Category Archives: Pune Design Festival
Design Industry forefronts the revolution to lead India towards the knowledge economy. Pune, the cultural, technology and manufacturing hub of Maharashtra state, is gearing up to become the Design Capital of India.
Architecture and Design- the old and new!
Let’s start with the new beginnings…
India finally has it’s own body for the Design Industry. Called the ‘Association of Designers of India’ (ADI), the initiative of forming this body began a year ago, when the Pune Design Foundation and AIDI, Bangalore members decided to dissolve their respective local bodies and come together to create a pan-India body for Design. So history is being made and the Facebook group, within a matter of few days only, has a membership of 300+ designers, all raring to come together and work for Design and it’s promotion.
The ADI will be formally launched on February 10th, 2011 during the inauguration of the Pune Design Festival.
The Pune Design Festival or PDFest as it is more popularly known as, is in its 5th year and promises to be a wonderful collaboration between different design fields, with various events lined up.
Mukund and I from Sarvasva are proud and honoured too, to have been part of the founding body of both – the ADI and the PDFest. What glorious times we live in! And I’m sure, this is just the beginning of more to come.
Look up ADI on www.associationofdesignersofindia.com (the site is still coming up, will keep you all posted) and PDFest on www.punedesignfestival.org.
On another note, I have been doing a month’s course on Indian History/Archaeology and Architecture and have been learning so much of what makes this great country; including some of the renowned teachers who are taking time out to lecture and share their work and viewpoints. I especially wanted to do this course so that I could further supplement ‘Pune Walks’ (the heritage walks that our firm conducts) with the knowledge from experts.
And while I have been seeing the extreme passion and care being taken for projects in archaeology, I have failed to see the same happening in the heritage conservation/ restoration segment, especially here in Pune. And what is saddening more so is the huge gap between the ancient history (archaeology) and the modern times; which makes the middle segment of history/heritage all the more so important. And hence required to be respected, saved, documented, conserved, restored and maintained. Not retrofitted with the new only, or with the modernistic idea of what we think these buildings /structures should be. Because, if these structures are not going to be part of our present and future, we will in the long run have no link to our immediate past.
And the past is important for the future to exist.
- Darpana.
India Design Festival
The Pune Design Festival became a larger platform called the ‘India Design Festival’ this year.
Apart from giving a presentation and help in organising, Sarvasva also had come up with an installation called ‘chaos theory’, for the overall theme of ‘Environment and Design’, wherein we collected discarded bottles and paper every day at the Festival to show how much waste the designers themselves generate, in a matter of a week.
We also got the ‘Polar Bear’ down from Mumbai. Our friend and artist Hetal Shukla, and the creator of this car, was here too.
And some of the highlights for us was the participation on the panel discussion on design, with CNBC (to be broadcasted soon), the very interesting talk by Prasoon Pandey, the various new friends we made and the great learning experience.
National Design Policy and more.
Yes, it’s been a year since I’ve written on this blog. And another Pune Design Festival 2007 was organised, this time with yours truly (me) being the Chairperson. I think when one is so involved in designing and doing other things related to design, one does not write that much on the subject. And this is a personal opinion out of my own experience.
A look at what major design events(India) happened in 2007:
1. The National Design Policy got launched. (finally!)
The Government of India has finally taken a good interest in design as an important field like medicine, engineering,etc. And on 8th of February 2007, the Union Cabinet approved the ‘National Design Policy’. For more details: http://www.designinindia.net/design-now/design-policy/index.html
2. Pune organised the second Pune Design Festival 2007. Here’s a gist:
Pune Design Festival 2007
(20th-24th November, Pune)
www.punedesignfestival.com
A festival organised and managed solely by designers for the design fraternity, industry and public to enable Pune become the Design Capital of India.
The Pune Design Festival 2007 saw many vertical components-
1. Design competitions for school (India’s first design competition for school children), college and non-design students.
2. Workshops for students: The first on Culture and Design by Lisa Yong and Wai-Loong Lim of YStudio, USA; Mukund Athale, Sarvasva Designs Pvt Ltd and Anirudh Natu,Symbiosis lnstitute of Design. The second workshop was on Strategic Branding taken by Anil Chouhan, Onio Design and Sanjay Jain, MIT-ID. These workshops were held at respective institutes.
3. Visions Workshop: A brand strategising workshop for corporate, management, decision makers and SMEs. Conducted by Eero Miettenen, Design Director, NokiaFinland; Pankaj Sapkal, Short-path and Balakrishna Mahajan, Ticket Design. Held at Multiversity School of Design. Design,
4. Exhibitions:
- Pune, its heritage and culture by INTACH-Pune Chapter
- National award-winning works of Indian Institute of Interior Designers(IIID).
- Showcase of works by designers of Pune, under the umbrella of Pune Design Foundation.
5. Conferences:
Spanning two days, 26 speakers, 8 moderators and encompassing fields of design like Product and Industrial Design, Design Management, Business, Culture, Environment, Automobile, Usability, Interaction Design, Colour Trends, Design Education, Communication Design, Architecture and Music + Design.
