A Pact To Impact
Branding Titan’s portal for creative entrepreneurs to design and impact for social good.
On the portal of Titan’s Design Impact Movement, a blizzard of arrows pushes you ahead. Design for sustainability is no longer about crying hoarse that the world needs saving. Everyone knows it; and the change-makers of today, from young designers to NGOs and social entrepreneurs are ready to dive right in. On the DIM site, the colors race from violet to blue, and the rhythm of content is fast paced. Its precursor DIA (Design Impact Awards) was started in 2017, spearheaded by Ritika Gandhi, Manager, CSR at Titan Company Limited. Says Gandhi, “While we were doing these grants we started DIM with the thought — how can we expand the program; how can we connect the dots of the ecosystem?”
The focus for the Design Impact initiative is identifying, celebrating, and supporting innovative product design for measurable social good, as envisioned by the Titan CSR Board Committee and the late Mr. Xerxes Desai, ex-MD of Titan. The idea of Awards is limited to a specific period but the effort to innovate needed to be immersive and continuous. Hence, the Movement was conceived as a program that would aid with a continual engagement, whereby designers would be inducted and inspired to become powerful change agents. Anthony Lopez of Lopez Design was brought in as a mentor and partner for branding Design Impact Movement. On 27th February 2021, Titan formally launched DIM.
What DIM Does
Design Impact Movement (DIM) is a social initiative that responds to the energy of Gen Z. Titan, however, does not wish to put an age limit on who can apply: After all, the oldest who had applied for Design Impact Awards was 80! DIM encourages professionals from all walks of life to transform lives in both rural and urban environments. Three areas of need have been identified: Healthcare, Environment, and Agriculture & Livelihoods. As for how you can make a difference, the CSR team identified 24 opportunity or problem statements that define where the problems lie in each of the three categories.
“We did not want to lock anyone to a brief,” emphasizes Gandhi, noting how creative professionals are more motivated to act when the problem has a personal connection. For instance, a young man who made a device to measure diabetes-related parameters was a diabetic as a child growing up in rural Haryana. “A fever meant Crocin. There was no knowledge of diabetic-related complications in children,” says Gandhi, who proudly shares that the designer is now a gold medalist. DIM provides Master Classes, comprehensive resources, and prototyping assistance. Further, through their communications and speaker events, a wide audience gets to know about the portal. Their webinars have got around 3000 views.
A Mission, A movement, and Awards
Because of the sensational power of design in various fields — designer cars, clothes, furniture, and jewelry — design’s capacity to make a change in everyday life has often been underrated. The incredible potential to transform the world was previously relegated to spaces such as NGO, non-profit, charitable organizations, and foundations. Titan Company in collaboration with Tata Trusts supports design innovations done for social good. By placing Indian youth at the center of the initiative, the Design Impact platform got a fresh outlook. The next step was to make the idea of ‘social good’ an exciting endeavor.
Lopez with Manasa Krishnan, a graduation project intern at his studio, translated the idea of Design Impact into dynamic branding where the basic element is an arrow. Multiple arrow elements >>>> hasten, influence, and push the story forward, harnessing creative energy to make an impact. The branding changes how we perceive design for social good, making it trendy and desirable. The simple and emphatic visual language gives the platform a dynamic and happening space. The awards and the movement also encourage the independent designer and young entrepreneur with incentivizing lines such as ‘Kickstart your ideas’ and ‘Spark up your genius’. This innovative model makes it attractive for the young designer who is ambitious to get up to speed.
How it started
The perception of design for social good has been rapidly changing in the past decade and Design Impact Awards creates a platform that supports social entrepreneurs, designers, and innovators to be the torchbearers of design.
Considerable research was put into the DIA program before its inception in 2017, how it would come across and engage. The process was thorough, consulting with various stakeholders, as well as researching the format of other awards programs and juries. Titan got 993 applications for DIA in 2017, four times more than they ever expected. After an extensive jury process, which was transparent and merit-oriented, 8 winners were selected. Each was awarded a grand sum of 65 lakhs to carry out the project over a period of two years. Ritika Gandhi emphasizes that clarity of agenda is a prerequisite for the project pitch, necessarily submitted with a prototype to show feasibility.
Supporting social do-gooders
The Titan team under Gandhi took forward product design as the focus for Design Impact, as the ecosystem for product development was found to be complicated. This is the area where social entrepreneurs struggle with development, research, prototyping, and mentorship. “Good innovators are looking for support,” says Gandhi, who was looking to connect NGOs to engineers, and designers to experts, and so on. As the learning curve for a social entrepreneur can be long and lonely, the need for incubators and accelerators was imminent. After a workshop for the top 100 applicants to their DIA awards, it was clear that designers need to be connected and feel a part of the community.
Drawing from these insights, the Titan team looked to create a space where the learning curve significantly reduces. “If I am thinking and dabbling about social design, where can I learn?” Zeroing on areas that are most value-adding, the team put down three philosophies. The Design Impact Movement would be non-competitive; the aspirant could join anytime in the journey. The facilities should speak to the mind’s higher faculties, not just as an award incentive. This allows people who are bold and aspiring to take up the work as a career using their skill sets.
A punchy portal
“One thing is to read the problem statement and another thing is how the viewers perceive it,” says Gandhi. Having heard Anthony Lopez speak at the Pune Design Festival, she recognized his aptitude for social design. At the helm was the question — how do we make social design cool? Lopez’s involvement would help to design a portal that looked and appealed to the young innovator’s mind.
Aside from providing the opportunity to design for society, innovators need to be mentored and supported to navigate the many stages to a successful product in the market. The portal provides concrete resources and masterclasses, equipping the aspirant to meet their goals through an informed design journey.
The punchy branding by Lopez delivers its messages through video clips, and these launch films were created by Causate, another Bengaluru agency. As Titan is an external-facing consumer brand, everything needed to be slick. Most, fortunately, under Lopez’s guidance, from music to treatment, we’ve done really well, affirms Gandhi. “Our TG is Gen Z, so we need to speak that language,” she says, affirming the need for a vibrant versus a static site with the ability to keep changing in a very dynamic fashion. The platform engages with its young audience in many nifty ways, through videos and other interactive stimuli, opening up the world of design for the greater good.
Written by Sujatha Shankar Kumar
Graphics by James Thottan
