December 16, 2012 By adminCDS

CII NID Design Summit 2012

This week I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the 12th CII NID Design Summit in New Delhi, India. It was a fairly large gathering of (mostly) product designers from across India, who had come together to meet and discuss Design Thinking and Design Doing, both within the context of the local market but also from a global perspective.

India’s design sector seems to be having somewhat of a boom, particularly in the field of product design, which is great to see. There seems to be a fair amount of government support and recognition of the value of design, but one thing that many of the people I spoke to complained about is the lack of awareness within industry itself. From that perspective, it was a shame not to see more industry delegates attending the conference since in many ways it is they who would benefit most from the range of educational, inspirational and thought provoking talks that were given by the invited speakers.

I myself chose not to do a portfolio run through, but rather to speak on something that I’m finding increasingly interesting and relevant of late, and that is what’s been termed ‘The Internet of Things’. This refers to the increasing number of connected devices that are appearing on the market at ever decreasing price points. For me what I think makes this particularly interesting is the ability to tap into data streams, from the plethora of social information, to the increasing amount government released data and also information available from the big hitters such as Google, Amazon etc.  It’s interesting that in many situations mobile phones seem to make us less social, requiring the user to interact with the device itself rather than the real-life people around them. So I wonder what products can be dreamed up to aid real life social iterations without the distracting use of a mobile phone handset. Another interesting thing to consider is ways to portray social sentiment as a physical manifestation, for example mood lighting that changes according to the ‘mood’ of the people in the room as perceived from their digital social interactions. As I discussed in my presentaiton, there are now many affordable devices available that enable everybody to start creating interactions between the physical and digital world, so it will be interesting to see what new products and services emerge in the next few years.

If you’re interested, you can have a read through my presentation here.