Sugar baronness Ms Rajshree Pathy is weaving grand designs to get corporate India to think creatively. The moving force behind the India Design Forum, which kicks off in Delhi on March 2, the chairman and managing director of Rajshree Sugars and Chemicals, says corporate India should “use creativity to boost production, or boost sales and marketing.”

The nine-day long India Design Forum, created and curated by Ms Pathy's Coimbatore Centre for Contemporary Art (CoCCA), will see global design thought leaders like Mr Adam Bly (Seed Media group), Mr Karim Rashid and Mr Jan Chipchase (Frog Design) converging in the Capital.

There will be walks and talks and visualising marathons where school kids will be taught to think out of the box. And there will be several parallel tracks – from architecture, fashion, art to product design – spread across the city, discussing how design can be effective in our everyday lives.

Ms Pathy says she has put together the event because it is high time design was brought to the centrestage in India. “It's relevant for India, because we are not a country that can afford waste. We need to diminish waste in raw material consumption, waste in lighting, waste in heating and so on. And one of the functions of good design is to eliminate waste,” she says.

So, how has she herself used design in her business venture?

“We were the first sugar factory that has eliminated waste in production time through architectural design,” she says. “Traditional sugar factories were designed in a linear format. I made it into a complete square. So any time, anyone in the courtyard of the factory can look at all the operations from one space. Earlier you had to walk from one end to another, and the supervisor at top end would not know what was happening at bottom end. I think spatial,” she says.

She stresses that every corporate has to focus on creating a design vertical in-house now. “You talk about HR, CSR, now it's time to have design also as a vertical,” she says, pointing out how it enhances the value of a corporate's product. “Take Apple. They make the same computer, right. So why is their product so sought after? It's all due to design.” Good design can take our industry further, she adds.

Ms Pathy feels that India is now ready to embrace design solutions. A Bloomberg report says that nearly 60 per cent of the industrial design work for automotive companies is now being handled in house by Indian product designers.

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