When Change is The Buzzword

Design entrepreneur Niladri Mukherjee believes that successful product design happens when the design team sits at the strategy table as a partner and is able to question and provide insight and inputs on the direction that a company takes. As Founder and Managing Director of New Delhi-based Glue Design Pvt. Ltd., he has been able to ensure that his team is engaged in some path breaking product design indeed!

How did your tryst with design start?

NM: It was close to the end of my school days in Bhilai (now in Chattisgarh) when a friend gave me a form for NID and strongly recommended that I apply, as I seemed to have an affinity for design. I got a glimpse of what design education offered when I visited NID in Ahmedabad. I spoke at length to some of the seniors and at that point of time, I understood design as an extension of how ‘Science’ could be utilized in the act of creation. Immediately I was sure that it would be Product Design if I was selected. And I did go on to do a Diploma in Industrial Design.

What made you decide to become a design entrepreneur?

NM: After training with companies like DCM Toyota and Gujarat Samachar during my education stint at NID it became quite clear that I was not particularly suited for a job. Product Design in the early 1990s was barely understood and recognized and was not really ‘situated’ well in any organization. I realized that the process of constant ‘questioning’ that was instilled in me during my design education was not a quality that organizations at that time valued, to say the least. The aspect of working on a product or a part of the same product for many years did not fill me with great excitement either.

Job offers came from an NGO (Development Alternatives in Delhi) that was interested in extending my diploma project on Lightweight Structure Systems, and one from TELCO, as a product designer. I turned them down much to my parents’ discomfiture and started working with a couple of small design firms in Delhi. After a year of that, my first partner and I started Whisper Design out of a small single room ‘Barsati’, one half of which was our studio, with a couple of drawing boards on trunks, and the other half with mattresses on the floor was our bedroom.