Year: 2014

A product’s success is attributed not just to its functionality but also to its design. Hence, the demand for design skills in industry is rising. Known as Industrial Design, it is a specialized discipline. Though closely related to engineering, industrial design focuses on aspects like aesthetics, usability, design, and ergonomics of products, while the focus of engineering has traditionally been on the functionality of products. It is industrial designers who merge form and function into a marketable proposition.

Considering the growing demand from industry and engineering students, CADD Centre has recently floated an exclusive division, Institute of Industrial Design (IID). IID delivers industry oriented, domain specific training on key engineering design skills.

Many of the industrial design capabilities fall in the realm of visual, creative, technical and analytical skills. They include conceptual Ideation and sketching, form factor and proportion studies, 3D Modeling, contextual renderings, 3D animation, developing Colors Materials Finishes (CMF) specifications, creating workflow diagrams, understanding anthroprometric measurements, developing mockups and prototypes.

Since industrial design is a multi-faceted field, training on industrial design needs exclusive infrastructure, culture, and equipments. At IID, we offer application-oriented software training for students to excel as industrial product designers in a wide range of industries including automotive, aerospace, and robotics.

The Institute offers courses on products like Autodesk Alias, one of the leading applications for automotive design, styling and technical surfacing – IID is an Authorized Training Center for Autodesk Alias and is authorised to certify on behalf of Autodesk. ANSYS Fluent, used in design and optimization phases of product development; and CREO Simulate, a structural, thermal and vibration analysis solution from PTC; SolidWorks Motion, a virtual prototyping tool.

IID training provides students with a foundation in the design process and a comprehensive understanding of design research methodologies, materials technologies, manufacturing processes, and reverse engineering. Our courses gives equal importance to theory and hands-on training sessions involving digital presentations and physical models. The courses are domain-based and problem-specific. This approach trains students to use design as a problem solving tool.

Third and final year students of engineering, working professionals and anybody who is interested in industrial design and who want to know how to take product ideas from concept to marketplace can enroll in our courses. IID currently has centres in Chennai, Bangalore, and Thrissur.

India wants to become a prominent player in manufacturing, as China’s losing its competitive advantage in this sector.

But at present, India’s manufacturing industry is not in a good shape. Its share of gross domestic product (GDP) is just about 15% (in comparison, it is 30% in the case of China). India has about 500 million workers but the manufacturing sector employs only about 50 million, which is 10% of the total workforce. The growth rate of the sector in 2013-14 has been an abysmal 0.35%.

Realising the need for its intervention, the Centre has launched Make in India mission to increase the competitiveness of India’s manufacturing industry globally. While there are many different plans to revive India’s manufacturing sector, a crucial agenda is skill development.

Industry needs a steady supply of skilled manpower. Only 10% of India’s workforce is skilled. Of the 10% only 2% of the workforce is formally certified – the rest 8% have acquired skills only through informal training and employment. In South Korea, Japan and Germany, the percentage of workforce with skills training is 96, 80 and 75 respectively.

In order to increase the share of skilled employees in the total workforce, the government has been promoting various skill development programmes. It has set a target of skilling 500 million people by 2022.

One of the important action plans is to breathe a new life into the vocational and industrial training, and promote apprenticeship schemes. There are about 11,500 Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) in the country. They have the capacity to train about 16 lakh students every year. But ITIs are not attracting talent, thanks largely to its outdated curricula. As someone put, our ITIs are teaching how carburetors work though carburetors are no longer used in cars and other automobiles.

Other than ITIs there are many players in vocational education or skill based training. Private training institutes in different streams are preparing people for specific trades, crafts and careers in engineering, accountancy, nursing, medicine, architecture, pharmacy, and law. The contribution of private institutions towards skill development is vital.

India may have the world’s most youngest population but it needs to harness the demographic dividend through appropriate skill development efforts and make the local manufacturing sector truly global.

India produces more engineers than America. One statistics say that India churns out at least 5 times as many engineers as the U.S. But that does not mean that the skills imparted to our engineers and the ones to their American counterparts are the same.

According to a 2012 National Employability Report of Aspiring Minds, an employee assessment service provider, about 83% of engineering graduates are unfit for employment. There are about 14 lakh engineering seats available for admissions in colleges across the country. Though India has many engineering colleges that provide world class education, most of them face “quality” issues. Often two fixed notions about engineering come in the way of providing quality in engineering education.

Notion 1: Engineering is just about engineering

Engineering education is not only about engineering. In other words, a person who only has engineering skills will not make a good engineer. Usually, curriculum of engineering colleges does not give enough importance to communication and interpersonal skills. Students practically get no exposure to organizational skills like working in a multi-disciplinary team or collaborating with a geographically distributed team having members from different cultures.

Notion 2: Engineer’s job is to follow rules

Engineering education may be about memorising facts, passing tests, and regurgitating information, and of course following the rules of the science. But engineering job demands students to think critically, try new things, fail and learn from their mistakes.

Industry does not need engineers. They need innovators. Employing organisations may hire top scorers but reward only the creative and the innovative.However, what happens at colleges? Do we teach students to prototype and pitch their ideas with professors? Do we get industry experts to mentor students and help them turn their concepts into realities? Do we encourage students to use open courseware, made available by dotcoms like Coursera and EdX, so that they can learn arts? Do we have business incubators to offer knowledge in management, and learn how to do business?

Engineering colleges should ponder over these two quality issues, if they want to play a meaningful role in higher education and employment generation.