How is creative education different from arts education programs? How is this different from a B.Ed?
SMI is an institution of art, design and technology and Creative Education locates learning at the intersection of these pillars. This allows us to investigate learning as all pervasive, as a lifelong paradigm not bound to a particular tool, space, demographic, subject or objective. Inquiries then range from the particular (for eg. a visual arts textbook for government school students in grades 9 and 10) to the meta (for eg. the Creative Economy). A B.Des allows us the opportunity to lay foundations in learning at the undergraduate level that can be expressed in a variety of media forms, methods and materials.