Prof. Ravi Poovaiah

Professor Ravi Poovaiah is a senior faculty member at the Industrial Design Centre (IDC), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mumbai. His research interests are in areas related to Visual Language, Information Visualisation, Visual Narratives, Interaction Devices, Collaborative Learning Environments and Designing for Children. He is involved with building open source digital resources related to ‘Design Learning’, ‘Folk Tales’, ‘Designing for Children’, ‘Design of Way-finding Systems’ and ‘Design in India’ with access to networked information. 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 source digital learning environment for design in India. He is also coordinating 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. The Centre of Social Media Innovations for Communities (COSMIC) is a collaborative initiative between three centers of excellence – NUS (National University of Singapore), NTU (Nanyang Technological University), and IITB (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai). COSMIC aims to empower communities, through social media innovations that improve the way they live, work and play, specifically those in the informal economy who are typically underserved by existing technology vendors and telecom service providers. The research envisions new interaction paradigms and information technology scenarios, which have the potentials to empower the next billion users – focusing on the common man in its everyday pursuit of activities in the 21st century. The four strands presently taken up for building social media solutions/interventions are agriculture, health, technology infrastructure, and social tools to help port the solutions.