Summary
Ravi is a Research Associate at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London. His main research project aims to design for circular consumption using the latest metering technologies and adopting resource-centric design as a root approach. This project focuses at transforming the engineering of fast-moving consumer products and their interaction with home utilities by learning from consumption practices in realistic ‘living’ settings and applying the principles of the circular economy. This work takes a system-approach to the design of future fast-moving consumer products, which involves the development not only of products but also digital and physical services and infrastructure.
Prior to joining Imperial College London, he worked at the Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge as a Research Associate where he developed a suitability tool for IoT-driven Mass Customisation for industrial applications. Different phases of this tool were developed with close collaboration with industry partners and the Strategic technology innovation management consortium at the University of Cambridge. His other research project at the University of Cambridge developed a process for MAKEathons to address ‘Grand Challenges’ (i.e. big societal problems such as global hunger, resilient food supply chain) involving ten academic and industrial partners across Europe. This study unpacked the art of formulating the tasks to run Open Innovation Contests using the complexity theory.
He obtained his PhD from Imperial College London as a President Scholar. His PhD research goals aimed towards understanding product design innovation with the help of product individualisation. The race to innovate products has become so intense that traditional product design and development processes cannot fulfil it. A new product design paradigm that could serve the need of adaptability, upgradability, sustainability, and also meets the exact requirement of the end-user has the potential to fulfil this demand. His PhD research explored such a product design paradigm, known as product design for Mass Individualisation, with the open platform architecture products and a multi-level optimisation model. The PhD thesis serves as a tool for setting the scope and importance of this product design paradigm.
Before PhD, he obtained his MTech (Design Engineering) from Indian Institue of Technology (IIT) Delhi with a fellowship by DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) to carry out his master's thesis work at the Institute of Aerospace and Lightweight Design, RWTH Aachen, Germany.
Besides the above-mentioned research areas, his other research interests and expertise lies in the areas of Product Design & Development, Industrial Design, Data-driven Design, CAD, Manufacturing, Product Design Engineering analysis, Design Management, Converting ideas into market-ready products and Applied Mechanics concepts such as FEA, CFD.
Publications
Journals
Sikhwal RK, Childs PRN, 2021, Towards Mass Individualisation: setting the scope and industrial implication, Design Science, Vol:7, ISSN:2053-4701, Pages:1-34
Conference
Sikhwal R, Aurisicchio M, Circular Consumption of Household Water: A Critical Literature Review, Product Lifetimes and the Environment Conference 2023
Sikhwal RK, Childs PRN, 2019, Identification of optimised open platform architecture products for design for mass individualisation, 7th International Conference on Research into Design (ICoRD'19), Springer Singapore, Pages:861-874, ISSN:2190-3018
Sikhwal RK, Childs PRN, Innovation toolkit for identification of the optimal module options in open platform architecture products, NordDesign 2018, Design Society
Sikhwal RK, Childs PRN, 2018, Product Design for Mass Individualisation for Industrial Application, International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM), IEEE, Pages:674-680, ISSN:2157-362X