Tales about things

The first in a series on designers profiles Srishti Bajaj.

Most people are creatures of habit — some gulp down their food in large spoonfuls, while others pick at every morsel; some people will go to great lengths to cut a cake into precisely equal slices while someone else will put down their glasses on a particular spot on the table.

Obsessive behaviour? Maybe, but look around and you’ll see that most of us go through life repeating certain patterns of behaviour that may seem illogical to those around, but are strangely comforting to us.

It’s this insight into human behaviour that was the spark behind “Habit Cutlery”, a range of dinner-ware designed by Srishti Bajaj, 30, a designer who trained at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (specialising in accessories), and later at the Royal College of Art, London. The winner of the British Council To Ten Creative Entrepreneur Award for 2007, Bajaj now runs DesignBait, a design consultancy that, among other things, works with architects providing design inputs on interiors.

 

A product designer primarily, Bajaj has worked with Titan creating a jewellery line in stainless steel and crystal, and with the now-defunct Toy Design Centre. “Creating products to satisfy a growing demand for personalisation and individualisation” is her design credo. And as the Habit cutlery designs illustrate, she carries the idea to great lengths.

Tagged “specialist eating tools”, the range includes “Picky Fork”, a fork with a sliced edge which allows picky eaters to spear one piece at a time; the prong-like “Equaliser Knife” for the fastidious to carve out same-size bites easily; and the “Sneak Spoon”, a doubled-layered spoon for those who want to be covertly greedy in polite company.

That might be a little way-out, and have limited commercial potential in India (the Habit cutlery was featured in design magazines in the UK and Sweden), but Bajaj also tried to showcase her belief in customisation in a limited way in a line of silverware she designed for a Delhi-based exporter a few years ago. These were high-value corporate gifts for the festive season and Bajaj added pep to the collection by creating four sub-ranges for four personality types she identified from the Ramayana — Ram, standing for simplicity and piousness, Sita for purity, Hanuman for knowledge and Ravana for dynamism.

The same attention to personal quirks animates a bar that Bajaj designed recently. “The client was a big fan of James Bond and so I made a series of stools and counters shaped like a martini glass. Clients often ask me what is my preferred ‘material’ and I tell them that I work with the ‘idea’, the material, and the design follow.”

“Pee Pods”, which Bajaj presented at a British Council gathering of creative minds to make Delhi, a better place is another quirky design based on the same philosophy. “Pee Pods” is simply a packet with assorted seeds that those who pee on the roadside carry and scatter before urinating. “Since it’s no use telling them to stop peeing, you might as well green the city this way,” Bajaj laughs.

But design is one thing and making a successful venture of it a different ball game. “Design is not about products, it is a state of mind. But the perception here is that design is expensive. That’s mainly you can’t mass produce, and that drives up costs.” With DesignBait, Bajaj is now trying to devise a solution to that conundrum.