Ravi Poovaiah

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.
Professor Poovaiah has worked on projects with major industry leaders such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google India, Motorola India, Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum Corporation, Bharat Electronics Limited, Siemens India, among others.