Soumitri Varadarajan

I am an Associate Professor in the Industrial Design Program at RMIT University, Melbourne (Australia). I hold the position of Adjunct Professor at Foshan University (Foshan, PRC), Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, PRC) and am a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad, India). I am currently advising Ambedkar University Delhi (New Delhi, India) in their setting up a new design school which is to have courses in social design, social innovation and service design. I began my career in the mid 80s working on design projects with a development focus. By the 90s this had sharpened to a design practice focussed upon poverty and sustainability. My first service design project was a prototyping of a waste recycling system that collected and recycled 2 tonnes of waste a day at a university campus in India. The project was then converted into a social entrepreneurship venture owned by the project team. I have since worked on similar projects in transport and water. My recent project has been about the development of products and a service model for diabetes care in India and China. The focus of my teaching is upon sustainability and the community orientated practice of design. A continuing studio I run called ecosphere deals with the construction of utopian visions for off the grid living.