The Hindu Business Line : Designed in India, made for the world

THE `D' word may no longer be dirty in the lexicon of Indian corporates. With an increasing number of business houses in the country beginning to acknowledge that any product, before it gets off the factory line does interface with this particular facet of life, it appears that the `D' word is finally coming of age in India.

No, the attempt here is not to make any oblique connection between Indian business and the don in Dubai. The focus is on the emergence of design as a key quotient in Indian industry, be it automobile, engineering, white goods, communication, or medium and small-scale industry sectors.

That design has been making an impact on Indian industry for a while is beyond argument; the difference now is that industry is no longer shy of acknowledging this vital component in product development. At the same time, the design community has cast aside its cloak of modesty bordering on self-evasiveness and is claiming its place under the sun.

With this comes the inevitable demand for enhanced fund allocation for a sector that has till now been woefully short of world-class infrastructure. According to Prof M. P. Ranjan, Faculty of Industrial Design, National Institute of Design (NID), one only needs to attend the world's largest expo for machine tools at Hannover to appreciate the extent to which Indian designers have arrived in the international arena. And, in comparison, the failure of some of the leading research bodies floated by the Indian government to deliver.

"You will find that young Indian designers like the Pune-based Satish Gokhale have some 50 of their products displayed at Hannover. In comparison, what do the likes of the CSIR have to show at such places? Hardly anything. Whatever be the products churned out by the CSIRs and the DRDOs, they need to reach the consumer. This cannot happen without a crucial input called design," says Prof Ranjan.

Raymond Turner, the British design guru, defines design as the principal means by which business manifests its strategic intent. Thus, creativity is the generation of new ideas; innovation is their successful exploitation, and design that which links the two.

It may take forever before the funds allocated for design in India — not over Rs 200 crore in the past few decades — will get even to whiffing distance of the tens of thousand crores of rupees poured into the Science and Technology Department initiatives each year.

But a beginning has to be made and a roadmap is expected to be laid out when the Government announces the National Design Policy in early 2006.

Meanwhile, if design is to get as big as is being projected, it really needs to get its act together as an educational option and move out of the fringes into the mainstream. With more and more Indian industries conceding their dependence on design, perhaps not quite as a core activity but pretty close in the pecking order, the time seems to be ripe to try and engineer this switch.

If recent admission trends in the US are anything to go by, it appears that fine arts and design are emerging pricier than business administration, even among corporate houses. While the likes of Lehman Brothers and McKinsey's look to countries such as India to hire MBAs, they are paying much more per head to hire arts graduates from the Rhode Island School of Design and Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Arts.

Clearly, a change is in the air and though it may be early days for Indian business schools to get worried, it would pay to take note. And leading academics have begun raising these questions: Can design as a discipline seize the imagination of Indian graduate students and carve out a niche for itself, as management did not too long ago? Will it be worthwhile for design institutes to take up management as an elective or get the management schools to pencil in design as an optional topic?

Dr Darlie O. Koshy, Executive Director, NID, says there is a serious dialogue on between him and Prof Bakul Dholakia, Director, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, on this issue. Taking it forward, the idea of bringing design to the educational forefront was thrown up for open discussion at a Design Summit, jointly held by the CII and NID in Mumbai last week.

Quite a few design gurus, some of them from Europe, are agreed that India is poised to be the next international design frontier. And if that scenario is to pan out, then it is time to centre-stage design in education.

While one may have to wait a while before tangible results are visible, the writing — not necessarily of the graffiti kind — seems to be on the wall. Design is promising to be the next big shout from the Indian shores and the international community is sitting up and taking notice.

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