Soumitri Varadarajan

Dr Soumitri Varadarajan is an Industrial Designer working in the area of patient-focused product and service design and development. Formulated in 1994, framed as Design in the Public Domain, he has practiced effective altruism as research from within university ecologies in the form of embedded research projects that explore precise ideologies of affordance. Privileging the pro bono, enshrining a research commitment to seeing projects through to community ownership, he enacts these people-engaged transformative projects through the three stages of design and build [1], then operated through the years to make sustainable[2], and finally the transfer of the viable ecology to new owners/ custodians [3]. His work focuses upon realizing the agency of the marginalised, the re-establishment of the primacy of the key beneficiary- individuals in the community - and upon generating tools (products and services) that are significantly for the use of and by the community. Dr Varadarajan has 25 career outputs, including 2 co-authored books, 4 book chapters and 19 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals and outlets for his field. He has received an international award for the delivery of a community-engaged project and 4 awards for work focused on enhancing the agency of the individuals in a community. Dr Varadarajan has served on steering committees of the United Nations (UNEP) focussed on design in the environmental context. He currently supervises 10 PhD students and has supervised 11 PhD students to completion.

Awards

2022 Vice Chancellor Teaching Award of Excellence Award, RMIT University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alec Cameron, awarded the My First Six Months pedagogy team in recognition of teaching excellence co-designed by Associate Professor Soumitri Varadarajan and William Dim., Highest academic distinction, RMIT University

2022 ACUADS National Teaching Excellence Award Winner, The Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) awarded the design pedagogy approach: My First Six Months project the winner of the National Teaching Excellence Award. Co-designed by Associate Professor Soumitri Varadarajan and William Dim., Highest academic distinction, The Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools, $2,000

2021, Industry Engagement in Graduate Research, Hospital Embedded Graduate Research, RMIT University

2010, Certificate of Achievement, Internationalization of the Curriculum, RMIT University

2005, University Award, Program Innovation: The Learner Centered Project, Industrial Design Program, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University

2001, Indo-German Greentech Award for Environmental Excellence, The Campus Recycling Programme, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India

Invited positions

• Adjunct Professor, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, PRC
• Adjunct Professor, Foshan University, Foshan, PRC
• Adjunct Professor, Ambedkar University, New Delhi, India
• Research Fellow, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India