IIT Delhi's 'School of Design' is going to be a centre to nurture young, creative minds

IIT will soon be setting up a full fledged department on design called 'The School of Design' to nurture creativity.

The proposal has already been approved by the IIT Senate and is likely to be placed before the Board of Governors later this month. The plan is to bring both technical aspects as well as those related to aesthetics and ergonomics closer.

At the moment, the institute offers Master of Design but only has four faculty members for the course with a limited intake. Meanwhile, Courses offered at the proposed School of Design will include Bachelor of Design (BDes) which is a four-year-long course, and Master of Design (MDes) which is of two-year duration.

In an interview to media, IIT Delhi Director V Ramgopal Rao recently said - "Be it machines or gadgets, what is inside is what engineers design. But for instance, a phone, how should the case be, how should it look like, where and how the buttons should be, this is not something a technocrat can work better upon and there is a need for someone who specialises in product design."

"For the BDes there is a separate entrance test in the country and we will be a part of it. Of course, for creative designs you cannot test one on concepts of Physics, Chemistry and Maths but on the ability of creative thinking which is not an engineer's domain," he added.

"Once we have a full-fledged school of design, we will recruit more faculty for the Masters course and then start offering the Bachelor's degree," Rao said.

"For the practical aspects, design students will work with engineers and design products which we will patent and commercialise in the longer run as we do for the technical projects," he further added.

Presently, IIT Guwahati has a Department for Design while some others run few programmes.