The thing about Ranjan was that you couldn’t ignore him; he was prolific, he was everywhere and he had a deep, unshakeable conviction that design could and should change the world. To me, he was the friend who always stayed in touch, a philosopher whose ideas sparked an enduring fire, and the beacon whose light burned bright even in the darkest doubts. To countless others, he has been the Bamboo Man, the Crafts Man, the Design Thinking guy, the man whose course on Design Concepts and Concerns turned the notion of design practice into a universal call to action.

Prof. MP Ranjan came to his life in design from a childhood grounded in disciplined education and playful experimentation. At an early age he became involved in his father’s manufacturing enterprise, picking up carpentry skills as well as the complex nuances of trade. It was an advantage he carried with him to the National Institute of Design where he gained admission into the advanced-entry programme on account of his training as an “Experienced Cabinet Maker”. There he embarked on an adventure that would bring him to engage in ambitious design projects, interacting with leading luminaries such as Charles and Ray Eames, Frei Otto, Adrian Frutiger, Stafford Beer and Christopher Alexander. In due course, he would extract purpose and build principles from these exchanges, joining his contemporaries in championing the case for design thought and practice in a developing world.

Born in 1950 in Madras, Ranjan would often remark that he had been doing design long before he came to study at NID. Making and creating new shapes for toys and furniture in his father’s workshop, he developed a life-long affinity for working with materials and testing ideas for himself. It is a habit that he tried hard to inculcate in his students. “Prototyping is the new sketching” would become a hallmark refrain, and while it would never do for him to accept a hypothesis without evidence, it did not make him a conservative pragmatist – on the contrary, it made him a practical dreamer. He urged his students to test every radical idea based on a real world model. If it could be tested, it could be improved – or discarded in favour of a better model, until a working, thriving system could be created. The trick was in asking the right questions and never being afraid to challenge the system.