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Mirajker Design wins 'Design Your World Contest

Mirajker Design, an industrial and transportation design company based in Chennai, recently won the grand prize in the 'Design Your World Contest' organized by the consortium of Autodesk, IBM and Cadalyst for its product Aquajack. The company bagged the prize for using Autodesk's Mechanical Desktop software in designing a complicated automated domestic water pump system for its client, Sharp Tools. The prize comprises an IBM IntelliStation and Mechanical Desktop solutions worth $10,000.

Mirajker Design was set up by Rajesh Mirajker in 1985, when he was specializing in industrial/product design as a student at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Starting off with a design study for a minivan for his first client, Standard Motors Ltd., Mirajker Design has graduated from doing styling for a commercial vehicle cabin, body redesign for an agriculture tractor model and designing a dashboard to actually designing a full-fledged special-purpose electric passenger mobile, orchard tractors, dumpers and intercity luxury coaches for clients such as Ashok Leyland, Sundaram Industries, Hindustan Motors, Swaraj Mazda, Punjab Tractors and Mahindra-Nissan.

The prize-winning product, Aquajack, is an automated water pump system for managing the transfer of water in buildings from a sump to the overhead tank. The system senses water levels and prevents overflows, whilst conserving electricity.

With initial rough sketches drawn manually, Rajesh modeled individual parts using AutoCAD. Starting first with the chassis as the platform and then referencing all other mating parts to this base was done using the software. Parts were created independently as surface models and parametric solid models with the Mechanical Desktop Release 1.2 software. These models were also supported by orthographic design and pattern drawings.

"On this project alone, we have reduced the pattern making process by about 50% and prototyping costs by about 25%," explains Mirajker. Talking about the advantages of using the software to design the model rather than the traditional manual drafting process, Mirajker says, "I could not only fully visualize my designs but could see them and animate them in 3D. I could actually see the space functionality, the operations etc., and that's why the final drawing was so close to the prototype." He adds that the final assembling of the model on-screen enabled him to identify fit problems and the surface modeling problems. "When I finished the final assembly, I realized that there was a fundamental surface modeling mistake which I had made. But for the software, this mistake could have thrown the entire prototyping into jeopardy," he admits.