Good design, good business

"It’s a myth that industrial design has to cost much," says Satish Gokhale of Design Directions, a Pune-based design house. "Savings come through selecting the right material or process. Or through value engineering. Good design has to mean good business."

Electronica would agree. Or for that matter, stationery manufacturer Camlin. Or textile machinery maker Loyal Engineering, or Weiler of Germany, Technofour of Pune, and others. They have all used the services of Design Directions, begun by two alumni of the National Institute of Design, Satish and Falguni Gokhale, and saved -- on cost and space -- and benefited from better business.

The Design Directions portfolio is diverse. It includes ball pens, automatic toilet seat lifters, gear hobbing machines, automated blood analysers, cotton carding machines, automobiles, animated films, and CD-ROM presentations, they have designed them all.

They developed the games and ‘Iron Shakti’ logo for Kellogg’s Breakfast Week campaign, and the graphic user interface and icon designing for Indus Software. They have created new generation automobile colours for paint manufacturer Asian Paints, the first and most endearing alphabet primer, ‘Tar-ram-too’, for Pre-School TV, the animated series on the girl child of S E Asia, for UNICEF… the list is long.

One of their most recent and most prestigious successes is the clinical blood analyser, which they designed for Transasia Biomedicals. Officially launched at the Medica ’99 in Dusseldorf in November 1999, it is the world’s smallest and fastest blood analyser.

They believe that even the most unromantic of engineering products has to appeal, visually. By their reckoning, a machine has to be more than a mere machine. "You may have the best mechanism or circuitry. But if the product does not look good, it does not appeal. The first impression is based on looks. If the looks are good, half the work is done – at least the customer comes near the product," says Satish.

Electronica Machine Tools would agree. Its wire cut machines, CNC turning centres, EDMs and other machines compared with the best in the world. But they were just another set of machines, hardly appealing. That was before Design Directions had a go at them. And how it worked!

Design Directions also created a new look for cotton carding machines made by Loyal Engineering Ltd. of Coimbatore. Again, this company too gained in many ways, including functionality, the look of the machine, production rate, and marketability. .

The design house has also designed little things. The smallest of these, both in size and value, is the ball pen, named Y2K, which the Gokhales designed for Camlin, the Mumbai-based stationery maker. Priced at Rs 10, the Y2K ball pen is designed to take in any refill – ordinary, jotter, designer. It is also one of the smallest of ball pens that can take normal sized refills and fit snugly into shirt pockets.

Truly innovative and user oriented – and unconventional -- is their automatic toilet seat lifter that makes use of a simple spring to keep toilet seats up – and clean. The device can also be retro-fitted, and is priced at around Rs 100. Electro-mechanical devices available abroad are priced between $300 and $3,000. Design Directions, which has obtained a patent for this device, plans to market it on its own.

Another product the design house is in the process of designing is a buffet plate. Again, unconventional, simple and useful. "The plate will be designed to prevent food spillage, and hand fatigue. It’s all a matter of getting the centre of gravity right," says Satish.

Other innovations include a hand-held engine scanner (Divgi Warner formed a new company to make this product), modular solar panels, tablet dispensers, pneumatic booths, and rural automatic exchange.

Not all designing relates to products. Design Directions has done a considerable amount of work in concepts and brand building. Of late, a bulk of its work goes into CD-ROM-based multimedia presentations for companies, and in graphic user interfaces, screens, and icon creation. "Today our focus is on screen based designing, and web-related graphics and animation," says Falguni. "Design is our forte. We have been taught to communicate visually in a relevant manner, to blend design and communication, and communicate most effectively."

In the case of German company Weiler International, not only did Design Directions design the transducer in Pune, it also developed the entire supporting material, including a website, a corporate brochure, communication materials, from out of Pune, communicating entirely on the net. "We were giving them the same international quality, and much faster," says Falguni.

It doesn't matter where you are located. What matters is what you can do to enhance value.