KOCHI: Kerala’s exceptionally impressive status in literacy, healthcare and sex ratio continues to be ‘selling story’, but the state requires a revolutionary new story focus ing on futuristic initiatives in design and out-of-the-box planning to achieve zero carbon footprint, zero waste discharge and even a complete digital use of currency for sustained development, experts at an international conclave said on Tuesday.
Ecological conservation should be focal in the process of socio-economic progress of the state, more so going by the lessons from the floods in August that ravaged Kerala, they said at the #Design Kerala Summit that began here.
The speakers at the inaugural session of the event at Bolgatty Event Centre, while deliberating on ways to rebuild Kerala after the floods and landslides, stressed the need for prioritising design if the state has to not just return to normalcy but keep up its development graph.
S D Shibulal, chairman of the High Power IT Committee (HPIC) of Kerala, called for concerted efforts to ensure zero waste, zero carbon emission and zero paper currency for a cleaner state.
“We must think about the next 50 years or a century of our surroundings, not the coming few years,” he said after lighting the lamp that symbolised the start of the event.
Greater emphasis on design can also trigger a flurry of intellectual property rights, thus providing a boost to technological and allied devices, said Shibulal, a co-founder of IT giant Infosys.
Kerala has its population of 3.3 crore people, thereby invalidating the prospect of centralised development aided by design and technology, he added.
Kerala Startup Mission CEO Saji Gopinath emphasised the need for inventors of new-age machines to conceive them from the point of view of the end consumer. “We have conventionally been taught to design machines from just the technical point of view. Seldom had we gone to imagine how the user would take it,” he said. “That attitude must change in our times now.”
Ana Laura Farias, head (Summer School) of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, gave a brief video presentation of her Danish centre that has a package of 35 workshops. Currently, Farias is leading a month-long workshop in Kochi.
In a keynote address, R Srinivasan, president of the World Design Organisation, spoke of the prospect of Kochi being the organisation’s venue for the biennial meet in 2022.