Short Bio-data:

Prof Ravi Poovaiah
Professor, Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay

Professor Ravi Poovaiah is a member of faculty in 'Visual Communication' and 'Product Design' at the Industrial Design Centre (IDC), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. His current pedagogic as well as research and design interests are in areas related to Collaborative learning environments, Way finding systems, Interaction devices, Visual data bases, Designing for children and in Corporate strategy and Retail design. He has backgrounds in Mechanical Engineering, Product Design and Graphic Arts 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.

He has started the initial phase of building a digital resource base related to 'Folk Tales', 'Interactive Systems', 'Designing for Children', 'Design of Way-finding Systems' and 'Design in India' with access to networked information. He is also involved with experimenting and creating an experience driven collaborative environment for children.

Professionally, he was involved with the retail design of a chain of superstores for the Khadims group in the Eastern part of India. He was also involved with designing the corporate vision and retail design for one of the three major oil corporations of India, Bharat Petroleum, to be implemented across all its outlets in India (4 to 5 thousand). Earlier he was involved with similar exercise for Indian Oil Corporation. Along with his colleague, he has also designed an electronic voting machine (EVM) for India built by Bharat Electronic Limited.