Design engg is much more than product aesthetics, says expert

The second day of Eduverse, the premier education and career guidance expo organised by DH and Prajavani, spotlighted the novel B Tech programme in design engineering and highlighted human resources as a viable career path. 

Speaking at the event, Commodore (Dr) Pramod R Kulkarni, pro vice-chancellor of the School of Design Engineering at Reva University, explained the importance of design courses. 

“We currently have bachelor’s courses in design engineering in the country, but they all focus only on one aspect of design: the aesthetics of the product. That is not why anybody purchases a product. This is the systematic gap we are trying to address,” he said. 

Dr Kulkarni emphasised that initiatives such as Make in India would succeed when the country is also able to design. 

“If we do not design products, we will be forced to bring other countries’ designs and manufacture them here, calling it ‘Make in India’,” he noted. 

According to him, the BTech programme at Reva University has a unique structure compared to existing courses.

It’s a design-centric multidisciplinary engineering programme that re-imagines engineering through an activity-based, project-based, challenge-based and case-study-based curriculum, combining creative design and engineering rigour.

The course also focuses on teaching engineering subjects with an orientation towards design.