It's a failure at many levels, no less one of design thinking and design professionals feels B K Chakravarthy, professor of product design at the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay.

Confronted with a rusted letterbox in the parking lot, "I felt shameful that being a design professor, we could not do any good design in the public domain."

That was three years ago. Under Chakravarthy's initiative, designing a contemporary postbox became a student project with the IDC undertaking to take up all aspects of design, development and production. The post master general, Mumbai circle, A P Srivastava, was involved and he provided a one-line brief to the initiative — "design a maintenance-free postbox".

Out of the box

As a first step, a study was conducted among users and postal staff to understand the lacunae in the existing design. The results — postboxes, made of mild steel, were easily rusted and did not make for easy collection of letters, people felt hesitant about dropping their letters in the dilapidated boxes, letters would get wet because of water seepage in the monsoons, and there was overflow in the festive seasons.

These were then collated into a series of idea sketches using engineering plastic, sheet metal and stainless steel, and prototypes were made. The final product is a sleek affair with a stainless steel body with a red beak-shaped lid that slides on top. It's sleek, elegant, easy to install and user-friendly — you can even use the surface for writing.

Of the total of Rs 45 lakh that went into the project, the postal department brought in around Rs 14 lakh with the rest coming from the IDC. "With good marketing strategy we plan to amortize our cost in future by way of royalty," says Chakravarthy.

The new postbox was launched in December 2005 at a function to mark 150 years of the Indian postal department, and around 30 of them were placed at various locations in the metro cities. But it's only now, with Jindal Stainless manufacturing it to Charavarthy's specifications that 200 of them have been added. Go look for one.