How Design Management Helps Companies

Everything designed, be it a product, identity, interface, architecture or communication, has one thing in common—it has to be managed.

Design management is the way to enhance collaboration and synergy between “design” and “business”.

In the UK, companies that are “effective users of design” outperformed the stock market by 200% over the last decade. —British Design Council, Design Index

Design management is the art and science of empowering design, for social, economic
and environmental benefit.

To use design effectively, companies apply design management methods and processes which include:

> Research and observation
> Envision future scenarios
> Innovation planning
> Create design strategy
> Build corporate reputation
> Visualization and modeling
> Design infrastructure
> Design organizations
> Design sourcing
> Financial resources
> Design process
> Creativity management

Incollaboration with DesignSingapore Council,DMI-theDesignManagement Institute ,will
host an exceptional conference on November28-29,2007 in Singapore.

Venture capital investment in clean technologies companies

Chennai metro rail project

Chennai: The Tamil Nadu Government today announced that it would implement the metro rail project, envisaged to ease traffic congestion in the metropolis, at an estimated cost of Rs 9,757 crore.

Of the total 46.5 km stretch, about 20 km would be underground and the remaining line would be elevated, the release said.

The Keys to Marketing Green Building

By Jerry Yudelson,, P.E., MBA, LEED AP, Yudelson Assocs., Tucson, Ariz. -- Consulting-Specifying Engineer, 5/1/2007

Engineering firms are beginning to realize that the green building revolution is here to stay and that they should join in. In 2006, LEED-registered projects increased 50% over the previous year, and LEED-certified projects increased nearly 70%, which suggests that more firms are accumulating green building expertise with each passing year. My own projection of green building growth points to a cumulative total of 24,000 LEED-NC registered projects by the end of 2012—a six-fold increase in just six years.

The keys
There is no single competitive response to the growing green building market that is right for every design firm, because much has to do with the 4 Cs—the clarity of the company's strategic vision, the firm's capability to execute its vision, the capital available for marketing and sustainability initiatives and the character of the principals—their willingness to “walk the talk” of green engineering. Nevertheless, a conscious choice among strategies, and a clear focus on one dominant approach, is vastly preferable to having none or just improving responses to opportunities. This series describes seven good ideas for developing a marketing strategy.


The seven keys to marketing green building are a combination of two familiar principles of marketing, as shown in the STP formula (p. 30): Segment your market, target key segments and position your company, and then, use the building blocks of competitive strategy—differentiation, cost and focus—to achieve success


The whole arcticle can be found here

construction boom in India and Middle east

Extract from - Knowledge@wharton

"The turnover of all construction companies in India last year was around $15 billion. This year it may rise to $20 billion. But a total of $50 billion is [slated] to be spent on construction every year in India, which requires a capability of 2.5 times the sector's size."

India's planned infrastructure outlay over the next five years has been revised upward by various government authorities, from $150 billion to almost $475 billion. The country currently spends around $21 billion a year on infrastructure, compared to China's $150 billion.

Consider the various construction firms:

1. Punj Lloyd, one of the country's largest engineering, procurement and Construction (EPC) companies, earned 72% more income for the quarter ended June 2007, at Rs1, 4179.5 million ($359.43 million). Yet, its order backlog rose to Rs 152,250 million ($3,859.32 million).
2. Larsen & Toubro, one of Asia's largest vertically integrated engineering and construction companies, announced that gross sales rose 47% in the quarter ended September 2007 to Rs 55.74 billion ($1.41 billion), and yet its order backlog rose to a record Rs 400 billion ($10.14 billion).
3. At Wartsila India, which had an order book of one times sales in 2003, the backlogs have risen to almost three times that amount.
4. Patel Engineering, which expects to close the current year with sales of Rs 16,000 million ($405.58 million) has an order book of Rs 54,000 million ($1.37 billion).


