The 'And' Factor

Dr. Naushad Forbes makes a strong case for giving greater priority to design in Indian industry. Excerpts from his inaugural talk at the recently held CII-NID India Design Summit in Hyderabad.

Design is the way in which companies progress, the way in which companies move up the value chain, and the world gets great products. As you know, great products are ‘and’ products. Great products are beautiful and functional. They are elegant and simple. They are high quality and accessible to a wide strata of the population. It is the task of great design to deliver on that ‘and’. Elegance with simplicity, beauty with functionality, and high quality with accessibility to all.

There are many great things that are happening in design in our country - at NID, within CII, within IIT Hyderabad and indeed within some of our most progressive governments around the country, which are using design in an explicit and tangible way to improve the lives of their populations. But without question we have to do a lot more.

Given that design has a huge potential to contribute to the success of our firms, and to the lives of our people, what are the kind of things that we should be thinking about to enable design to have the kind of impact on the country that it needs to have?

I will very quickly cover five topics: scale, the quality of design, the quality of design education, how do we raise the priority for design in Industry, and how should we be thinking about design for public purpose.

Our challenge is scaling the many good things that are happening so that we have an impact on the country and 1.3 billion people can see a difference in their lives as a result of what design brings to them, whether it brings better products or a pleasanter built environment.