PDF has joined hands with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad to organise the event along with Designindia and DIPP as partners for the event.

For a city that has a one-third share of the Rs 1,500-crore design industry in the country, the event is welcome. “For Pune, it is a big event. There are lots of design houses and companies in the city and we want Pune to be known for its designing capabilities,” said Satish Gokhale, PDF president and head of Design Directions.

Many MNCs have already set up design centres in the city — Philips Design, LG Electronics, Whirlpool, Cummins, Honeywell and Hayworth. IT majors like TCS, Persistent Systems, Infosys, Wipro Technologies too have started providing value-added design services to their offshore clients.

“Our aim is to take design to the masses and slowly we want to move to other small cities. We are also planning to tie up with schools and colleges so that the students can know more about designing and its career possibilities. The city has tremendous potential to become the designing hub of the country,” said Gokhale.

For the past seven years, the CII and the NID have been jointly organising the Design Summit while the last three years have seen the Pune Design Festival. “This time the idea was to club Pune Design Festival with Design Summit and make it a seven-day event,” said Nachiket Thakur, chairman of the festival.

Among the high points would be ‘Design Showcase’ that will display works of designers from different disciplines.

“The objective of this special programme is to exhibit noteworthy works by designers. Workshops on design innovation for small and medium industries, furniture design, product design strategy, trend and design strategy for India are some key highlights of the festival,” said Thakur.

To nurture young design talent, an on-the-spot design competition for school students with ‘community dustbin’ as a central theme has been planned as also a workshop on opportunities in automotive design.