“The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.” - Michael Crichton

“Cognitive justice recognises the right of different forms of knowledge to co-exist, but adds that this plurality needs to go beyond tolerance or liberalism to an active recognition of the need for diversity.” - Shiv Visvanathan

Olivia Chakraborty describes her research and design of a craft gallery as a part of her studio project. Credits: Divyarajsinh Rana.

Vision

The Information Arts and Information Design Practices (IAIDP) program blends art and design, focusing on a transdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches to this information age. We go beyond information communication to challenging, repositioning, and reframing information through the personal, cultural, contextual, and creative frames. We see design as a frame embedded in the acts of deep learning, meaning making, and reflective engagement with life to as the fundamental question - what does it take to be human?

In this light our program, locates successful Information Artists and Designers as those who can emerge new gestalts of perceiving and understanding information before they respond through art and design for a human need entwined with the environment. They also need to bring vision and leadership in their perception and attitude to information art and design. At its core, the program deepens storytelling and pushes our imagination to create narratives that matter.

The program emphasizes self-reflection and deep engagement with society, the environment, and oneself, viewing design as an immersive, visionary, and relationship-building process. By integrating arts and philosophy, IAIDP expands the field of design, addressing complex inquiries and reimagining the role of art and design in shaping our world. IAIDP encourages immersive experiences, artistic inquiry, self-reflection, leadership, environmental stewardship and worldmaking, positioning itself as an inquiry-based program at the intersection of art and design.

Our inquiries are located in the following questions.

• How can art, design and technology be used to push the boundaries of information and create points for action?
• What can traditional practices from different cultures offer to interpretation of contemporary data?
• Where can art and science meet to activate alternative research?
• How does one train at a reflective self in relation to the world to be a storyteller who mines diverse data to arrive at deeper truths?

These and more questions serve as a guide map to engaging with and creating within this program. This course is an attempt to explore how to dissolve discipline-based perceptions of data to engage with real life in its nuanced stories allowing for new discourses to emerge.

Workshop: Photography in Context - Exhibition of student works with more than 300 photographs contextualized on narrative exercises, color, and context. Workshop Faculty and Picture Credit: Dr Dyutiman Mukhopadhyay

Traditional boundaries of the narrative are constantly broken in the interfaces of the global and the local, the traditional and the contemporary. Access to information is making the physical boundaries of the world we live in permeable. With multiple screens, constant connectivity, social and mass media has taken on a completely new form. The narrative has become all-pervasive, whether it be complex data that is to be effectively disseminated to diverse audiences, using diverse media, or it be used as a tool for research with communities in flux. The information artists and designers of today and the future have the particular challenge to create for a fragile world where politics, economics and ecosystem are placed at the tipping point of culture, ethics and the tradition of the artisan. Successful Information Artists and Designers have to emerge new gestalts of perceiving and understanding information before they respond through art and design for a human need entwined with the environment.

Field Visit to Indian Music Experience Museum towards developing ideas for an exhibition and information design on crafts. 2022. Photo credits: Divyarajsinh Rana.

Ojasvi Harish works with poetry and painting alongside Indian Rasa theory to look at ways of reconnecting with nature.

From a knowledge-based society, the challenge is to move to a wisdom-based society. To this end, we seek to find ways to seamlessly draw from the essence and spirit of the jester, the bard and the wandering minstrels in our modern guises. In that, the Information Arts and Information Design program is about crafting oneself as a storyteller, a behroopiya, whose stories are crafted through the fine lenses of time and space, cultures and contexts, information, knowledge and the extraction of wisdom. The axis of the course revolves around Self & Contemplation, Context Sensitivity and Leadership.

Students explore Mekedatu Gorge in the Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary to engage with the complex interdependence in riverine landscapes. Credits: Srivi Kalyan

Inspired by the challenges to ecosystems when dams are constructed, Shubham Shrivastava rethinks and reframes Civil Engineering curricula as part of his capstone project.

Sakshita works with calligraphy and text as a mode for expressing information in subtle and diverse ways in her final capstone project.

Learning Approaches

Learning in at the postgraduate level is driven by published lines of inquiries that is enacted through studio-based learning, workshops, theoretical reflections and field work. This approach cultivates a creative practice through engagement in diverse contexts, collaborative and participatory approaches leading to knowledge development.

Program learning approaches includes:

• Participation in integrated multidisciplinary learning
• Exploration of hands on ways of crafting, design and development for traditional and digital platforms
• Strengthening our learning with critical perspectives and purposefulness
• Research into communities and contexts using participatory approaches
• Building multiple modes of expression for engagement in diverse disciplines
• Use of narrative structures and technologies to create communication
• Embodied approaches to investigate, interpret, engage with and translate narratives
• Lively debates, dialogue, sensitive and ethical questioning on a range of issues
• Independent and self-motivated learning

Shubham Shrivatsava maps the stakeholders that hold power in governance in a studio on Leadership.

Capability Sets

This course will enable students in their capability:

• to inform and communicate through narrative
• to interact and work with communities, contexts and limitations and sensitively negotiate boundaries
• to transact meaning with audiences and build context-sensitive practices
• to perceive gestalts, navigate complexity and negotiate intelligences  through transdisciplinary engagement.
• for leadership as action in art, design and/or technology praxis
• for responsible creativity that emerges from social, ecological, ethical and learning design
• to emerge transdisciplinary practice with reflections on interdependence and co-existence
• to strategically work with emergent systems and chaos

Opportunities

The above mentioned capability sets could lead to opportunities such as:

1. Employment in Design Studios, Advertising Agencies and the Publishing Industry
2. Employment in New Media and Software industry
3. Employment in Media and Television Industry
4. Employment in startups, small and medium enterprises, NGOs, social and educational enterprises.
5. You can become a contemporary art practitioner, entrepreneur, design consultant
6. You can have an active involvement in emerging domains such as digital arts and new technology, storytelling in new formats.
7. Pursue your research and continue to do a PhD.
8. Develop your own projects and apply for grants.
9. Some jobs profiles could be
   Design Strategist, Project Manager – Community Programme Services, Entrepreneur- Visual Designer. Artist. Arts Manager, Design consultant, Educator, Social justice Coordinator, Multicultural program coordinator, Cultural Design Practitioner, Creative Director, Program Manager, Creative and Cultural Researcher, Storyteller, Systems designer/ Consultant, Design Consultant, Educational designer, Eco-artist/ Eco –Designer

People

Enquiries

Disciplinary Intersections

The program is informed by the following learning disciplines:

Research and Collaboration

The program is closely linked with a wide range research and practice spaces:

FAQs