ONthe outskirts of the southern city of Bangalore more than 25 creative packaging designers work in a tropical campus environment of colonnaded courtyards, blue ponds and leafy

Of course, neither of these two major IT players can compete locally with the Indian brand, Tata. The name is on the back of two out of three trucks, lorries and busses which make driving on India’s roads a white knuckle event.

As a 120 year old company Tata is the country’s largest auto company, in fact Tata is India’s largest company. A conglomerate, with more than 220,000 employees, two million shareholders, a market capitalisation of US$46.9 billion and 93 separate companies. Tata is into everything from autos to consumer products, steel, soda ash, solar power, insurance, satellite, tv and telecoms, hotels, ceramics and of course packaging design.

The design group, Tata Elxsi is a listed subsidiary of the Tata Group and was formed as a design company mainly with the intent of being a specialised manufacturer and systems integrator for Silicone Graphics and Cray platforms in the days when the only CAD-CAM applications available sat on those platforms.

According to Anil Sondur, General Manager at Tata Elxsi “It was only natural that our experience in the manufacturing, systems integration and R&D of the computer platform expanded to the creative application system, and today we have evolved into a global technology and design service provider in the main areas of Electronics, Mechanical and Media, with our business divisions based on these core services.

“At the core of the business is ‘Ideation’ creating and developing the idea into prototype and ‘proof-of-concept’ production”.

In the area of embedded product design the Tata Elxsi team may have projects to design auto electronics control systems for breaking systems, or in-car entertainment units (designed form the component parts through to the visual styling, or mobile phones. Mostly these products do not find their way into the Indian market but are the essence of the famous Indian outsourcing technology boom.

Though mainly Bangalore based, Tata also has a separate facility in Mumbai, the Visual Computing Labs which provide computer graphics and animation for Bollywood and Hollywood, India’s largest integrated design company.

The Bangalore campus houses the core product design capabilities under one roof so that designers and engineers from different disciplines can interact creatively to draw on a range of experience whether it be mechanical, engineering, electronic or packaging.

“We have regular weekly creative brainstorming sessions where we thrash out the concepts of a product from all angles, with teams from groups not involved in the project– it keeps the creativity flowing across the various disciplines.”

Applied design

As a result of this multi- discipline capablilty, Tata’s package approach is very different from most design houses which focus primarily on the conceptual issues of brand equity and graphic element “We look primarily at the whole product cycle from the design brief through the manufacturing process to delivery.”. says Shyam Sunder, Tata’s senior industrial design speciallst “Design should add value to the product while having cost efficiency built into the manufacturing process, so a change in the package’s structural design must contribute more than just a nice shape.

“When a structure is designed in one design house and passed over to another company for the graphic design the brand owner often finds it difficult to migrate the whole value proposition in terms of the history, emotion and appeal of the product.”

While Tata is perfectly happy to execute a client’ brief, it comes into its own when it is invited to develop the brief itself and can bring to bear the multi-disciplinary perspective to the product: “Often we find that we are interacting with consumers to determine an end user’s expectation so that we can approach the product from a practical designer perspective rather than the more common marketing perspective”.

With a clear understanding of the end-use, the concept and functional design phase can then begin, material recommendations made, and when flat-board and 3-D visualisations have been approved the Industrial Design team takes the project through mock-up to engineering a prototype and proof-of-concept.

“For example, where we have a special type of mechanism on the closure, we have our engineers produce the actual mechanism and package using the materials chosen. This is to prove not just that the closure mechanism works but that it can be blown or moulded in a production environment at speed, that it can be assembled in the most economical manner.

“Similarly if we are migrating the product from one packaging medium to another stackability, burst strength capacity we have to produce a fully functional prototype to validate the design’.

In an organisation the size of Tata, more than 50 Finite Element Analysis engineers are onsite and included in the workflow to test the package capability “Typically, in the case of bottles we’d analyse top-load strength, optimisation of thicknesses and set the specifications for the toolmaker and blow moulder to follow.”

Tata supplies the product specs in electronic data format, they use Daelius software – more commonly used for automotive design (think dashboards and other plastic parts in autos), the system records almost every, spec, vector and tollerance imaginable converting it for the final manufacturing system.

Finally, when all of the structural and engineering phases have been validated can the graphic design be applied.

“Of course the graphics are involved at the very early stage while the concept and styling is being considered, we are very much part of the creative process” adds Ms Divya Parmar, Tata Elxsi Marketing Manager and a graphic designer by profession “Graphic designers attend all the client briefings, our internal brainstorming process and we contribute preliminary sketches to flesh out the visualisations. However, only when the structure has been validated and finalised do we have a clear prespective of not just the shape but of the product aspiration, client’s marketing goals and consumer emotional responses to the early testing.”

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