Rupen Patel, managing director of Patel Engineering, says that alone, the planned roll-out of highways by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) over the course of the next 10 years exceeds the total turnover of all construction companies in India today.

"Construction companies have never seen such a boom in India. Even if [they all] did only road projects and left all work on building airports and power plants aside, NHAI still has more work to offer than firms can take.”

Almost every Indian company -- big or small -- that has some expertise in
Construction finds itself flooded with orders that are nearly three to four times its annual sales. The size and pace of orders could threaten the development of the country's already creaking and short-supplied infrastructure. "Execution is the biggest issue in India today, especially on time and within budget," says Pratyush Kumar, president and chief executive officer of GE Infrastructure, India.

Foreign firms might view the huge gap between the sector's existing capabilities and those required as an opportunity to make their mark in India. Indeed, the infrastructure spending boom in India has benefited a bevy of overseas companies, such as Dongfang Electric Corporation in China and Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction Company in Korea, who are filling orders for turbines used to generate power. A number of leading global construction companies, such as Australia's Leighton Holdings and Italian-Thai Development Public Company, have also entered India.

CHALLENGES :-

1. Skilled-labor Shortage

It's difficult to fathom the words "talent shortage" in a country of a billion people that's getting younger over time. But speak to any infrastructure builder, and you hear anecdotes about shortages of trained fitters, welders, masons and plumbers. "Whether we will get the people necessary to support the growth
is the real challenge. Both engineering and blue-collared skilled workers are in short supply. Fitters and welders are not available in the numbers you want. The industry also needs mechanical engineers who have worked in capital goods industries and would like to pursue a career [in that sector] rather than Switch into software," says Allen Antao, vice president, process equipment, at Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Company.

2. Equipment shortage

At the lower end of the skills chain, companies are responding to labor shortages by automating parts of the production process, which makes them less susceptible to shortages of vocational staff. As a result of this, and partly in response to customer demand for faster build-outs, construction companies that once relied on an army of cheap labor now employ a variety of equipment, from low-end concrete mixers to goods elevators and tipper trucks for transporting materials, tower cranes, tunnel-boring machines, robotic drills and hydraulic excavators.

Patel, for instance, has spent Rs 600 million to Rs 800 million ($ 20.28 million) so far to build an equipment bank, while IVRCL estimates it has invested between Rs 2,500 million to Rs 2,750 million ($69.71 million) in equipment so far.

The boom in building activity in Asia and the Middle East has not only increased demand for such building equipment but also resulted in a rise in lease rentals and forced many companies to own equipment. This has made the operations of such companies far more capital intensive.


While funds can be raised, companies have also been rethinking their work methods and the building materials they use. Many companies now employ ready-mix concrete rather than prepare a cement and sand mixture on site. This helps speed up production since ready-made cement can be poured faster and in a uniform consistency to lay out foundations and pillars. Companies have also started employing prefabricated materials -- like brick wall sections or Siporex blocks for ceilings -- to help speed things up while using less manual labor. "India may soon move to [another] stage of mechanization, where developers use completely knock-down assembly components to build projects."

In one of my regular visits to the atelier A+D blog ,i was amused to find an article written by Michelle Linden in a online magazine called art signal .Hope to see more of your ideas!

Sherwood Forest’s new tree

The Tree features a café, educational facilities and a shop at its roots, with a spiralling walkway leading up the trunk and through the branches and to a 30m-high viewing platform

via BD online

CPH Experiments

An exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC
Oct 2 2007 - Nov 24 2007










BIG is a Copenhagen based group of over 80 architects, designers, builders and thinkers operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, research and development. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. In their projects, BIG tests the effects of size and the balance of programmatic mixtures on the triple bottom line of the social, economical and ecological outcome. Like a form of programmatic alchemy, they create architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, and shopping.
The exhibition will showcase some built works and a number of large-scale models illustrating proposals for innovative residential typologies, all of which are situated in Copenhagen. Focusing on Kløverkarrén, BIG House, the LEGO project, Mountain Dwellings and VM Houses (both designed in conjunction with JDS Architects), the exhibition presents a broad spectrum of the research that has gone into varying housing solutions for different generational attitudes and economical backgrounds

TREMIX Vacuum System

The Tremix Vacuum System is a method for laying high-quality concrete floors at an acceptable cost. The key of the method is dewatering concrete by the vacuum process.

