‘Design must reflect social responsibility, offer sustainability’

The International Design Conference Karachi being held in collaboration between the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS) and the Kennesaw State University, Georgia, USA, opened at the IVS on Monday evening.

With the theme of ‘Design, Evolution, Education and Practice’, the three-day conference will discuss these aspects in architecture, communication and advertising, new media, film, graphic design, illustration, interior design, textiles, fashion design and related fields, all in the South/Central Asian and Western cultural and cross-cultural currents context.

Anthony Dean Trachina, Cultural Attache, US Consulate General, Karachi, said that the conference would serve as a model for conferences in Karachi, a city that he likened to New York. 

American universities, he said, had 20 partnership programmes in Pakistan and hoped that these ties would prove to be longstanding. Trachina said he looked forward to a productive conference that would cause an exchange of global ideas in science and technology.

Jawad Haider, Dean, IVS, spoke of symbiotic relationship between design education and practice. Design education, he said, must be derived from sociology and philosophy; it should reflect social responsibility and sustainability.

The keynote address was delivered by Prof Mehrdad Hadighi, of the University of Pennsylvania, USA.  In his detailed address, he explained with particular specifics the inimitable role philosophy had to play in design. 

Speaking of the link between philosophy and things material, he mentioned the doctrines of Plato and how many of these doctrines could be seen to be reflected in architectural structures worldwide. 

He started off his lecture with the finches of the Galapagos chain of islands mentioned in Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and said that Darwin had found that the characteristics of the finches, especially the beaks, adapted to the peculiar conditions existing on the respective islands.

Prof Hadighi presented that as an analogy of the relationship between design and architecture. He also presented case studies of structures in New York and other US cities. The evening was brought to a melodious end with a Qawwali presented by a talented group of IVS students.