Saturday, June 22, 2013

EDUCATION SPECIAL...... DESIGN CAREER ..... DESIGNED TO FIT

CAREER DESIGNED TO FIT 



Kavita Redkar, guide for design careers and courses, fielded a few questions by aspiring students

Q) On what basis should one choose a career? A) Any career decision should be made on the basis of one’s aptitude and interest. It is a fact that conventional careers like engineering, medicine and accounting are inundated with professionals. Here, supply exceeds demand. On the other hand, there is a thriving demand for design professionals, especially in a growing economy like India. This field provides about 50 different career options including architecture, product design, automobile design, fashion design, textile design, animation, interior design, etc. The starting salary for a fresh design graduate from a premier institute is in the range of Rs 5-14 lakh per annum, with rapid growth prospects.
Q) What careers does the field of design offer? A) Fashion is a fast growing field in India. Fashion as a career field is not restricted to apparel design. There are several additional career options including textile design, lifestyle accessory design, knitwear design, leather design, fashion communication, apparel production, fashion styling, fashion merchandising etc.
    BA, BSc, BCom, BCA, BCS students can do post graduation in graphics, film and video, animation, photography, toy and game design, new media and retail space design.
    At the postgraduate level there are three main streams ie fashion design, visual communication and industrial design.
Q) How can I gauge my aptitude for a career in design? A) Design is putting two or more familiar objects or concepts together and coming out with novel yet usable idea or object. A designer comes out with multiple solutions to a given problem. Right from cars to phones and from high fashion to plush home and office furniture, designers are constantly creating and reshaping the world we live in.
    The best way to determine the right design career would be to take a design aptitude test which will not only test general creativity but also specific aptitude required for a particular design career. Unfortunately, the standard psychometric aptitude tests focus only on the logical and numeric aptitude of a child and fail to test the creative aptitude. The design aptitude test should ideally be done anytime during classes IX-XI.
Q) Which are the institutes that offer courses in design and what are the number of seats available at these institutes? A) The National Institute of Design offers seven disciplines at the graduate level and 17 disciplines at postgraduate level. Various specialisations like industrial design, communication design, textile and lifestyle accessory design, apparel design, IT integrated design, retail and strategic design management, etc are offered here. National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) has 15 centres across India and offers 2,100 seats. Other institutions include Pearl Academy of Fashion, National Institute of Design (Textile), MIT Institute of Design (Apparel), Srishti (Textile), Footwear Design and Development Institute (FDDI), etc which offer close to 2,000 more seats. Other design institutes include MS University, Baroda, and Shantiniketan, Kolkata. JJ School of Art, JJ Institute of Applied Art and Rachana Sansad are the three colleges in Mumbai offering the BFA degree.
    Also, there are very good foreign universities for design studies at both graduate and postgraduate levels. The admission to design institutes abroad is based on a design portfolio.
Q) On what basis do colleges admit students for their design courses? A) Admissions to design schools are made on the basis of individual entrance exam conducted by the school. To get admission to an architecture college, students have to pass an entrance examination. There are different examinations for different types of colleges. First is NATA (National Aptitude Test for Architecture), which gives admission to CEPT and private architecture colleges across India. Second is JEE (earlier AIEEE), which paves the way for admission to colleges such as the 17 National Institutes of Technology (NITs) across India and School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), which offer around 2,000 seats. Then there is the common admission test of each state for admission to state government aided colleges, MAH-AR-CAT is conducted for admission to around 400 seats in eight government aided colleges in Maharashtra including the JJ School of Art and Architecture.
Q) Which are the prominent schools that offer courses in automobile and product design? A) The prominent schools to pursue automobile or product design in India are IIT-Industrial Design Center (IDC) and National Institute of Design (NID), which have about 50 seats. Other design schools for product and automobile design (100 seats) are MIT Institute of Design, Srishti, DSK Supinfocom. Each of these schools will have a stringent entrance examination covering written test, studio test and interview with portfolio presentation. Fresh postgraduates in product and transport design from top institutes command an anywhere between Rs 6-14 lakh per year.
Q) What is the ideal time to start preparing for entrance exams? A) Students must start preparing for the design school entrance exams from class XI onwards. As these exams are competitive, one needs to undergo a two-year preparation and practice time. Moreover, nothing related to the design entrance syllabus is covered during until class X.
    Again students need to prepare themselves to create a design portfolio, during their class XI and XII.
EDUT 130617

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