"It's a myth that industrial design costs much," says Satish Gokhale of Design Directions, a Pune-based design house. "Savings come through selecting the right material or process. Good design means good business sense." he opines.

Satish, a graduate from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, passed passed out in 1985 and worked with Bajaj Auto for two years in the company's styling department that he helped set up. Always keen on wanting to start something on his own, he quit Bajaj and set up design directions in January 1987.

Life in the beginning, he confesses, wasn't exactly easy. He had to knock many doors as getting customers was a difficult proposition. It was a sellers market, the global economy had not yet opened up and as a result most firms failed to understand the importance of design.

Satish's main thrust is design of capital equipment. In his opinion, one may have the best mechanism or circuitry, but if the product does not look good, it does not appeal. The first impression, according to him, is almost always based on looks. If the product looks good, half the work is done as the customer at least gives the product a "dekko."

Electronica Machine Tools would gladly agree. Its wire cut machines, CNC turning centres, EDMs and other machines is compared with the best in the world but they, sadly, lacked appeal. That is now history. Design Directions had a go at them and the same machines, now, are in demand worldwide

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

The company has also designed a ball pen, named Y2K, 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.

Yet another product designed by the company is the blood analyser, which was officially launched at the Medica '99 in Dusseldorf in November 1999. The product has been designed for Transasia Bio-medicals Ltd of Mumbai and handles about 600 tests per hour. Mr Gokhale said the analyser could conduct 43 tests with five millilitres of blood as against the 10-15 ml used normally. This is about 35 % cheaper than the competition, he points out.

Truly innovative, user-oriented and unconventional to boot is their automatic toilet seat lifter that makes use of a simple spring to keep toilet seats up and more importantly clean. The device can also be retrofitted, 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.

However, not all designing work that the firm does relates to products. It 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. His firm is a multi Dimensional design firm. His wife Falguni is a Graphic Designer. She handles the Graphic User interface. After completing her design at NID she did a further two-year course in Animation.

"Today our focus is on screen based designing, 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," she adds.

Their clients include C-Dac, Indus Software and TCS. People, feels Falguni, have realised the importance of the man-machine relationship. It is essential that the end user is comfortable while using the software when he is sitting in front of the machine, is her strong belief.

The firm has developed the games and the 'Iron Shakti' logo for Kellogg's 'Breakfast Week' Campaign. The graphic user interface and icon designing for Indus Software is their effort. The new generation automobile colours for paint manufacturer Asian Paints are also their work of art.

Falguni was involved in the first and most endearing alphabet primer,
"Tar-ram-too", for pre-school TV, done by UGC and subsequently aired on Doordarshan in 1993. Her job was to design the alphabets and numbers and also give animation for the 13 episode pilot project whose aim was to achieve literacy in the Devnagari script.

The firm has only ten employees on its rolls. They do, however, engage the services of several reputed consultants whose expertise may be needed on a specific project.

Design Directions are sure headed in the right way. 

Address: # 828 Shivaji Nagar, Off Bhandarkar Road,
Pune - 411004,
Phone: 565 3902
URL: www.designdirections.net

Text: Rahul Surkund
Photo Courtesy: Design Directions