Look between the covers for design opportunities.
Businesses that use design perform better than their rivals, says the introduction to the Kyoorius Design Showcase 2009/10. This is an irrefutable truth and the design industry in India is growing. Many more businesses and individuals seek professional design intervention than they did even say five years ago. To that end, a directory of professionals and services is invaluable, even if only as the first point of contact.
But design outfits in India tend to be boutique hotshops, more often than not started by former classmates from design schools. Even Elephant Strategy+Design , Idiom Design and Consulting — bigger, better known firms that have been around for some years — have only about a hundred employees. Globally too, design firms are traditionally boutique affairs — IDEO, possibly the biggest, has only 550 employees. A directory thus works well to showcase work and, more important, to bring it to the notice of potential clients.
That, more or less, is also the intent of Kyoorius Design Showcase 2009/10, the second edition of which is just out (the first came out in 2007). “We hope to tingle an interest in the minds of the design buyers and provide them with a justificable guide to sourcing design services in India,” writes Rajesh Kejriwal of Kyoorius Exchange in his foreword to the book. Kyoorius Exchange, the platform for the design community in India established in 2005, publishes the Showcase (its other, high-profile activity is Designyatra, the design conference).
Showcase 2009/10 lists 97 of the more established design firms in 11 cities and offers glimpses of their work. It is itself well designed, bright colours, pleasing aesthetics, and a funky touch to the graphics and layout. But the accent here is on graphic design. Other than a few such as Design Directions, Ticket Design, Foley Designs and Studio ABCD, there aren’t many outfits listed in Showcase 2009/10 that do industrial or product design. There also isn’t a single firm that specialises in interiors or textiles, two areas in which design has come to make a real difference to Indian firms.
In India, the other directory worth a mention is the Young Designers series that National Institute of Design (NID) has been bringing out since 1990-91. It’s a basic tome, nicely (if a little stodgily) designed, giving each young desginer a two-page profile. It’s useful for the snapshots it gives of the diversity of emerging talent, but it is restricted to NID and is not ‘commercial’ in the sense that a more regular directory is.
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Globally you have a number of such directories, the most well-known of which is the International Design Yearbook. Published every year for 24 years now, it has a leading designer pick his choice of the best in furniture, lighting, tableware, textile and product design from all over the world.
Online, however, is where the excitement surrounding design directories really lies. There is The DesignDirectory, jointly produced by Core 77 (a web forum for industrial designers) and Business Week magazine, which aims to be a ‘comprehensive database of design firms’. Core77 also has Coroflot, which has 150,000 portfolios of creative professionals, even students, and there’s another from design portal Dexinger. Many of them have listings from India — The DesignDirectory has 482, Dexinger has 211, while Coroflot has as many as 7,438 (we are the country with the second-largest number of entries after the USA).
All auguring well for a better designed future.