Interview with Anuj Prasad, Founder & CEO, Desmania Design Pvt Ltd

Desmania auto studio claims it is India’s only state-of-the-art auto studio. You mean there is no one else in the country?

We are the first ones to build an automotive design studio outside the OEMs. We launched the studio in 2010. It has been a one-of-a-kind studio in India which has a clay modeling facility, and has a facility to make one is to one markups, prototypes and models. The whole studio has been based on the way things have been done in the western countries where you have a lot of car design happening. We have come to know that there are some more similar studios coming up. But this is one fully integrated automotive studio.

What does your work entail? What is that you exactly do for a client?

We are creative people. We are not design engineers per se. We have to do two aspects of design. One is styling of the vehicle, and second is on the usability front of the vehicle i.e. anything that the driver or passenger feels and touches and is emotionally connected to the vehicle is done by a designer. We are industrial designers and some people call us car stylists. But we are not stylists only. We understand what a consumer requires. We do a consumer insight, which means we go to the users, observe and talk to them and then decide as to what needs to go in a design.

But the trend in the last 15 years in the automotive industry is that the design is being done in-house by the OEMs themselves. But there are small companies that do not have a design in-house, they come to us for styling and the interiors, etc.

But large OEMs take our support. We provide them a lot of design support services which includes making a full scale model in clay and refining a design along with them. We do something like a full-scale mock up, etc. And these are taken to the consumers for their insight.

There are also new areas that are coming up, like electric vehicles. A lot of people do not understand what automotive design is. A lot of EV people are interested in design. Then there are accessories which are becoming very big in the market. There is a lot of traction happening in accessories because people want to personalise and customise their cars. Big OEMS are laying a lot of emphasis on accessorizing their cars. We have done many projects with very large OEMs here.

Big guys give you big business, because they have bigger budgets. They have the maturity of understanding each step in the process. So, to build up a car design you have to actually go through a fairly long process of quick validation of the design. People start with sketching, then they make scaled models, then they would go in for full scaled models, the first model could be made of foam and is called volume model. Then they would make it in clay for refinement.  Then they would make a hard model. In between they would also make an ergonomic model. There are several types of models that have to be made. You have to do a whole lot of refinement.