When Vimal Govind MK and his three friends, all students of MES College of Engineering,Kuttippuram began to translate their Proof of Concept (POC), a robotic solution to manual scavenging, from paper to a commercial product, they founded Bandicoot, a robot weighing 500kg.
“Though it was a complete replacement for a human being in a manhole, it was not user friendly. It felt clumsy and weighed too much,” recalls Vimal, co-founder and CEO, Genrobotics. A design intervention helped solve the problem.
Hardware incubators
After the Kerala government sent the team to incubate at NTU Innovation & Incubation Center (NTUIIC), in Taiwan, Bandicoot returned having shed 300 kg. “It is currently being deployed in 12 States and used at 30 towns across India,” says Vimal.
“Kochi has 2,200 start ups and a majority are hardware incubators for whom design is critical. With Bandicoot, we realised the significance of design in hardware and the lack of it at hand. The Kochi Design Week (KDW) began with this need: to bring design experts and companies in IT to Kerala,” says, M Sivasankar, Secretary to CM & IT Secretary.
The demand for a convergence like this was expedited when a mobile incubator was set up in collaboration with the Internet and Mobile Association of India. “It was found that mobile apps from India did not feature in the top 100. We realised that it was because these were limited by design. It was then decided that, in the next five years, we need at least 10 of the top 100 apps to be from India. The government of Kerala thought that the question of appropriate design —whether it be hardware software, mobile apps, AI or VR — was critical and the gap in this area needed to be addressed.”
Two events had a big impact on the first Design Week last year. “One was the floods and the other the CM’s call to rebuild a New Kerala. The slogan was “built back better”. This generated a flurry of new designs in architecture and infrastructure — buildings, roads, drains — everything that was presented was designed better.”This edition also saw the prestigious Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design participate and hold workshops addressing policy design and programme design.
“Apart from product and architecture design, this was expanding to cover different fields. It was then decided to throw open the event to make it an open-ended platform.”
Masterclasses
Design leader Srini R Srinivasan, CEO Lumium set up a branch of his company in Kochi facilitating the proactive role of the government in bringing in a design policy. As curator of this edition, the President of World Organisation says, “We are having a host of workshops — masterclasses — that will give participants a hands on idea and feel of working with design. The importance of design, especially product design, has to be enforced to a larger audience.” Srini will be taking a Masterclass along with Alok Nandi of IXDA.
Aarthy Rao, a food stylist who’s setting up a food installation says, “Design serves a certain function, which is creating appetite. Once you start following food design, it leads to eating right, healthy and serves a higher purpose.”
V Sunil, design thinker and co-founder of Motherland, is excited that design is at the crux of creativity and manufacturing.“It is good that the government has taken the lead but it must begin with design education. We don’t have many design schools. We teach craft but we don’t teach aesthetics.” His company is currently engaged with an urban regeneration project in Jodhpur and is designing an ecosystem that combines culture with commerce.
Arun Balachandran, CM’s Fellow-IT who is coordinating the KDW, cites data to prove that Keralites are leading creative teams in all fields. “In Technicolor that made Lion King and Jungle Book, 20% of the workforce is from Kerala. There are many such examples. We have a talent pool but they have to go outside the state to work. We are trying to get the companies here.”
To keep up the tempo, a Centre of Excellence in Design is scheduled to open in Kalamassery by mid-2020.
With the expanding definition that began with solutions in the field of IT, the second edition of KDW finds itself moving into varied fields —architecture, art, food and fashion. Arun points out that, in this new scheme, food design too is in focus. “Isn’t the Kerala sadya a naturally plated design?”
