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December 12, 2006

India design

In an earlier posting, I mentioned a design conference in India. Business Week now has a summary of the conference, Designing for India's Consumers, which was held last week. While the theme was on both local and global Indian designs, it appears that much of the focus was on designing for the vast Indian market:

Selling products made for American, European, or Korean markets across India doesn't guarantee success. Indeed, it may guarantee failure.

"It is critical to bring realism and relevance to a design world that has become commoditized," says Manoj Kothari, founder of Pune-based Onio Design. So when his studio designed a pen, the cap had a satisfying click sound when it was shut. That went down well with consumers, since Indians relate the click to the closing and preserving of an object (just like Americans and Europeans like a solid "thud" sound for their car doors).

Being too modern and contemporary can be dangerous in the Indian market, says L. K. Das, head of Innovation & Design at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. For example, he points out that Indians understand old fashioned round faucets. But modern day variations leave people perplexed. "The fundamentals of consumerism are built on other people consuming, and when that doesn't happen the design is a failure," says Das.

The vastness of India can also be baffling to companies and designers looking for a focused approach. U.S. retailer Wal-Mart (WMT) may have entered India, but setting up outlets and getting mass consumers to buy from its stores will not be that easy, says San Francisco-based emerging markets strategist Niti Bhan. The trick is to create products that have sales volumes but "resonate with subsets of culture," says Bhan.

With the cultural and communal diversities in each of its 28 states, these subsets are tough to understand even for Indians. "India is not one country but a conglomeration of many countries that people have to recognize," says Bhan.

At the conference, the Indian government announced a new initiative to build up the design sector. I was struck by one comment in the story:

As part of this new campaign, the government will begin to promote more design schools. Today, India has only about a dozen design programs, compared with 241 in China.

That sounds like a major disadvantage, starting that far behind. To overcome that hurtle, the government wants to enlist the help of the country's successful outsourcing sector in building design competencies. An innovative idea. But I'm not sure that the same set of skills in IT outsourcing can be translated into design expertise. Yes, Apple Computer pulled off the iPod -- with a lot of help from a top-notch design firm.

I expect India will be successful in building a design capacity for its local market. Given the size and challenges of that market, designers will have a large business space in which to operate. However, I don't see India yet becoming a global player in design. In part, this is because India is yet to be a global player in manufacturing - unlike the Chinese. Look for the Chinese to lever that manufacturing experience into product development and design. Not India; not yet.

But it could turn out that I am wrong.

Posted by Ken Jarboe at December 12, 2006 8:00 AM

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Posted by: Ken Jarboe at December 13, 2006 9:12 AM

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