Raja Ravi Varma

 Raja Ravi Varma (April 29, 1848 - October 2, 1906): Indian painter from the princely state of Travancore who achieved recognition for his depiction of scenes from the epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. His paintings are considered to be among the best examples of the fusion of Indian traditions with the techniques of European academic art. His exposure in the west came when he won the first prize in the Vienna Art Exhibition in 1873. He is considered among the greatest painters in the history of Indian art. Most famous paintings: GajLukshmi, Saraswati, Shivaji @ wikipedia.org

F. N. Souza

Francis Newton Souza (April 12, 1924 - March 28, 2002), was an Indian artist. He was a founding member of the Progressive Artists' Group of Bombay, and was the first post-independence Indian artist to achieve high recognition in the West. According to The Times of India Souza's expressionistic style sought to illustrate both low-life and high energy, "Be it the sluts or the suits, the seamy side of life or the steamy, the gnomish, pox-scarred boy from Goa who went on to become one of the first Indian artists to be feted in the salons of Europe, laid it bare. @wikipedia.org

Homai Vyarawalla

Homai Vyarawalla (born 1913), is India's first woman photojournalist.

She started her career in 1930s and thereafter received noticed at the national level when she moved to Mumbai in 1942 with her family, before moving to Delhi where in the next thirty years she shot many political and national leaders, including Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhi family working as a press photographer. At the onset of the World War II, she started working on assignments of the Bombay based The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine which over the years till 1970, published many of her black and white images, which later became iconic. @WIKIPEDIA.ORG

Louis Kahn

Louis Isadore Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky) (February 20, 1901 or 1902 – March 17, 1974) was a world-renowned American architect of Estonian Jewish origin, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. After working in various capacities for several firms in Philadelphia, he founded his own atelier in 1935. While continuing his private practice, he served as a design critic and professor of architecture at Yale School of Architecture from 1947 to 1957. From 1957 until his death, he was a professor of architecture at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Influenced by ancient ruins, Kahn's style tends to the monumental and monolithic; his heavy buildings do not hide their weight, their materials, or the way they are assembled. Louis Kahn's works are considered as monumental beyond modernism. @Wikipedia.org

Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier (October 6, 1887 – August 27, 1965), was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, with his buildings constructed throughout central Europe, India, Russia, one in North and several in South America.
He was a pioneer in studies of modern high design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities.
Le Corbusier adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s, allegedly deriving it in part from the name of a distant ancestor, "Lecorbésier." However, it appears to have been an earlier (and somewhat unkind) nickname, which he simply decided to keep.

Frank Lloyd Wright

.Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 projects, which resulted in more than 500 completed works. Wright promoted organic architecture (exemplified by Fallingwater), was a leader of the Prairie School movement of architecture (exemplified by the Robie House, the Westcott House, and the Darwin D. Martin House), and developed the concept of the Usonian home (exemplified by the Rosenbaum House). His work includes original and innovative examples of many different building types, including offices, churches, schools, skyscrapers, hotels, and museums. Wright also often designed many of the interior elements of his buildings, such as the furniture and stained glass.
Wright authored 20 books and many articles, and was a popular lecturer in the United States and in Europe. His colorful personal life often made headlines, most notably for the 1914 fire and murders at his Taliesin studio.
Already well-known during his lifetime, Wright was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects as "the greatest American architect of all time"@Wikipedia.org

Fritjof Capra

Fritjof Capra (born February 1, 1939) is an Austrian-born American physicist. He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, and is on the faculty of Schumacher College.
Capra is the author of several books, including The Tao of Physics (1975), The Turning Point (1982), Uncommon Wisdom (1988), The Web of Life (1996), and The Hidden Connections (2002).

