My project brief was to design a panel based on open plan office partition system. Working on this project with Godrej and Boyce Mfg. Ltd., Mumbai, was an extraordinary opportunity for me. The aim of this project was to design low-cost office furniture in the Indian market.
Godrej has long been in the furniture business and wanted to expand its market by adding products that’d serve the medium scale industry, which is quite price sensitive. Though this industry is not willing to pay more, it expects quality compared to existing systems. With growing economy and emerging knowledge based sector, demand for office workspace is increasing rapidly but not all Indian firms are capable of investing heavily in infrastructure and ask for an economic solution for office furniture.
I started by understanding the product itself, by observing each of its components, and knowing their functions, going into office history and knowing how present office space evolved from a mere chair and table, observing how users interact with their workstation and surveying them. This raised many issues which were important to know. Cost cutting was the main criteria for the client here, so going through different manufacturing processes and studying the material used for these purposes were required for that. Once the research was done, concept generation was more exciting and many ideas came to mind. Some were too impractical to implement and some had already been tried before; many of them had manufacturing constraints.
The final solution was a partition system with fewer parts and easy to assemble. It is a slide-in type office partition system, which can be configured to different patterns depending upon the requirement. This project gave me an experience, which was not possible elsewhere.