The conference had insightful and inspiring presentations by Padmashree Dr.Vijay Bhatkar, Freeman Lau-Hong Kong Design Center, Eero Miettenen-Nokia, Bhargav Mistry, Lisa Yong- YStudios, Jos Oberdorf-NPK Industrial Design, Satish Gokhale-Design Directions, Latika Puri Khosla-Freedom Tree Design, Neeraj Chandra-Britannia, Sudhir Sharma- Elephant Design + Strategy, Dr.Dinesh Katre-CDAC, Anurag Sehgal- Experiential Design Lab, Pramod Khambete- Tech MAhindra, Ajay Jain- Renault India, Nachiket Thakur- Mahindra Composites, Kiran Kulkarni- TATA Motors, Abhimanyu Kulkarni- Philips India, Nishma Pandit-Ticket Design, Girish Doshi- Navkar Architecture Studio, Christophe Francois – Institut Superieur de Design, France, Nachiket Thakur- Bamboo Vishwa, Prof.Pradeep Pendse- Welingkar Institute, Ampat Varghese-Srishti, Anirudh Natu-Symbiosis, Sanjay Jain- MIT-ID.
The Grand Finale was a presentation by Alessi- represented by Chiara and Giovanni Alessi.
One of the highlights was the Design Honour 2007 given to Shrikant Nivsarkar, President IFI, for his contribution to the design field.
Moderators:
1. Dhimant Panchal, MIT-ID
2. Ashwini Deshpande, Elephant Strategy + Design
3. Sammeer Chabukswar- Persistent Systems
4. Anand Palsodkar, Elephant Strategy + Design
5. Manoj Kothari, Onio Design
6. Nachiket Thakur, Bamboo Vishwa
7. Hrridaysh Deshpande, Elephant Multiversity – School of Innovation
8. Harshwardhan Gupta, Neubauplan Machine Design Studio
The Festival was a great success by the very fact that a group of designers could come together to organise such a large event and have such great content. And this being the second year only of Pune Design Festival; it still saw a huge number of eminent Indian and international speakers.
The Executive Committee of the Festival was:
1. Darpana Athale, Chairperson, Pune Design Festival 2007.
2. Nachiket Thakur, Vice-Chairperson, Pune Design Festival 2007.
3. Satish Gokhale, President, Pune Design Foundation
4. Ashish Deshpande, Vice-President, Pune Design Foundation
5. Sudhir Sharma
6. Mukund Athale
7. Hrridaysh Deshpande
8. Prakash Khanzode
9. Samyak Pungaliya
10. Pankaj Sapkal
11. Balakrishna Mahajan
12. Nishma Pandit
Sponsors: Principal Sponsor -Sakal; Industry Partner- MCCIA, Associate Sponsors- Think3, MIT-ID, Forbes Marshall, DSK School of Animation,Gaming and Industrial Design, Vishwakarma Institute Creative-i, Competition Sponsor- Symbiosis Institute of Design
Supported by: Designindia, NID, Intach-Pune Chapter, IIID, Kyoorius Exchange.
Organised by: PUNE DESIGN FOUNDATION. www.punedesignfoundation.com
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Pune Design Foundation
Pune Design Foundation is an association of design professionals & thinkers from Pune and surrounding region determined to make Pune as the design destination in India.
Pune Design Foundation has Communication designers, Industrial Designers, Usability & interaction designers, Accessory designers, design & brand managers, design researchers and design educationists as its members.
Mission of Pune Design Foundation is to promote the cause and awareness of design as a necessity to good living and better business. The ‘Foundation’ believes that Pune region has strength of around 500 design professionals, a number that is bound to increase due to growth in the engineering, Auto and IT industry in this region.
Pune Design Foundation aims to;
1. Create a strong network of designers and create a platform for sharing design thinking and case studies
2. Increase the awareness of “good design” amongst the “people” and ”industry” thru out-reach programs, events and museums.
3. To spread design awareness at school level so as to inculcate design thinking in young minds as well as provide structured guidance to improve higher design education.
4. To undertake design of public convenience as a key program to elevate general life of common people
5. To identify and help integrate regional cultural values, crafts and traditions.
6. To link up with national and international bodies to help promote the Pune region as a design destination.
7. To become a voice of the design professional community at government policy level.
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3. CII_Design Summit
This was in Bangalore and the focus was on the National Design Policy largely. But with a great presence of international designers, this summit also saw a focus on ‘innovation’ as the next word instead of design. Brand Experience, Culture, Design 3.0 were some of the other buzz words.
The next Summit is slated to be in Pune. 
Pune Design Festival 2006
“Winning by Design”
The Design Industry forefronts the revolution to lead India towards the knowledge economy. Pune, the cultural, technology and manufacturing hub of Maharashtra state, is gearing up to become the Design Capital of India. Pune has a flourishing design industry with several independent design studios, in-house design teams in the industries, design education institutes and supporting ecosystem of suppliers and collaborators.
The Pune Design Festival is an effort to bring together innovation centered industries, the design industry and global thinkers on one platform to promote Pune as the preferred destination for design.
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Sarvasva Designs will be giving a presentation on 18th Nov, between 11.30-12.30pm.