I found "The Turning Point" an amazing book, develops new way of thinking and attitude toward life...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) is a Lebanese American philosopher, essayist and practitioner of mathematical finance. He wrote the 2007 book The Black Swan, which a Sunday Times review described as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.
He is a bestselling author, and has been a professor at several universities, currently at Polytechnic Institute of New York University and Oxford University. He has also been a hedge fund manager and Wall Street trader,[ and is currently a scientific adviser at Universa Investments. He criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently making a fortune out of the late-2000s financial crisis. He advocates what he calls a "black swan robust" society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events. He favors "stochastic tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means experimentation and fact-collecting instead of top-down directed research.
Ref: Wikipedia

Alvin Toffler

Alvin Toffler (born October 4, 1928 in New York City is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communication revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity.
A former associate editor of Fortune magazine, his early work focused on technology and its impact (through effects like information overload). Then he moved to examining the reaction of and changes in society. His later focus has been on the increasing power of 21st century military hardware, weapons and technology proliferation, and capitalism.

Peter Drucker

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) was a writer, management consultant, and self-described “social ecologist.”His books and scholarly and popular articles explored how humans are organized across the business, government and the nonprofit sectors of society.He is one of the best-known and most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject of management theory and practice. His writings have predicted many of the major developments of the late twentieth century, including privatization and decentralization; the rise of Japan to economic world power; the decisive importance of marketing; and the emergence of the information society with its necessity of lifelong learning.In 1959, Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker" and later in his life considered knowledge work productivity to be the next frontier of management.

Sumantra Ghoshal

Sumantra Ghoshal (1948–2004) was an academic and management guru. He was the founding Dean of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, which is jointly sponsored by the Kellogg School at Northwestern University and the London Business School.
Ghoshal co-authored Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution (Bartlett & Ghoshal 2002), with Christopher A. Bartlett, which has been listed in the Financial Times as one of the 50 most influential management books and has been translated into nine languages.

C.K. Pralhad

C.K. Prahalad (August 8, 1941 – April 16, 2010)was the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business in the University of Michigan. He is famous as the father of the concepts of Core competency and BoP - Bottom of the pyramid.

Prahalad has been among top ten management thinkers in every major survey for over ten years. Business Week said of him: "a brilliant teacher at the University of Michigan, he may well be the most influential thinker on business strategy today." He was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission of the United Nations on Private Sector and Development. He was the first recipient of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Award for contributions to Management and Public Administration presented by the President of India in 2000.
Ref: Wikipedia

Karen Holtzblatt

Karen is the visionary behind InContext’s unique customer-centered design approach, Contextual Design. Karen’s combination of technological and psychological expertise provides the creative framework for driving the development, innovative designs, and design processes.
Recognized as a leader in the design community, Karen has pioneered transformative ideas and design approaches throughout her career. Karen is the inventor of Contextual Inquiry—the industry standard for gathering field data to understand how technology impacts the way people work. Contextual Inquiry and the design processes based on it provide a revolutionary approach for designing new products and systems based on a deep understanding of the context of use. Contextual Inquiry forms the base of Contextual Design, InContext’s full customer-centered design process.
Karen co-founded InContext Enterprises in 1992 to use Contextual Design techniques to coach product teams and deliver customer-centered designs to businesses across multiple industries. The books, Contextual Design: Defining Customer Centered Systems, and Rapid Contextual Design, are used by companies and universities all over the world. Karen is a member of the CHI Academy (awarded to significant contributors in the Computer Human Interaction Association) and in 2010 received CHI’s first Life Time Award for Practice for her contributions to the field. Karen’s extensive experience with teams and all types of work and life practice underlies the innovation and reliable quality consistently delivered by InContext’s teams.
Karen also has more than 20 years of teaching experience, professionally and in university settings. She holds a doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto.
Ref Site: http://incontextdesign.com/people/karen-holtzblatt-3/

Don Norman

Don Norman has a background in both engineering and the social sciences, with both
academic and industrial experience. He is currently Professor of Computer Science at
Northwestern University and Professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is active as co-founder and principal of the Nielsen Norman group, happily engaged in advising numerous companies on products and services for consumers. He was an Apple Fellow and Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer, and an executive at Hewlett Packard and UNext (Cardean University), a distance education company. (From Don Norman's Website, adapted)

Currently, Norman is working on "Emotional Design," which is also the title of his forthcoming book. He is developing a three-level theory of affect that has impacts on the design of "pleasurable" products.

