First stop - meeting Quicksand

We were only an hour late for our first meeting. A) we overslept, reception hadn’t given us our envelope with instructions B) We got stuck in Delhi traffic C) The driver didn’t know where we were going… but it no one got that stressed, even the people we were meeting.

We met the MD of Design Agency Quicksand Ayush Chauhan and his team at their offices in a residential area of Delhi. Their office felt like a house, their ‘boardroom’ a dining room, their workspaces tucked away in bedrooms with Ninja the company dog lolling by some French doors into the garden.

Whilst the setting may have been laid back, the team that we met, whilst casual, were fiercely passionate about their trade, developing design and young designers in India. One of the aspects I found particularly interesting was the way they research products to help them design for the end user.

They use a combination of video diaries and footage with photography to show their clients ‘how’ people are using their products and what design needs to do to help them get the most out of them. We saw a video of a man putting together a water filtration… but it wasn’t just a man, it was a man and his family. It was obvious from the video that the kids played a massively important role in the assembly of this product, if not the primary role. So, they concluded, the product design, instructions etc needed to address them as well as ‘dad’.

What also struck me from a passion perspective was their fierce protection of design as an industry and art form – not to let the bureaucrats and the ‘trade bodies’ hinder development. Their passion also for collaboration, if they don’t have the skill themselves they’ll bring and friend or consultant who does have it. They want to work with other people to make things happen. Their motivation for interesting things outside of work see http://blottin.blogspot.com/ has brought them new business from the likes of coca-cola, who wanted to work with them after they realised one of the team was at the cutting edge of the nascent Indian electronic music scene. I just love their concept of ‘basic love of things’ (BLOT).

I left the meeting impassioned and inspired about their business, the way they work and their drive to use design to push the social agenda as well as a great way to make money and have fun.