Professor, IDC School of Design, D L Shah Chair for Innovation, IIT Bombay

Professor Ravi Poovaiah is a senior faculty member at the Industrial Design Centre (IDC), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. He is also holds the D L Shah Chair for Innovation at IIT Bombay.

He has backgrounds in Mechanical Engineering, Product Design and Graphic Design Education having studied respectively at Indian Institutes of Technology at Madras and Bombay (IIT Madras and IIT Bombay) and at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, USA.

His research interests are in areas related to Visual Language, Information Visualisation, Visual Narratives, Interaction Devices, Collaborative Learning Environments  and Designing Play-Learn Environments for Children.

He is involved with building open access digital resources related to ‘Design Learning’, 'Folk Tales', 'Designing for Children', 'Design of Way-finding Systems' and 'Design in India' with access to networked collaborative information.  In this regard, he has been co-ordinating along with NID and IIT Guwahati, a Ministry of Human Resources sponsored project named ‘e-kalpa’ to build an open access digital learning environment for design in India.

He is also the co-director of a research project on experimenting with Social Media called ‘The Centre of Social Media Innovations for Communities (COSMIC)’, a collaborative initiative between IIT Bombay and the Universities from Singapore - NUS and NTU. COSMIC aims to empower communities, through social media innovations that improve the way they live, work and play.

Dr. Ajanta Sen has a Ph.D. in Development Planning from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), Mumbai, India.
 
With her key interests in interpreting technologies vis-à-vis cultural paradigms for the emerging markets, the socio-cultural- ethnographic analysis of industrial design-related issues, and critiquing new media technologies and design issues for the media, Dr.Sen specializes in the disciplines of Interaction Design, Social Computingand the Evolution of Industrial Design as a Co-evolution of Technology.

She directs a networking technology project entitled ‘Solar Project’ about cross-cultural collaborative learning environments for children and a joint initiative between schools and design institutes in India and UK. The project has won over a hundred awards to date.
She is also the founder of Design in India (www.designindia.net), India’s only comprehensive resource site for design.

As a research scientist at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, she was involved with a research project on experimenting with Social Media called ‘The Centre of Social Media Innovations for Communities (COSMIC)’, a collaborative initiative between IIT Bombay and the Universities from Singapore - NUS and NTU. COSMIC aims to empower communities, through social media innovations that improve the way they live, work and play.

She has helped conceptualise, advise and co-organise international events such as the 'Icograda Design week in India', international conference on 'Designing for Children', 'In a Planet of Our Own - a vision of sustainability and design from across six continents', Cumulus Mumbai and Typoday events.

Dr.Sen serves as master juror for international design competitions and keynote speaker at international design platforms. She has to her credit several international papers on design and technology and has been awarded a prestigious Senior Fellowship by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.

Contact details: ajantasen@gmail.com