Norman received the ACM CHI (Computer Human Interaction) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002.

Don Norman's home page: http://www.jnd.org/

Jakob Nielsen

According to the New York Times, Jakob Nielson is "The Guru of Web Page Usability;"
further appellations can be found in the biography on this Website. He terms himself a "user advocate."

Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap
improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. His famous statement, based on the Nielsen-Landauer model from 1993, "Five test persons are enough" has recently been discussed controversially in the HCI community.

Nielsen authors the Alertbox column on Web usability, which is published on the Internet since 1995 and has a current readership of 10 million page views per year (Jakob Nielsen's Websitse: www.useit.com). He wrote a number of influential books, such as Usability Engineering and Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. His newest book Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed from 2001 presents more than 100 guidelines for better homepage design.

Nielsen is principal of the Nielsen Norman Group (www.NNgroup.com) which he co-
founded with Donald A. Norman. Until 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished
Engineer.
(from www.useit.com/jakob/index.html, adapted)

Read his bio on the company Website: www.useit.com/jakob/index.html

Bruce Tognazzini

Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini was Apple employee #66, has been designing software for more than 30 years, and holds nearly 50 US patents in computers and aviation.

Tognazzini is a principal with the Nielsen Norman Group. He was lead designer at WebMD, a start-up founded in February, 1996 by Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Before that, Tog was Distinguished Engineer for Strategic Technology at Sun Microsystems. During his 14 years at Apple Computer, he founded the Apple Human Interface Group and acted as Apple's Human Interface Evangelist.

Tognazzini has published two books, Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design, and was co-author as well as contributing author of numerous other books. He has also
published dozens of papers and articles on computer design. He is currently publishing the free webzine, "AskTog."
(Based on AskTog Website, adapted)

Bio: www.asktog.com/tog.html

Jef Raskin

Jef Raskin (March 9, 1943 — February 26, 2005) was an American human-computer interface expert best known for starting the Macintosh project for Apple in the late 1970s."Jef Raskin is an interface and systems designer, a writer, and a consultant, concentrating primarily on making computers more usable and their interfaces efficient as well as pleasant. He is also well-known as an expert on the aerodynamics of miniature aircraft."

Raskin's contributions to user interface design are numerous: He is best known for being the driving force in creating the Apple Macintosh user interface. He also created the Canon Cat, click-and-drag selection and other inventions. In addition, he coined the term and the concept of "information appliances."

Raskin has written numerous articles and books. In 2000, he published the book The Humane Interface, which presents his vision of human interface design. Raskin says that "our honeymoon with digital technology is over: We are tired of having to learn huge, arcane programs to do even the simplest of tasks; we have had our fill of crashing computers; and we are fatigued by the continual pressure to upgrade. The Humane Interface delivers a way for computers, information appliances, and other technology-driven products to continue to advance in power and expand their range of applicability, while becoming free of the hassles and obscurities that plague present products."
(Based on Raskin's Website, adapted)

Jonathan Ive

Jonathan Paul Ive, CBE (born February, 1967) is a British designer and the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. He is internationally renowned as the principal designer of the iMac, aluminum and titanium PowerBook G4, MacBook, unibody MacBook Pro, iPod and iPhone.

