Behind the Design: Rahul Dhinakaran Overcomes His Fear of Design
When I ask Rahul Dhinakaran to introduce himself, he dives right in.
“I design machines. I build machines,” he says without hesitation. “I’m a tinkerer, if you can call it that.”
When I ask him to tell me more about his life outside of work – who he is when he’s not an engineer – he’s stumped.
“That’s tough,” he laughs, “I’ve been doing this for two decades.” But he eventually told me about his family and son, who shares his love for motorsports. Rahul’s passion for machines was, in fact, nurtured by a family member, but one from an earlier generation. Though he wasn’t an engineer, Rahul tells me that his grandfather had a natural sense for, and love of, mechanisms and machines.
When Rahul was only four or five years old, his grandfather took him to railway stations to observe steam locomotives. They lived in Madurai, a small ancient town in the South of India that hosted one of only four or five steam engine maintenance sheds in the country.
Rahul remembers watching the complex engineering that allowed the turntable to slowly rotate the locomotives, as well as the steam turbine at the textile mill where his grandfather and father worked. His grandfather also taught him about internal combustion engines, and explained how scooters and motorcycles worked.
Rahul’s childhood fascination naturally progressed to studying mechanical engineering at university, even though his education in machines had clearly begun much earlier. Afterwards, he worked in motorsports. And it was during his apprenticeship in motorsports that one of his colleagues traveled to the US for a car styling course, and came back with a compact disk labeled “SOLIDWORKS” in black marker.
It was 2003. At university, Rahul used a very complex modeling software, which discouraged him from pursuing a career in design.
“I was actually very scared to get into design because of it,” he admits. But everything changed when he discovered SOLIDWORKS.
“It was a breath of fresh air,” Rahul says. He explains how arduous it was to model any object with the software he’d been using previously. “But in SOLIDWORKS you could just click on that box, and drag it like that…” He mimics the simple movement for me with a slow hand gesture, his gaze almost dreamy as he recounts it. “I still remember it, twenty years later. It was what convinced me that I could have a career in design.”
Rahul hasn’t used another software since, and he’s had a long career. He left motorsports and started his own design company, where he designed and built everything from suspension systems to pick-and-place robots to medical vessels for companies all over the world. He eventually moved to design consulting to make more time for his family.
Some of his machines still harken back to the technologies that captured his childhood imagination. For example, he tells me that once he incorporated a component that functions like the connecting arm that existed in steam locomotives.
“I was thinking, why did I do that?” he laughs, “and then I remembered.”
That was when Rahul had moved to Muscat in Oman to work for a company that wanted him to design consumer products. Rahul had to learn how to go from creating industrial machines for factories to building, for example, microwaves for individuals. Not to mention navigating the culture shock.
One of the most memorable products Rahul created while in Oman was an automatic roof tent for vehicles, like an awning. Omanis, he says, like to spend time in the desert, and understandably need some reliable shelter from the sweltering heat – ideally one that can unfurl automatically.
But Rahul had never even seen a desert before.
“It took some time for me to understand their culture, as well as the behavior of sand when it comes to machines,” he explains, “how it blows up and penetrates into the smallest cavities.” I imagine him struggling with early prototypes, maybe shielding his eyes from the wind-whipped sand with one hand while the other tries to hold back an unruly flap, wondering why people couldn’t just stay home. That is, until he got it right. The learning curve was steep but successful.
When things don’t go according to plan, though, Rahul says he relies on his machine design skills. He recalls an experience from his early design years when he’d gotten a contract from an American company that tasked him with drawing a boat roof.
“I screwed up so bad,” Rahul laughs. He was, after all, just a fresh engineer at the time. “The guy told me that I have to find a new career,” he remembers with an ironic smile. Good thing Rahul didn’t follow his advice.
His time in the Middle East was followed by a brief stint with a startup company that built complex vending machines for the Indian market in China.
Now, he’s the head of industrial automation at Big Basket, India’s first online grocer, where he can design and build to his heart’s content – as always, using SOLIDWORKS.
“If that software hadn’t reached me at that particular time,” he admits, “I probably would have chosen another profession.”
Margherita Bassi
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