Codesign : By Rajesh Dahiya and Mohor Ray, Founders of Codesign
What made you start Codesign?
What made us start Codesign, what has sustained it so far and what we continue to look forward to is the same – a desire to keep growing through the work we do, without being compartmentalised by scale, media and trends. The idea was to create a rich environment that encourages asking questions and rethinking briefs, with the rigor of hands-on ‘making’. An important thread that has always stayed strong, is the love of content—making sure that design is building on appropriate and rich content, and not acting as a prop for it.
Tell us about your designers. Did they go into fine art or design schools? How do you pick them up?
All the designers in our team currently are graduates from design schools. However this is not, nor has been, a pre-decided condition of working with people. We look at people’s work, and even more importantly how they approach it; build on it—and how they can inspire us back to push our own boundaries.
At the heart of our work is people, and that’s where we look for inspiration—in the way they live, the dreams they dream, the things they trust, the things that make them happy. Through conversation and observation, there is much that we learn which inspires our work. The composition of the studio is diverse by choice, brings several influences and interests, from music and food to crafts and calligraphy, into play with each other. This often brings surprising, new flavours into the way we develop ideas.
In short, there’s no checklist. It’s work, it’s partially gut instinct and it’s a shared dialogue between both a potential hire and us on expectations, responsibilities and the future.