Alan Moore

Alan Oswald Moore (born 18 November 1953) is an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books, a medium where he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and popular series, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell.
Frequently described as the best comic writer in history, he has also been described as "one of the most important British writers of the last fifty years". Source:Wikipedia

Charles Correa

Charles Correa (born in Hyderabad, India on September 1, 1930) is an Indian architect, planner, activist, theoretician and a fundamental figure in the worldwide panorama of contemporary architecture. He studied architecture at the University of Michigan and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology after which he established a private practice in Bombay in 1958. His work in India shows a careful development, understanding and adaptation of Modernism to a non-western culture. His early works attempt to explore a local vernacular within a modern environment. His land-use planning and community projects continually try to go beyond typical solutions to third world problems. All of his work - from the planning of Navi Mumbai to the carefully detailed memorial to Mahatma Gandhi at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad has placed special emphasis on prevailing resources, energy and climate as major determinants in the ordering of space. Over the last four decades, Correa has done pioneering work in urban issues and low cost shelter in the Third World. From 1970-75, he was Chief Architect for New Bombay an urban growth center of 2 million people, across the harbor from the existing city. In 1985, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi appointed him Chairman of the National Commission on Urbanization. In 1984, he founded the prestigious Urban Design Research Institute in Bombay which to this day is dedicated to the protection of the built environment and improvement of urban communities.He was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for the year 1984. His acclaimed design for McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT was dedicated recently. He is a recipient of the civilian awards in India, Padma Vibhushan (2006) and Padma Shri (1972). In 2008 he resigned his commission as the head of Delhi Urban Arts Commission.
Source: http://connect.in.com/charles-correa/biography-51195.html

B.V. Doshi

Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi (b. 26 August 1927 in Pune, India) is an Indian architect. After initial studies at the J. J. School of Architecture, Mumbai, he worked in London then for four years with Le Corbusier. Doshi returned to Ahmedabad to supervise Le Corbusier's work. His studio, Vastu-Shilpa (environmental design), was established in 1955. Doshi worked closely with Louis Kahn and Anant Raje, when Kahn designed the campus of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. In 1958 he was a fellow at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. He then started the School of Architecture (S.A) in 1962. Doshi is a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and has been on the selection committee for the Pritzker Prize, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, and the Aga Khan Award. Dr. Balkrishna Doshi, a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Architects was born in Pune in August 26th, 1927 After initial study at the J J School of Architecture, Bombay, he worked for four years with Le Corbusier as Senior Designer (1951-54) in Paris and four more years in India to supervise his projects in Ahmedabad. His office Vastu-Shilpa (environmental design) was established in 1955. Dr Doshi has been a member of the Jury for several international and national competitions including the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts and Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Apart from his international fame as an architect, Dr. Doshi is equally known as educator and institution builder. He has been the first founder Director of School of Architecture, Ahmedabad (1962-72), first founder Director of School of Planning (1972-79), first founder Dean of Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (1972-81), founder member of Visual Arts Centre, Ahmedabad and first founder Director of Kanoria Centre for Arts, Ahmedabad. Dr. Doshi has been instrumental in establishing the nationally and internationally known research institute Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for Studies and Research in Environmental Design. The institute has done pioneering work in low cost housing and city planning. As an academician, Dr. Doshi has been visiting the U.S.A. and Europe since 1958 and has held important chairs in American Universities. In recognition of his distinguished contribution as a professional and as an academician, Dr. Doshi has received several international and national awards and honours. In 2008, 100hands director Prjmit Ramachandran released a documentary interviewing Doshi. Doshi was the teacher for contemporary designer and University of Pennsylvania professor Anuradha Mathur.
Source:http://connect.in.com/b-v-doshi/biography-491816.html

Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando (September 13, 1941, in Osaka, Japan) is a Japanese architect whose approach to architecture was once categorised as critical regionalism. Ando has led a storied life, working as a truck driver and boxer prior to settling on the profession of architecture, despite never having taken formal training in the field.

He works primarily in exposed cast-in-place concrete and is renowned for an exemplary craftsmanship which invokes a Japanese sense of materiality, junction and spatial narrative through the pared aesthetics of international modernism.

In 1969, he established the firm Tadao Ando Architects & Associates. In 1995, Ando won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the highest distinction in the field of architecture