Through vacuum dewatering,the surplus water is removed from the concrete, which means that the water/cement ratio automatically leads to a noticeable improvement of almost each of the concrete properties. These improvements are particularly noticeable on the top surface i.e. the most vital part of a floor.

The 24-hour-strength of the vacuum dewatered concrete slab is much higher, which reduces the risk of damage on a newly cast floor.The final strength is about 50 % higher than that of a conventional concrete floor.

Advantages:-

* Higher and more uniform quality
* Increased tensile strength in bending
* Thinner slabs - lower cost
* Minimized plastic shrinkage
* Minimized dry shrinkage
* Increased wear resistance
* Improved frost resistance
* Minimized crack formation
* High flatness accuracy
* Better adhesion to the base, when casting
a wear course on already hardened concrete
* No curling

Accelerating innovation in concrete: Lafarge inaugurates a unique new research facility

Lafarge inaugurating a new technological building dedicated to innovation in concrete at its research center in L’Isle d’Abeau, near Lyons, the world’s largest building materials research facility. The creation of this unique facility demonstrates Lafarge’s drive to accelerate the implementation of its strategy for innovation in concrete, a major strategic focus of its "Excellence 2008" plan.

With floor space of 2500m² and a ceiling 12m in height, the building houses an experimental concrete plant where laboratory research results will be tested in real time on an industrial scale. It also houses specific testing zones where materials can be tested and manipulated. This new research facility will therefore enable testing of formulas or experimental plans on an industrial scale while controlling external factors such as temperature or hygrometry. This will considerably speed up time to market for innovative products and solutions for the construction industry.

The floor was laid using Extensia™, a concrete with exceptional properties launched earlier this year, itself the result of research carried out at the L’Isle d’Abeau research center. Whereas before, it was not possible to pour slabs over 25m² without joints, Extensia™ makes it possible to pour 400m² surfaces without joints, a real technological breakthrough for the industry. What is more, its exceptional resistance allows a reduction in slab thickness, means that there is no need for steel mesh or fibers, and reduces maintenance requirements. The product therefore has a reduced ecological footprint, in particular through a significant reduction in the CO2 emissions usually associated with pouring a large floor surface.

Marx and engels theory on Art

Extract from - Marx and engels -On literature and art

when developing their theory of Aesthetics, Marx and Engels naturally based themselves on the achievements of their predecessors . But the main aesthetic problems - and above all the problem of the relationship between art and reality - were solved by them in a fundamentally new way, on the basis of materialist dialectics. Idealist asethics consider art as a reproduction of the ideal ,standing over and above reality. The origin of any art form ,its development ,flowering,and decay ,all remained incomprehensible to the art theoreticians and historians of the pre-Marxian period, in as much as they studied these in isolation from man's social existence .
Marx and Engels considered it absolutely impossible to understand art and literature proceeding only from their internal law of development .In their opinion ,the essence ,origin,development,and social role of art could only be understood through analysis of the social system as a whole , within which the economic factor - the development of productive forces in complex interaction with production relations- plays the decisive role .Thus art ,as defined by Marx and Engels ,is one of the forms of social consciousness and it therefore follows that the reasons for its changes should be sought in the social existence of man.

Neemrana Fort-Palace Revitalisation, Neemrana, India

jali designs

Design for people in need .

I was going through bustler and found a Toilet design competition .Its interesting to find a competition which is focusing on the need to sanitary facilities in the developing countries....check it out here

JVC hotel by Zaha Hadid