When the trained designer or steps in with his experimentation, he effects certain modifications through abstractions and items are made to fit into the changed functionalities. Use of colour and form on the wall of houses in rural India is an essential and day-to-day activity, for performing rituals and simple house decoration. (Fig 9)

The intrepid Naga male had had many a human head up his totem pole during the head- hunting days of the recent past, but mithun or bison horns equally asserted themselves in his house decorations. The motifs and the manner here are so akin to the African masks and other non-functional artefacts from the south of the dark continent that they had figured in Picasso's imagination and had educated his insight while arriving at the radically new Cubism. (Fig 10)

The folk is an infinitely self-sustaining area and can face and accommodate holistic changes of material, shape, form and colour. And in the process not only the aesthetics but the semantics also change radically.

There are various private and state centres now for the diffusion of knowledge and expertise. The artisans of the community are taught modern finishing skills and hitherto unknown methods of treating the traditional material make them not only durable but also commercially viable. Cane and bamboo furniture of the region get sophistication in the process that will make them endure. The rugged native artefact becomes aesthetically more attractive as well as more diversely functional. This working together of traditional artists and modern technologically equipped personnel on locally available material has also been promoted and encouraged in the Design department of the Indian Institute Technology Guwahati. The local traditional worker often tends to fall back on his native resources if he finds the going tough or if he somehow gets threatened. He is reassured when the basic elements do not change and he does not feel that the whole thing is an alien aggression. The Department of Design, IITG, conducts workshops imparting necessary training to the traditional craftsmen of various localities in utilising their skills through newer technology. The process involves digital technology to enhance the possibilities of refinement of traditional motifs. In such workshops, the traditional craftsmen get an opportunity to internalize the digital techniques and give their crafts and products a fresh look with the help of their traditional expertise. The designers (craftsmen) are basically traditional artisans, trained and equipped with modern technology.

The contemporary designers, after their design education at professional schools return to their native places and explore the possibilities of modifying the craft products with the use of recent technologies.  

The folk and contemporary find many linkages. They changed their semantics, functions, and techniques, which are after transformed and translated to meet different functional needs. As the modern or the contemporary draws from the folk and the folk is also informed and reinvigorated by the encounter. This is the process of completion and the journeywork involves abstractions at different level. Abstraction has always been a human prerogative, which we had first encountered in the cave paintings (fig 11) where there was a change of the medium and a delimitation of dimensions. The same process is now added by technology and digital efficiency. This process will continue to enrich the global craft scene when we are concerned with an aware of the sources, the faiths and the symbology of the peoples whose practices we address.

Acknowledgement -

For preparing this document I acknowledge