Lakshmi Murthy, founder of Vikalp Design, has been working with the rural population in Rajasthan & Gujarat for over 20 years as a communication designer, to develop an effective framework for communication. And in doing so, she has uncovered a way of seeing, and consequently a new way of conversing with her audiences. Below is a short excerpt from an interview with her in Dekho—Conversations on Design in India.

“In distinguishing between the urban and the rural audience, the latter is wrongfully regarded as visually illiterate. The rural audience has a sharper perception of their environment and are keener to infer from indexical traces that the urban individual would neglect. In fact it is the city-bred individual who may be ‘illiterate’ in the rural environment, lacking their visual knowledge. While an urban designer will draw in proportion and orientation of what they see as ‘known’, a villager would rely on vernacular knowledge to draw, displaying a keen unlettered intelligence.

Urban designers need to re-examine their role in communication when working with non-literate and rural groups. They need to assume the role of a facilitator and act as a catalyst in encouraging people’s own visual expression, finding a common visual language and producing visuals that are responsive to the needs of the audience.

A participatory process of self-expression holds one answer. Encouraging people to draw has been looked upon as an empowering process that leads to inclusion of notions otherwise difficult to express.”

Image from Vikalp’s Rural Pictorial Gallery. Drawn by people in rural areas of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, and collected by Vikalp since 1992.

In the above excerpt, Lakshmi puts forth a new role of the communication designer when working in a new social and cultural environment. She proposes a shift, from creator to a facilitator—wherein the process of design seeks to leverage existing knowledge and language—gently questioning and guiding and eventually co-creating a solution. The process brings one of the key principles of design—empathy into action, and goes beyond merely sensitising a designer to enabling him/her with the building blocks of a design intervention. The other key benefit of this process can be the emergence of a natural ownership. World-over, well meaning design interventions often break down with users/communities not being able to sustain a connection with it (design intervention). But this new way of building together, breaks down barriers and roots the foundation of an idea in the user community.

Image from Vikalp’s Rural Pictorial Gallery.

Learn more about Vikalp and their work, here.

Dekho image, courtesy Codesign.  Illustrations courtesy Vikalp.

Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit is an illustrated account of a young woman’s thoughts and feelings as she comes into contact with the larger world. A semi-auto-biographical tale with art by Mithila artist Amrita Das, and text by Gita Wolf & Susheela Varadarajan (from the Hindi original by Amrita Das), the book was published by Tara Books in April 2014. While a deeply personal account from Amrita’s own life, the book encourages reflections on what it means to make choices, in the face of societal norms.

As a publishing effort, Tara Books has been recognised for its sensitive dealing of social and cultural themes through many of its titles, and also successful collaborations between designers and folk artists creating a uniquely Indian style of illustration and visualisation. Their recent publication “Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit” is a particular poignant narration, where the choice of the Mithila folk art style adds significant meaning to the story.

Mithila painting (also known as Madhubani painting) originates from the Mithila region of Bihar, India and adjoining areas in Nepal. Traditionally practiced by the women within a small community, and initially restricted to religious, mythological themes, the paintings became a canvas for the women to express their feelings and reactions, over time. It is this fact, that makes the choice of art-style an apt vehicle for a story that is about a young girl’s fears, dreams and questions as she ventures out.

In her art for the book, Amrita uses her training at the Mithila Art Institute, to employ different devices of the style to amplify her narrative. The characteristic detail of Mithila art is used to incorporate elements which establish the contemporary physical situation of the story. Repetitive borders, patterns are used to illustrate situations of limitation and societal norms. Graphic compositions in each page bring multiple events and spaces into a unified moment in time, reflecting the contradictions, questions in the author’s mind.

That a traditional or folk art style can be used to establish the ethnic or cultural origin of a story, is but obvious. But the ability to find a resonance with the content of the narrative, and the skill-fullness to reshape established, traditional visual devices, makes work like ‘Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit’ exceptionally rich and relevant for a wider audience.

These are some of the places you can buy the book: Tara Books, Amazon. You can also read a detailed report on the book’s art at Look/Book.

Images, courtesy Tara Books.